You cannot petition the lord with prayer!
“When I was back there in seminary school, there was a person there who put forth the proposition that you can petition the Lord with prayer…
Petition the Lord with prayer…
Petition the Lord with prayer…
YOU CANNOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER!”
The Soft Parade, The Doors
The following exchange took place in Safeway at 11pm last night:
“Hey, Karen! I’m so glad you’re back!”
“Thanks! I’m very glad to be back.”
“How are things then?”
“Good, and bad. My father is very sick, and I’m having to make some tough decisions about his treatment.”
“What’s his name?”
“Zezozoze Zadfrack.” (Okay…I didn’t really say that. )
“I’ll pray for him.”
Zap! Pow! Bam!
I frowned, felt a little cold, and I think I went a bit rigid.
I hope I didn’t scoff rudely, laugh a little, or roll my eyes.
Should I have proclaimed, “I’m an atheist”, or, “I don’t believe in prayer”, or sneer with skeptical superiority, “I’m actually trying to do something practical“?
Do I email her with this BBC article, or this American Heart Journal article, or this CSI article, or this article by Stephen Barrett, or this e-skeptic article, or this Skeptic’s Dictionary article; pieces that all demonstrate that prayer has no effect?
Or do I explain that thoughts are solely contained within the mind; they cannot be interpreted or read by an external source, or conveyed or communicated by ESP, or be expressed without the intercessory power of language; and even then, the hopes, desires, wants and needs, both thought and expressed to ‘gods’, other supernatural beings or even humans, in and of themselves, do not bring about any change of state in the real world?
Do I meekly thank her and go silently?
Do I cough “ahem”, gather my chocolates and condoms and leave chuckling?
Or do I quote Jim Morrison and scream,
“YOU CANNOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER!”
I tried to sum it all up, and express my true gratitude for her concern. I touched her on the arm, looked her in the eye and said with sincerity:
“I have confidence in science, and in my own judgment. Thank you for caring.”
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About the skepbitch
I’m Dr Karen Stollznow, Academic, Author and Paranormal Investigator of the Skeptical Kind…
I’m a Linguist with a background in history, and I research, teach and consult.
I’m a Director of the Bay Area Skeptics, a committee member of CFI San Francisco and an insatiable writer for many sites and publications, including Skeptical Inquirer, Skeptic, the James Randi Educational Foundation’s Swift, Skepchick and my Naked Skeptic web column for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. I’m a co-host of the Monster Talk podcast.
I’ve spent many years investigating pseudoscience and the paranormal, including: ghosts, aura reading, psychics, medical intuitives, alternative therapies, mediums, faith healing, conspiracy theories, cults, pareidolia (seeing faces on places other than heads), religion, haunted houses, and much more. As a linguist, one of my specialties is language-based phenomena, such as glossolalia (speaking in tongues), automatic writing, body language, graphology, alien and monster languages and writing systems, EVPs, codes, cold reading, speed reading, fringe theories and bad thinking about language. I research topics, road test the theories and report my experiences.
The Skepbitch blog aims to provide scathing skeptical commentary of everyday people, places and events; and is an accompaniment to my website Bad Language.
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Actually that was a really nice way of handling it.
That question seems to be an ongoing one amongst atheists, I know. I usually just go for a ‘oh, thanks’ because I guess I tend more towards apathetic agnostic… :/
I think that was an excellent answer. I’ll keep it in mind next time I get attacked by a prayer (which seems to happen more when I’m in the US than back home in Norway)
My mom called me yesterday and said, “You’ll never guess how the lord answered our prayers this week!”
I said,” You’re right, mom. What’s HE up to this time?”
…
I like your answer – respectful yet full of meaning deeper than the surface words.
I figure that in moments such as that it’s quite pointless trying to make headway with someone else’s religious beliefs. When my wife was dying of cancer, I got those kinds of responses all the time. My wife’s cancer was diagnosed as terminal immediately it was discovered, and I came to realise that there are really only two ways people respond to that kind of bad news – they either feel powerless to do anything at all, or they grasp for some way of helping. Since there’s really no ‘helping’ when someone has terminal cancer, some evidently decide that petitioning the lord with prayer is more useful than doing nothing at all.
