----- Original Message ----- From: "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, November 11, 2002 6:01 AM Subject: Re: Praying for the Poor RE: Christian insanity.
> On Sun, Nov 10, 2002 at 10:18:57PM -0600, Dan Minette wrote: > > > problem with that arguement. My arguement is that people can pick up > > many non-verbal signals about the internal mental states of others. > > Your arguement appears to be that people can pick up false signals. > > No, you have completely missed my point. The point is that praying is as > negligible as a pebble in your shoe or sucking on a piece of candy in > the direct effect that it has on helping homeless people. You would say > the same thing if you were discussing something like air-powered cars, > but here you have some sort of mental block. Erik, I'll submit this to others for their comments. My contention is that the unspoken attitude of people affects other people but not cars, neutron, Higgs bosons, etc. Your contention appears to be that it doesn't and that I'm also unscientific to think it is. If others think that I am being superstitious to think that unspoken attitudes can affect other people, I'd be very interested in seeing why. > > Because the question was whether prayer could. I also beg to differ > > as to whether a nasty or positive attitude towards the other people in > > the world matters much. But, then we've differed on that for a long > > time now. > > I didn't say it doesn't "matter much", in general, as you imply > here. But I did say that it doesn't have much effect on helping the > homeless. > > > Do you really believe that? Do you have experiments showing that > > people who have friends with pebbles in their shoes recover faster > > than those who have friends who don't. > > You are again missing the point. You admitted in another post that if > the people don't KNOW they are being prayed for, there is no effect. Look at what I wrote, please. >If you told people that others are intentionally walking around with a > pebble in their shoe in order to help them, I bet the results would be > the same as the prayer study you cited. If your contention is that the theological validity of the action has no real affect on the ability to affect the lives of others, then that's reasonable. Indeed, someone putting a pebble in their shoe to remind themselves of my need every time that the pebble bugged them would be very touching to me. But, you talked about coincidently having a pebble in their shoe, which is very different. IMHO, what we are really arguing about is whether people's attitudes matter. The examples you cite are inanimate objects. I'll agree that computers, cars, virtual partons, etc. are not affected by our attitude. But, I do think people are. You appear to say that's mere superstition, and I'm opposed to science and logic when I contend this. Dan M. What in the world do you think my contention was? I repeatedly stated that I was considering mundane effects only; that I didn't consider the action of God changing because of the prayer in my analysis, etc. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
