Shouldn’t even have to get BIG CEMETERY involved at all, just rent a backhoe and put me in the back yard. Thanks Obama.
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I was thinking of posting something like this only my body being dumped at a Trump golf course.
You can chalk up the variance for prayer results to god’s ineffability, and the power of prayer is non-falsifiable. It’s something else entirely when you choose to believe the earth is flat.
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Probably should be excised to the religion thread, but intercessory prayer from the common conceptions of God is falsifiable for the most part. To make it completely non-falsifiable, adherents have to add all kinds of caveats that move further and further away from the god they claim to believe in.
A Trump-supporting friend had a backhoe all ready to go when I nearly passed out for no apparent reason at his fairly remote house. And I’d be ok with that, I guess. Thanks, Obama!
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When I was a kid, the idea that prayer possibly had some non-trivial real-world impact was just part of the warp and weft of things, so it’s not that immediately jarring that there are still people who believe it. But the Flat Earth is something we grow up with as this canonically discredited idea - people have invented myths overstating how widespread it used to be, so popular is the tale - so it gets much more of a double-take. “I still believe that thing you’ve always known people believed” vs “I’ve come to believe the thing you grew up being told only idiots believed and even that was hundreds of years ago”.
I really need to rewatch the Sopranos. It’s been like 10 years, and that show still has a pretty good case to make for best show of all time.
It’s easily the best show I’ve ever seen. I probably rewatched 3 times beginning to end. The episode where Livia dies is one of my favorites.
Yeah I saw you’d pre-empted it once I posted it. To delete my flawless prose would be to wound the world, however.
Not really - it’s just a matter of how hard you want to look for or ignore evidence.
I recall a study that showed a very mild negative correlation of outcomes where the patient knows they’re being prayed for - like it’s added pressure. There’s some showing positive, too (people care about me!) so I mean I guess we can say the power of prayer is unlikely to be clinically significant.
Medium-warm take: the primary function of public declarations about prayer (“I’m praying for you” and etc.) is to signal group membership and solidarity. The rest is basically mystification, but on at least some naive level it seems to me that most people who perform these actions understand that. Or it might be more accurate to say they just take their cues about what they should be concerned with from others, and since others in the group are unconcerned with the actual effectiveness of prayer, there’s no reason for them to be. This works, more or less, because effectiveness is not really the point.
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I called it a medium-warm take because I think it’s possible to go too far with this way of looking at it. But I think there’s a core of truth in it. I don’t think the counter-point is a refutation, because people are equally unconcerned with whether or not the public declaration about the outcome is logically valid. It’s also more signalling. It’s tempting to explain that lack of concern by saying that religious people are all terrible at logic – and pretty much everyone is bad at logic so this works to an extent – but IME most people have some practical ability to discern this kind of logical fallacy when they aren’t motivated to ignore it.
But, I agree that people also want to maintain that there is some thin veneer of plausibility to the idea that prayer works. It’s just surprising how thin of a veneer they are willing to accept, and I think explanations based in signalling help account for that.
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Yeah but he always has the moon boning story.
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Couldn’t their kid pass it down to their own children? Eventually SIDS or something will hit the lineage.
I have had a burial plot since I was sixteen.
https://mobile.twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1199045292399747073
If Russia gets kicked out of ALL sports My country goes to the Euro’s and the 1st time we will get to a major sports event since 1996 
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If that happens I think you might be in England’s group again.