I hold no religious beliefs at all, and I am certainly not one of the skeptics that comes down on the side of the argument that religion deserves special treatment when it comes to critical thinking. In some cases, though, particularly throughout the grieving process, I can see that, for some people, religious belief plays an important and useful role. I’m not encouraging it as a way forward, mind you, but to those who have it already entrenched in their psyche, it may be too much to contemplate the serious sickness of loved ones and the criticism of their faith in the same fell swoop.
I understand that you weren’t trying to demolish this person’s faith in your exchange, but probably your response would have been almost meaningless to them. In my experience, science means little to people of religious conviction. Sure, science might work, but as an old lady said to me in the chemo ward “Really, dear, science only works if it’s God’s Will…”
I hope your dad is doing OK.
Oh, also, the calls to the images in this post seem borked for some reason.
I hope your Dad is doing alright. Well done with the response. One of my kids is autistic and I get offers of prayer, healing touch, etc, etc, etc, all the time. It’s frustrating.
I think you did just fine. The other day I was talking to this couple, and the woman turned to me and said, “Smile, God loves you”. I was shocked at first (almost like a deer in headlights kind of shock), and after a few seconds I gathered myself and said to her, “I don’t believe in God”. She looked right at me and in a smarmy tone quipped “Oh I didn’t believe in him once either, but you will believe in him soon”. I mean, what the fuck?! Thankfully, her smarter husband stepped in at that moment and stopped her from going any further, as I tried my damnedest to not fire back.
One of the reasons why I think you are so special is because you have the perfect blend of heart and logic. While there have been times when you weren’t sure of the right words to say (or you weren’t sure of your own internal logic battling it out between all the possible outcomes), you always have been able to come up with just the right thing to say. When you combine those words within the framework of your sincerity and compassion, you show all around you why you are the best. So in closing, close-minded religious people can go spend their time praying to an imaginary non-corporeal deity, while people like us can be content knowing that thru science (and all things that are actually real) we can be the smarter ones with the bigger hearts, and thus feel a closer connection to those we feel special. ~
Not a bad answer, one which I must remember for later.
My stock response to “I’ll pray for you” is:
“And I’ll THINK for you.”
But I am rude apolitical bastard who does not mind giving offense, if it serves reality and truth.
When my dad was very sick and people told me they’d pray for him I told folks just where to stick their prayers; my dad thought I was very polite, but then again I didn’t have his long years of experience dealing with sick people and prayers and being handed so many children so close to death because people believed so much in their prayers so I don’t know if I can be nastier, but it’s worth trying.
“When my dad was very sick and people told me they’d pray for him I told folks just where to stick their prayers”
Cool. I’m sure you told people who said “I hope he gets better/I hope the treatment is effective” where to stick their hopes too, right? After all their ‘hope’ has as much effect as prayer.
I don’t get why anyone’s bothered by people praying for them. It wastes their time, not yours. And they’re doing it out of kindness, and good wishes for you. Would you tell a person who wishes for your life to be happy – at a wishing well – where they can stick that wish?
I mean, would it be cool for a Christian to reply to a Hindu who said they’d pray for them – “I have confidence in God, and in my own judgment. Thank you for caring”?
Do you respond to people who wish you good luck – “Actually, I have confidence in science, and in my own judgment. Thank you for caring”?
@Ender: yes, I tell people where to stick good wishes too. I don’t encourage any sort of mystical beliefs and have no attachment to social conventions. “I don’t believe in that crap” has to be one of my most often used phrases.
Well, that just makes you a Superior Person in all ways!
You can from nothing, you are going to nothing, and eveything you accomplish in life is nothing.
Being a Superior Person means nothing.
Let’s go rape, pillage, and do other stuff to make ourselves appear superior.
