The Powerlessness of Prayer
Since I've been on a sports kick for the past few posts, I thought I'd follow up today with a nice example of the second thing that really bothers me about sports today: the fact that superstitious Christian types have taken it over. You know the kind of athlete I'm talking about. The guy who spends years practicing and training and straining to become great, and then makes a big play and attributes it to Jesus (curiously, Jesus is never blamed when the guy screws up). I challenge anyone to show me tape of Jesus having his ass out on the practice field just once. These guys are successful because they've worked hard and sacrificed a lot to become that good, yet they have to attribute their success to some kind of vaguely defined yet highly personalized supernatural force.
This behavior is not accidental. These athletes were targeted at a young age by fundamentalist recruiters who recognized that athletes are frequently ... to put it kindly ... prone to accept groupthink and authority. And why target athletes? I'd wager that the main, largely unspoken motivation is money. Weak-minded, authority-accepting jocks make huge amounts of money these days, which means they won't miss the few millions that get siphoned off over a few years by Reverend Billy Bob's Old Time Gospel Ministry. Jocks are a bottomless well of money -- money that can then be turned around to brainwash generations of adoring young people and keep us intellectually mired in the 14th century. I would argue that the flow of money from athletes to preachers contributes greatly to our country's medieval attitudes toward science, reason, and logic. Hence, when these cash-laden jocks-for-Jesus blatantly (and unknowingly) demonstrate that their superstition is just plain old hooey, I think we really need to point this out.
That being said, today's prize for firing intellectual blanks goes to Seahawks running back and 2005 NFL MVP Shaun Alexander. On Monday, September 25th, the Seahawks announced that Shaun had a cracked bone in his foot and would be out for 4-6 weeks while it healed. Shaun, in typical evangelical fashion, came out shortly thereafter and said he'd be ready to go the next week because he'd been healed by "the power of prayer". Fortunately, the team physicians had enough sense to use the secular, objectively-arrived-at technology at their disposal to assess the injury. Turns out Shaun could have prayed until his knees were bloody .... the bone did not magically heal in less than a week. In fact, as of today, he's still on the mend. Maybe by next week (which falls into the medically predicted 4-6 weeks) he'll be ready to go.
What should this teach us? That prayer is powerless to change reality. It may make believers feel better, and it may have a placebo effect in non-serious cases, but when stacked up against the power of logic, reason, technology, and evidence-based medicine -- when its actual, objective efficacy is examined, it's pretty useless. Moreover, every news/sports reporter worth his salt should be riding Shaun about this mercilessly. This man uses his celebrity status to raise money for his favorite preacher/church/outreach ministry, and he has demonstrably shown -- in public, no less -- that he's selling snake oil. He was not magically healed by prayer (or anything else, for that matter). He has objectively demonstrated that the very thing that he's advocating did not do what he claimed it would.
When a politician does this, most would agree that he or she has betrayed the public trust. When a business does this, we can take it to court for false advertising. Why doesn't this simple, fair, and reasonable standard apply to religion and its advocates?
This behavior is not accidental. These athletes were targeted at a young age by fundamentalist recruiters who recognized that athletes are frequently ... to put it kindly ... prone to accept groupthink and authority. And why target athletes? I'd wager that the main, largely unspoken motivation is money. Weak-minded, authority-accepting jocks make huge amounts of money these days, which means they won't miss the few millions that get siphoned off over a few years by Reverend Billy Bob's Old Time Gospel Ministry. Jocks are a bottomless well of money -- money that can then be turned around to brainwash generations of adoring young people and keep us intellectually mired in the 14th century. I would argue that the flow of money from athletes to preachers contributes greatly to our country's medieval attitudes toward science, reason, and logic. Hence, when these cash-laden jocks-for-Jesus blatantly (and unknowingly) demonstrate that their superstition is just plain old hooey, I think we really need to point this out.
That being said, today's prize for firing intellectual blanks goes to Seahawks running back and 2005 NFL MVP Shaun Alexander. On Monday, September 25th, the Seahawks announced that Shaun had a cracked bone in his foot and would be out for 4-6 weeks while it healed. Shaun, in typical evangelical fashion, came out shortly thereafter and said he'd be ready to go the next week because he'd been healed by "the power of prayer". Fortunately, the team physicians had enough sense to use the secular, objectively-arrived-at technology at their disposal to assess the injury. Turns out Shaun could have prayed until his knees were bloody .... the bone did not magically heal in less than a week. In fact, as of today, he's still on the mend. Maybe by next week (which falls into the medically predicted 4-6 weeks) he'll be ready to go.
What should this teach us? That prayer is powerless to change reality. It may make believers feel better, and it may have a placebo effect in non-serious cases, but when stacked up against the power of logic, reason, technology, and evidence-based medicine -- when its actual, objective efficacy is examined, it's pretty useless. Moreover, every news/sports reporter worth his salt should be riding Shaun about this mercilessly. This man uses his celebrity status to raise money for his favorite preacher/church/outreach ministry, and he has demonstrably shown -- in public, no less -- that he's selling snake oil. He was not magically healed by prayer (or anything else, for that matter). He has objectively demonstrated that the very thing that he's advocating did not do what he claimed it would.
When a politician does this, most would agree that he or she has betrayed the public trust. When a business does this, we can take it to court for false advertising. Why doesn't this simple, fair, and reasonable standard apply to religion and its advocates?
posted by DrJDG @ 14:11
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