• FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    So, I was dropping off meals for my parents;

    Mom was in the phone relating a story from when I I was a kid. The short version is we had gone into a ditch while traveling cross country. It was icy. We were going slow enough for the average conditions but for whatever reason, they weren’t salting ~1000ft of highway- we saw the city plows getting on at the same exit the county plows were getting off, leaving a gap.

    In any case, my mom related the story as if the tow truck that came out was some kind of miracle, and just happened to be going by, etc.

    No. We had a cell phone and AAA roadside. Dad called for service.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Personally I don’t find big issue with praying but kids should not be exposed to this sort of mentality. It’s frankly insane that we allow religious indoctrination for children.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Prayer as a form of meditation is fine, but when it actively takes the place of working towards solutions and/or improving situations…. At best it’s a lazy response to feel better.

      For example, praying for the homeless or starving. Praying about it changes very little. Granted unless one happens to be Jeff Bezos, there’s not a lot we can do, but even that much doesn’t happen when people see prayer as a viable alternative to doing it.

    • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      If you stopped the indoctrination of children, religions would die within a generation. You’d just be left with fringe cults here and there that we’d laugh at.

      • uis@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Sounds like something that happened in ex-republics. For example during 2023 cristmas 1% of citizens visited christian churches in my country. And considering source(police) this number is probably inflated.

        Relative to countries where many people visit church every week we have pretty secular society. Meanwhile fe(de)ral propaganda will continue to sell bullshit of “staples”.

    • Captain_Waffles@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Yep. And yet the same people who squawk about the “LGBT religion indoctrinating kids” have no issues indoctrinating kids in actual religions.

      • uis@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        To be fair cancel religion is a thing. Or Twitter religion. Many names, same stuff.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    11 months ago

    Trust me, when they suggest using your superior intellect to get back at the angry oversized bully, they don’t really mean it.

    I think prayer is practice deferring to authority and resignation to one’s fate as an obedient peon.

  • ben_dover@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    i’m not religious and i’m not doing it, but i think praying also has a psychological aspect that should not be underestimated. you take some dedicated time to reflect on your current problems, what you want in life and the people around you, possibly just before going to sleep so your subconscious can digest everything over night and might give you a different angle.

    typing all of that, i realise i should start doing my own form of non-religious praying o_O

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      As a former pastor, I you’re pretty close to understanding prayer.

      God isn’t Santa and doesn’t grant wishes. Prayer is more about contemplation. It’s seeking courage, strength, and acceptance.

      Praying for healing isn’t about literal miracles. It’s about accepting that something is out of your hands.

    • uis@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      i realise i should start doing my own form of non-religious praying o_O

      It’s called sysadmin’s tambourine.

    • Notyou
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      11 months ago

      I was first thinking meditation as a form of non-religious praying, but that is more clear your mind or be in the moment. It’s not really reflecting which I think is an important part of praying. At least it was for me when I was religious.

      • BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Why do you think meditation is not this ? Just like prayer, there isn’t one “proper” way of meditating, you are free to do it just the way you want it.

  • cetvrti_magi@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    To me praying looks like a way to pretend that you did something while actually you didn’t do anything. Very convinient but it won’t do anything.

  • ToxicWaste@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    While I don’t believe in any religion, there is a relevant story in the christian bible. I’ll be writing from memory, because I cannot be bothered to search for it:

    There where two coachman travelling on an old bumpy road. Both of them broke their axle an could not continue to the next market. One of them was a firm believer, so he sunk to his knees and started to pray to god to fix his axle so he could reach the market in time. The other coachman jumped of his cart while cursing like a sailor. He copped down a small tree from the nearby woods and made an improvised axle, all while shouting and yelling indiscriminately about his bad luck. Who do you think received more help from god?

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      “The moral is that god helps those who help themselves!”

      “Or that he takes credit for other people’s work. Basically, he’s middle management.”

      • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The mysterious thing about God is that he can do anything humans can’t (create worlds, stars, animals), but he can’t do anything humans can (create ships, fixing axles)

        • Notyou
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          11 months ago

          Does that mean the more humans learn to do the less God can do? Like God used to be able to make fire until we figured out how to start one. Since humans figured out flight and communicating great distances, God can’t fly around or hear and send messages anymore?

      • ToxicWaste@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        Haha I definitely like the middle management comparison here!

        I don’t remember the context of the story. But I think it was supposed to be “god helps those who help themselves” - basically discouraging people from being the ones described in the picture above.

    • Ignotum@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      That first man is a fool!

      Prayer only works if there are two or more people doing it!

      Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.

      Matthew 18:19

      This implies that there has never been two christians gathered together and praying for world peace or to end world hunger

      • uis@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        This implies that there has never been two christians gathered together and praying for world peace or to end world hunger

        Or that there are two christians that want wars and starve people.

        Looks more likely.

    • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Okay, I’ll bite. Which one received more help? I’m guessing the one who got off his knees and did something about his situation?

      But then what help was actually provided if the guy did it himself?

      • ToxicWaste@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        I don’t really want to argue for religion here. The way I comprehended the story was basically telling people to not be the ones described by OP.

        But if you really want to go into the interpretation stuff: I guess if you wanted to argue for a god, god made sure the cart broke down next to a wood with a tree roughly the right dimensions? Here we are with the part where religion can’t really be proven or disproven. Was it luck, was the whole road just forest…?

        • nyctre@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          You’re not arguing for religion, don’t worry. I don’t believe in gods but I was raised by religious people and the whole point of most faiths, the way I was thought, was to pray for help, for strength, inspiration, etc. not for the problem to magically go away.

  • blahsay@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Fun fact: You can actually tell if someone is religious by an mri.

    The part of the brain that deals with critical thinking shrinks due to lack of use.

        • eighty@lemmy.one
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          11 months ago

          If I’m reading this correctly, the findings of this particular paper are more directed towards a relationship between stress/anxiety (such as life-challenging events or religious-related existiential stress) and religious beliefs rather than critical thinking via hippocampal volume (the neural section associated with emotional responses).

          It’s interesting that there was a pattern of hippocampal atrophy however they do not definitively claim the direction of a causal relationship or if even is one (such as correlational).

          Interesting read that sheds into how religiosity may induce additional stressors from having a specific belief system.

          • blahsay@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            The cause for the atrophy is hard to prove exactly for obvious reasons but it seems to be in the part of the brain used for critical reasoning. Could be stress too. Either way yes, you can spot the religious because their brains are a bit shrunken

            • Liz@midwest.social
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              11 months ago

              Emphasis mine.

              The authors offer the hypothesis that the greater hippocampal atrophy in selected religious groups might be related to stress. They argue that some individuals in the religious minority, or those who struggle with their beliefs, experience higher levels of stress. This causes a release of stress hormones that are known to depress the volume of the hippocampus over time. This might also explain the fact that both non-religious as well as some religious individuals have smaller hippocampal volumes.

              You can’t look at a person’s brain to determine if they’re religious or not.

              • blahsay@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Eh that just means it’s not an exact science and there are exceptions like anything. You’ll find qualified statements like that in any good scientific study.

                • uis@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  We found correlation

                  It’s not science

                  ???

                  Just in case correlation != causation.

      • blahsay@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        ‘Greater hippocampal atrophy over time was predicted by baseline identification as born-again Protestants, Catholics, or no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants who were not born-again. Greater hippocampal atrophy was also predicted by reports at baseline of having had life-changing religious experiences’

        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068149/

  • Namstel@lemmy.one
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    11 months ago

    If prayers don’t work, then where are all the school shootings? Oh…

    • holycrap@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Maybe they’s why they don’t want to do anything about school shootings. It’s to keep prayer in public school.