There is some very wrong information here that needs to be clarifyed. I am not a religious person and understand as any logical person does that we have evolved for billions of years and that no persons “God” created us but what many people here are missing is the real dynamic of what prayer and “belief” is. The built in intelect of our universe has had everything to do with us evolving into spiritual beings. As the Godfather of Quantumn Physics , Max Planck , taught us, everything is energy and everything is created by energy and survives within it’s own frequency within our place in space and time. But more important than recognizing that science defines all matter as a reflection of energy that has existed since the beginning our our universes time ( 15 Billion years ), one needs to understand that all quanta ( the building blocks of all matter) can be in contact with each other even though they are in two different locations within our universe. I speak of the scientific fact of “non locality”. Of course our thoughts are a source of energy and of course they can interact with the quantum field we all exist in??? Anybody who truly wants to understand our existence needs to aggresively keep up with recent advances in Consciousness Studies. What scientists understand is that our world and everything in it is created in part by our conscious abilty to see it and perceive it on a quantumn level. Religion is one of mankinds best efforts in her evolution to define this hidden energy that creates all things. An atheist should not feel any need to contradict or oppose a relgious persons belief system. The amount of books I have read in the last year (6) on the subject of science blending it’s view of relity with the evolution of religious belief is startling. Science has turned a major corner in recognizing that mankind has always been able to “tap in” to some kind of natural energy that has always existed. Religious people call it God. The rest of us know that it is something else. But what troubles me here is the idea that there is nothing beyond ourselves? I get very confused by fellow Atheists who do not truly understand who we are but only can define themselves by not being Christian or Jewish or Orthodox, etc.
We are energy.
We evolved from more than likely bacteria over a billion years ago.
Our consciousness and therefore our abilty to perceive ourselves also evolved.
We have quantumn particles in our bodies that came from billions of light years away.
All information in the Akashic Field of the universe moves through The Akasha through quatumn particles.
When as a race our consciousness evolves, just as we continue to evolve, we will be able to understand better how our whole universe is connected.
It is widely documented by science that thoughts can and may be stored in a quantumn field through certain manipulations of frequencies. Prayer is a great form of meditation that may, and I do say may, help advance the transportation of information through this field.
How any atheist sees prayer as a solely religious thing is very strange to me. I meditate and pray everyday. And I don’t believe in any God.
Errr, @Tom McAuley, do yourself, and us, a favour and read some decent texts on quantum physics. Start with Wikipedia, if you must, but please learn about the subject before you use the terminology of quantum physics.
ha hah hah. what a hoot. you may not believe in god, but to a skeptic, your comments are just more woo woo magic. You think “The built in intelect of our universe has had everything to do with us evolving into spiritual beings.”
That’s cool. Believe in prayer, god, psychic powers or humans evolving into spiritual beings if you want. But it’s all the same woo woo nonsense.
When you make comments like that and “…everything is created by energy and survives within it’s own frequency within our place in space and time.” it shows your lack of any grasp on what you are talking about. People confuse principals of quantum physics with normal scale physics all the time, thinking that fluctuations in quantum states and things like Heisenberg’s (sp?) uncertainty principal can apply to large scale objects.
Atheists see prayer the same way they see believing that stepping on a crack may break your mother’s back. It’s all superstitious nonsense. Bring some scientific evidence to the contrary to the table and then we’ll listen. Akashic Field indeed.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) discovered within the last year what I hoped most people on blogs like this would be following “religiously”.
It has been discoverd and is widely being put to use at MIT that simple electrodes attached to ones head being allowed to interface with a computer can create a path that allows the persons thoughts to interact with the computer and spell out words. Paralized people have been sending emails through this invention for almost a year. No, thoughts are not “solely contained within the mind”. Thoughts are part of the energy landscape that transfers information. This experiment I am refering to is not the least bit controversial nor is it’s authenticity in question by anyone of any stature in the scientific community. It’s everyday science.
Bloggig does a great diservice to true science. Blogging is pseudoscience.
Do better research.
Tom, you appear to conflating reality with wishful thinking.
