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.
Nobody is an actual flat earther. It’s a joke thing isn’t it?
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It’s tough to tell. The main guy in that Netflix documentary struck me as a little disingenuous. I think maybe he just wants to start a church and sees FE as his in. But I mean, you’ve got Young-Earth Creationists and whatnot, at least a flat earth is immediately intuitive, even if the intuitions aren’t that hard to overcome.
Yes… Is that the group of death atm, if we join it will be the group of who beats us 5-0 1st 
Here’s hoping… As England would rather face us than Russiansondrugs🤣
This is it. Religious or spiritual people wrestle with doubt and uncertainty, but they forge ahead with reaffirmations from an inner voice, both in times of depression and mania. It’s a cross they bear and biblical passages chronicle such struggling from key players:
The devil is ever-present and always efforting to misguide. etc., etc.
So they comment that they’re praying, while often ambivalent.
Flat-earthers have to do the same thing, if they aren’t completely insane. So I dunno where this leaves us lmao
The percentage of people who believe in evolution for valid scientific reasons is vanishingly small. A lot of intelligent-design type arguments against evolution are basically sound arguments that just happen to be wrong due to the mindboggling fact that the earth has been in existence for billions of years, which is nuts.
Evolution is even a bad example, because the theory itself is basically plausible. Think about what well-informed people believe about cosmology, which is broadly speaking this:
- The universe is extremely old (OK!)
- The universe didn’t always exist, and it started out smaller than a single atom. (Wait, what?)
- Virtually instantaneously (i.e., expansion time: human lifespan << human lifespan : total age of the universe), the universe expanded to something close to its current size due to something called an inflation field (Don’t ask what an inflation field is, because no one has any idea)
- After that, the universe evolved according to the normal physical laws we see on earth, although the scales are very different. (Whew, glad that weird shit is behind us)
- Except also, the only kind of matter we have any direct experience of is basically insignificant, and a solid majority of the stuff in the universe is invisible fairy dust that no one has ever seen or has convincingly explained the nature of. (…)
- Also, there is a mysterious energy that permeates the universe that makes gravity work backwards for no known reason. (You’re the guys who say that flat-earth makes no sense?)
Again, I’m not saying that fairy-dust theory is false, it’s apparently true (or true-ish, or a stand-in for the truth). The point is that virtually everyone who believes this crazy shit doesn’t believe it for well-justified empirical reasons. The explanation for inflation has to do with a mathematical property called “anisotropy” that can be sussed out only through an exhaustingly precise examination of the static you see when you tune an old-fashioned radio or television to a dead channel. (<-- This is precisely true!)
What actually happens is that people’s empirical beliefs are obtained, in almost all cases, by ingesting the pronouncements of authoritative figures. There are many excellent reasons why science guys are a much better source to obtain scientific beliefs from than the Pope, but it’s a serious error to assume that a person’s choice of epistemic authority figure tells you much about that person’s character. For the most part, people just follow the authority figures that their social context tells them to follow. The only people you can really get some information about is people who were born into one social context but chose to adopt the epistemology of another–people who deconverted from a serious religious sect (not Episcopalianism) or joined a cult.
Flat-earthers are remarkable not because their beliefs are weird (the earth does look flat!), but because they are unsanctioned. The strangeness isn’t what they believe, it’s that they came to believe something that is unsanctioned by all elements of society.
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HONG KONG election results in with 90% Pro democracy Party wins.
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That would be great nice if those elected had any real power. They don’t.
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At the top probably, at the core, probably not. Unfortunately, that group is also growing every day.
The internet, all the information at your fingertips and instead we as a society seem to be getting dumber.
To be fair, elections are inherently biased against the anti-democracy party.
I didn’t fully understand this but the BBC said they have a 10% say in who is actually running things.
…and the CCP has a majority that makes the decisions. Those 10% mean nothing.
not in this country
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