Don't Encourage Him!
2007-01-09 12:20 - Religion
I was recently reading a blog post from a friend of mine. To paraphrase, they said simply that though they're an atheist, if someone wants to pray for them, they are fine with it. I immediately disagreed, and failed to get my point across in a discussion about it. I eventually came up with an idea, which prompted this short piece of fiction:
Sally, my wife, has dragged me to the Davidson's again for Sunday dinner. Her and her socializing.
It's not so bad, really, April sure can cook. What gets to me, though, is their kid. Lewis. He's retarded. Lewis is usually well behaved. But, you can tell that the cogs in his head don't always line up quite right.
After dinner, the four adults are sitting in the living room, chatting and gossiping. Okay, well, the women are. Me and Doug are just smiling, nodding, and waiting the night out. I shouldn't be surprised, but Sally brings up that bum that lives next door to us, Mr. Shaw.
"Sally, don't bring up that Shaw! The asshole overturned our garbage cans just last week! I don't want to hear his name!" I shout.
Suddenly Lewis bursts into the room. "Asshole! Asshole asshole! Shaw is an asshole!" he begins chanting.
Lewis doesn't really know what he's saying. He heard one of the magic words, though. He might be dull, but he catches on. He's learned over time how to get a reaction out of the adults. None of the four of us realized he was listening in on us from around the corner. We all thought he was upstairs in his room. Now, he's leaping around, repeating, "Asshole asshole!"
"Lewis, stop that!" Alice scolds him.
"Yeah, you sing it out loud! That Shaw is an asshole!" I join in. It took me an hour out in the cold to pick up that mess. Sally tried to convince me it was just the wind, but I know Shaw was just making trouble.
"Asshole!" Lewis shouts, giggling and jumping.
"Don't encourage him, Carl!" Sally says, and hits my arm for emphasis.
So, what's the point I'm trying to make? It's pretty simple. Religion is irrational, and dangerous. It's quite hard to pin down what it is that is dangerous about religion. It's easy to point to extremists, make some sort of statement about 9/11 and 72 virgins and martyrs ... but such an argument will just as soon be shrugged off. "Of course, those are the extremists. Plenty of people find good in religion. Not everybody is a suicide bomber."
Well, it's more insidious than that. Religion is irrational. Religion encourages wrong thought, encourages blind faith and poor decisions, rather than intelligence and reason.
Anyone who believes in an invisible magical man in the sky is irrational. Especially those who have been brought up to believe it from childhood will accept it as some sort of fundamental truth. They'll pick up one particular book, call it divine, and begin rationalizing away it's incongruities and falsehoods. They have to, they've built their life on it. They have to believe that God is listening, and that prayer makes a difference. Without it, they are a hollow shell.
So fine, they pray, no damage done. But what happens when they believe so strongly that the earth is only 6,000 years old, and that God created it all in seven days that anything else must be wrong? Might they push their own views where they don't belong? Perhaps science? Perhaps schoolrooms? Might they poison the minds of others, especially young people, with their irrational ideas?
Well of course, that's just what they did. The battle over "Intelligent Design" in the American classroom over recent years is a direct and perhaps inevitable consequence of the irrational minds that religion breeds. It's just one of the shades on the gradient from prayer to terrorism to crusade and inquisition. All the while, the people engaged in such activities posses a fervent belief that they are doing right and good. Does it still seem that way, externally?
I, for one, would prefer if you would not pray for me, thank you very much. I'd prefer to forgo the encouragement.
2007-01-11 10:08 - bgalbreath
I found your site because a co-worker needed a stopwatch, couldn't find one that used to be in the office, and I said I would search for an on-line stopwatch she could use. You come out number 2 or 3 in a google search under "on-line stopwatch"
Read your latest, and will probably read back a ways. I share your disbelief, and used to argue more along your line emphasizing how much destruction religious beliefs have caused, but I guess I'm mellowing in old age and don't feel as strongly as I used to. I think that religious impulses arise from somewhere deep in our evolutionary development, and have my own speculative just-so stories about how that all made sense in paleolithic times. I think it's too deep-seated to suppress. At best, we can try to channel it into benign forms of expression. If someone tells me they are praying for me, and if I assume they really intend to help me, I would take it as a well-meaning but probably ineffective gesture on their part, and thank them for it. I habitually wish people I deal with "Good Luck" but don't believe I have any power to enhance other people's luck by saying those words. If someone reacted angrily to my good wishes and said, "Who do you think you are? Do you control people's fortunes? How dare you think I need good luck or your well-wishes?" that would probably put me off. The prayer (unlike me) supposedly believes his verbal incantations really to tap into genuine power. I doubt that the belief is expungable for almost all who have it, but if someones seemed on the fence, I might expose him to some of the studies that have been done about the effectiveness of being prayed for (there seems to be little or none, if I recall correctly).