Electrodes on the scalp can really detect the gross electrical signals from the firing of bulk neuronal activity, which have been shown to be correlated to broad patterns of thought.
These, and other assertions on your behalf sound to me as though they have been printed in all CAPS on a Deepak Chopra worshipper’s website, in blinking multi-coloured text.
But what do I know? I am only a scientist who has been involved in real quantum physics for more then the past 30 years…
Please learn some actual quantum physics before putting your foot in it further.
Take your own advice, and “Do better research.”, ok?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/22/twitter.locked.in/
@Tom McAuley: >>It is widely documented by science that thoughts can and may be stored in a quantumn field through certain manipulations of frequencies
Oh really? If it’s so widely documented by science, then you should have a good scientific source you can refer us to. Like many people who understand these things only peripherally, you drop in words like ‘quantum’ and ‘energy fields’ and ‘non-locality’ as if you know what they actually mean. To you, all these things are magical constructs that lend substance to concepts that you believe irrationally.
The MIT experiment to which you refer is meaningless in this context. The science behind it is perfectly understood – there is nothing remotely ‘prayer-like’ about it.
Well said, anaglyph.
Karen, you’re reply was to the point, yet appreciative about the sentiment offered you.
Jess
Your response was excellent, especially in such an emotional and difficult time, but I am glad that I’m not the only one who has been tempted to scream Morrison’s line at people in that TV preacher voice.
My stock response to the offer for prayer is a simple “No, thank you.”. Does that make me insensitive? Possibly, but I don’t really care. I feel as though the offer of prayer is an empty one, like the “bless you” after a sneeze (or cough, or burp in the case of my ex-boyfriend), a sentiment to which I am equally adverse.
Angela
Take it one step further: if we can scientifically show that praying doesn’t work then basically we have a proof that theisism is false and invalid. Say goodbye all you profits… So why not do this? Well it has been and covered up as the world’s greatest conspiracy…
http://sycologist.blogspot.com/2008/02/worlds-greatest-conspiracy.html
I love Jim Morrison’s line and I hate it when the overly-religious thrust their beliefs on me. But I didn’t like your response as much as many of the commenters. I thought it smacked of “skeptical superiority,” to use your own words. It often seems extremely difficult for you atheists to resist using ridicule and “superiority” on the rest of us.
Funny you should claim that – how many times have I had Christians sympathetically cluck at my atheism in a way which implies that they have possession of a dispensation to which I have no access (unless of course I ‘accept Jesus into my heart’)?
No Mikeb, ‘we’ atheists are not the only ones who can be condescending.
language as weapon
I spent part of the weekend following the elections in Iran, in the vain hope that Ahmadinejad might get thrown out. I found myself feeling much as I did while watching the American elections in 2004, when I prayed in vain that the idiot Bush would be thrown out.
The two seem frighteningly alike, you know — both of them similarly simian in appearance, with their beady little eyes set too closely together, their thin monkey-lips, their limited imaginations, and so forth. Were you to strip them of their national identities and put them in a room together, they’d scratch each other’s armpits and get along famously.
A secret project of mine is a news site I built last fall. Nobody but me and a few friends know about it because I don’t plan to take it live until next Christmas. It aggregates news sources from all over the world, organizing them by category, world regions, or by American states, making it easy to follow anything you want to follow wherever you want to follow it.
It’s fair to say that it’s the equivalent of having every news source in the world in front of you in one browser window, and that’s where I was following the vote.
But after a few beers tonight, I realized I’d read every account of the election except for the Iranian government’s own account. So I went back to my own trusty news site and clicked on the Islamic Revolutionary News Agency.
All the latest IRNA headlines came up like they were supposed to, but with a difference: they were all written in Farsi. They used to be English when I first built my site. I clicked on the top headline, assuming it would be the election story. It was, but it all came up in Farsi.
The English version is gone now. If you can’t read Farsi, you’re stuck with just Arabic, Spanish, French and Turkish versions. I had to read it in French.
I remember being impressed by what I thought was a surprising openness when I discovered that the IRNA published an English version. But now it’s gone.
I find that to be a terribly foreboding thing. If you’ve ever had a wife or a girlfriend who just stopped talking, you know what I mean. How language — one of the deadliest weapons on earth — can seem suddenly ten times deadlier when it just goes silent.
Nothing good can follow.
condoms? hot!!
Logically, rather than praying
“Please, God, cure my father’s cancer”,
should not the prayer be
“Please, God, stop causing my father’s cancer”?
For some reason when I point this out to religious people they take offense.
Or perhaps even more logically: “God, you know this cancer thing – it’s causing a lot of people a lot of grief – how’s about doing away with it altogether?”
I have read most of the comments here, even though this is a few months old. It was the topic of discourse that drew me in. I offer hope that your father is on the road to recovery. Let me not offend with this gesture of pure passion which is neither scientific nor an entity generated outside the mind.
I suggest to you that you desire to believe in prayer, and in a higher being. Your second paragraph, which is run together, over-flowing and pregnant with contradiction, expresses your confusion and questions about whether or not you can affect change on your own world, in the personal or broader sense, through prayer.
“Or do I explain that thoughts are solely contained within the mind; they cannot be interpreted or read by an external source, or conveyed or communicated by ESP, or be expressed without the intercessory power of language; and even then, the hopes, desires, wants and needs, both thought and expressed to ‘gods’, other supernatural beings or even humans, in and of themselves, do not bring about any change of state in the real world?”
Let’s break it down, that is, what you are trying to explain, as you put it. That thoughts are solely contained in the mind. That thoughts cannot be interpreted or read by an external source. That thoughts cannot be conveyed or communicated by ESP. That thoughts cannot be expressed without the intercessory power of language. Qualification: if and when thoughts are expressed through the intercessory power of language, the hopes, desires, wants and needs-both thought and expressed-in and of themselves (here it gets a little nebulous, for we are to assume you are speaking of your father’s need, but you speak in more global terms of exigency){whether these thoughts are expressed to ‘gods’, other supernatural beings or even humans}: that these do not bring about any change of state in the real world? You end the sentence with a question mark.
The sentence, at best, is confusion, and likely mirrors the true questions in your own mind about the existence of God and the power of prayer, which, ironically, is itself deemed to be an ‘intercessory power of language’ with the arbitrator being the person praying.
These comments have run the gamut! There have been comments on quantum physics. I read that we have evolved from bacteria and that “Religion is one of mankinds best efforts in her evolution to define this hidden energy that creates all things.” I would like to re-word that. Evolution is one of mankinds best efforts in her confusion of origin to define what it cannot accept as truth, that the universe and its inhabitants were created by a living God. Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics, struggled with the existence of God. He didn’t want to believe, but all his equations were telling him the universe had a definitive beginning.
What do I propose? That God lives outside of space and time. He therefore sees the beginning and the end of all time at the same time, he is reachable through prayer as such and can affect change on humanity because he is God. Quantum physics is not wrong, it is right. Those hard working physicists, the most intellegent minds of our times who are searching for truth, are not far from finding out the physical truth of the universe, but they will not be able to discover the spiritual truth of the universe, unfortunately, in Switzerland, in space, or in time.
Even Plato suggested that God created time. Justin Martyr, a second century Christian apologist, wrote in his Hortatory Address to the Greeks, “And from what source did Plato draw the information that time was created along with the heavens? For he wrote thus: “Time, accordingly, was created along with the heavens; in order that, coming into being together, they might also be together dissolved, if ever their dissolution should take place.” And that day will come.
God can fold up our universe like a pancake if he wanted to. He can bend it, shake it, poke holes in it, do whatever he wants with it. He created it. Think about it. How do you think something came out of nothing. First there was nothing, then there was something. The only answer is that there is an intelligence that is far beyond anything we can comprehend or understand. We don’t like it because of the connotations behind it, and because of the supposed fabricated religiosity associated with it. The simple terminology connected to the word God makes us shudder.
Whether or not you believe that our thoughts are energy and thus able to be transferred is meaningless, isn’t it. Prayer is a matter of faith. There is one of those words. Ugh. But all it means is to have a solid belief in something. I have a solid belief that this chair I am sitting on is not going to dissolve into nothingness and cause me to fall on the floor. That is faith.
I can tell you this much about myself. I never lose anything. I have an uncanny ability to always find anything I misplace. All I need to do is stop, pray, if you will, with faith that I will find what I am looking for, and I usually have it in my hand within 5 minutes, 10 at the most. I am just beginning my journey into faith. Faith is a matter of belief, of finding God for yourself. I have survived breast cancer, through, I believe, the power of prayer, hepatitis C, and, as a baby, polio. I have had large debts cancelled, through prayer, and recently had a vehicle given to me that I was praying for. I didn’t have to pay a dime for it.
You might ask me why doesn’t God listen? I beg to differ. We are the ones who stopped listening. A long, long time ago. It is because of this that the world has gone to shame. When I was a young child, my parents raised me Catholic, and I knew it was just a ritualistic cover, a religion, not the right path to God. I knew I would know the truth someday, and I profess to you that I do. I am not telling you what it is, though. Not here and not now. You are too skeptical, you are all after each other’s throats, and you are all too defensive. You are not ready for the truth. You will have to find it for yourself, or you can ask me personally about what I know to be truth if you are truly interested.
The sentence made perfect sense to me, Lynn. Your long, convoluted post, however, …
Yeah, but see Lynn, the reason you have been so lucky in your life and and got your new car is not because you prayed to your god for it, but that I prayed to Osiris on your behalf.
So you see, it was not your god doing the work but mine! Now – can you convince me in any meaningful way (other than saying ‘I KNOW it was MY god‘ that I’m wrong about that?
Can you not see the great absurdity at work here? Whose god? How chosen? WIth what kind of imprimatur? Christians are just johnny-come-latelys with the god business.
You are playing the one card from the deck that can never be beaten ‘Epiphany’: ‘I know because I know’. If you just change it to ‘Magic’, not one person here will care to disagree with you or take up discourse – magical thinking is not something that can be dealt with in the realm of common sense.
That you pretend to ‘know’ the truth but will not share this magnificent secret with us skeptical heathens, sounds to my ears un-Christianlike and mean at best, and downright spiteful and childish at worst. For surely didn’t your god tell you to spread the word as widely as possibly especially among the heathens? I don’t believe he made a caveat about not bothering with those heathens that were ‘too skeptical’ (at least as far as I can determine in my readings of the bible).
No-one here will take up your offer to ask you personally about your Secret For Knowing God – you know why? Because whatever ’secret’ method you’ve come across, we’ve heard umpteen versions of it before. My guess is that this is pretty much why all of us are skeptics in the first place – a slice of baloney on a sandwich is a nice treat – a lifetime diet of it is boring, fattening, lacking in nutrition.
Lynn, I’m glad to hear your life is turning out OK. I’ve had some rough patches in mine too, and it’s also turning out OK. And God had nothing to do with fixing mine up, just as He had nothing to do with fixing yours up. You’ve just applied magical thinking to the way you observe things.
Blow it off. People either pray or say they will pray for their own self edification. Their intent isn’t affront, they are saying what they think people expect them to say and to look as if they care. I have the sneaking suspicion that most people who proclaim their prayer habits are those who do it or say they do it to look good. The vast majority of people don’t expect to be confronted by someone so deeply involved in a way of life which is so anti-prayer and don’t think what they will say will be annoying. There’s no effective way to express concern for something in the English language. “My condolences,” sounds full of shit and invoking the name of James Randy or whatever his name is wouldn’t make an impression on most people. Since a religious version of Monty Python hasn’t yet made a movie lampooning him, he’s not commonly known. “I’ll pray for you,” is akin to “Have a nice day.” It’s just verbal fluff. Don’t worry about it.