The problem with intercessory prayer

There are many things I don't get about religion, but one of the ones I understand least is the idea of intercessory or petitionary prayer -- prayer that has as its intent to alter the course of something unpleasant like an illness or run of bad luck.

The Bible is full of examples of intercessory prayer, of God's wrath being turned away by a devout word in the Divine Ear.  In the episode of the Golden Calf (Exodus chapter 32), God apparently intended to destroy the Israelites for idolatry, but his judgment was altered by Moses' plea.  Even Sodom and Gomorrah, those pinnacles of depravity from the book of Genesis, would have been saved had Abraham found ten or more "righteous men" there.

All of this, to my admittedly unqualified ear, sounds as if God could change his mind.  The problem, so far as I can frame it, is this; in the typical Christian model of how things work, God is changeless, eternal, all-good, and all-knowing.  As such, the whole idea of a person's prayer altering the course of what God wants is a little silly.  God presumably already knows not only what is the best outcome, but knows what will happen; why would the prayers of one person, or even of everyone on Earth simultaneously, change that?  And what happens when you have equal numbers of devout people praying for opposite outcomes -- like what happens in the United States at every high-stakes sports event?  Does God simply tally up the number of prayers, or does the intensity of the prayers count?  Or the piety of those who are praying?

Old Woman in Prayer by Gerrit Dou (ca. 1630) [Image is in the Public Domain] 

So, in my effort to understand this idea, I turned to C. S. Lewis.  Even if I usually disagree with Lewis' conclusions, I find him to be generally rational, and certainly a clear, sober-minded writer on the subject.  Here's what I found, from his essay "Does Prayer Work?":

Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men?  For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it.  But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate.  He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers, or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries.  Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will.

So far, sounds like the God/No God models look kind of the same.  But Lewis goes on to say:

I have seen it suggested that a team of people—the more the better—should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B.  Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths.  And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors.

The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer could go on under such conditions.  “Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” says the King in Hamlet.  Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment.  You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery.  But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another.  You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens.  The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance.  In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying.  The experiment demands an impossibility. 

What brings this up today is that a team in Brazil did exactly what Lewis suggests -- not with "properly trained parrots," but with a group of the devout who were told to pray for a group of COVID-19 sufferers, and who were honestly desirous of a positive effect.  The people doing the praying weren't told not to pray for the other group; in the setup of the experiment, they didn't even know the other group existed, so this circumvents Lewis's objection that the prayers wouldn't be valid because the people praying would only be "doing it to find out what happens."

The results, which appeared this week in the journal Heliyon, found zero difference in the survival rate, severity, or rate of complications between the prayed-for and not-prayed-for groups.

I am very curious as to how a Christian would explain why, if intercessory prayer works at all, the prayed-for group didn't show a lower risk of complications or death.  "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test," perhaps -- but all that means is that the scientists running the experiment were sinning, and you'd think God wouldn't be petty enough to let the prayed-for group suffer and die just to get back at the researchers.

Plus, there's the consideration that if ever there was an opportunity for God to show that what the Christians claim is correct, this is it.  You would think that if presumably God wants people to believe and to pray (and in fact Christians are positively commanded to pray, in a variety of places in the Bible), some sort of results would have been forthcoming.

You get the impression that even Lewis was a little uncomfortable on this point.  He said, "Prayer doesn't change God -- it changes me."  Again, I have to wonder how this would work.  How would praying for something to a deity whose mind I can't change, who knows what is "supposed to happen" and who will do what he chooses regardless, have any beneficial effects on me?  Imagine a parent whose mind could never be swayed by his children's requests -- and telling the children, "You should ask anyway, because it's good for you."

While I am not religious (obviously), I can at least understand the concept of other sorts of prayer -- prayers for enlightenment, prayers for understanding, prayers for courage.  But I really have no clue what the possible logic could be to praying for intercession, other than "the Bible says we have to -- never mind why."  Perhaps some reader will have a good explanation of it, but on the face of it, it seems like the most pointless of pursuits.

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A moment of Judeo-Christian silence

Let me start out with a reality check: despite what the Religious Right and the pseudo-pundits on Fox News want you to believe, there is no law against students praying in public school.  Nor is it against the rules for any student in any public school in the United States to have, or read, a Bible.  Nor to cite it (or Jesus) as an influence in their lives in personal essays.  No school has stopped students from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance because it contains the words "under God."  Bible study and Christian fellowship groups are allowed to hold meetings on school property as long as attendance is completely voluntary.

Anyone who claims otherwise is wrong at best, and flat-out lying through their teeth at worst.

What is not legal is mandating prayer in school, or using Christian membership or affirmation as a qualification for... well, anything.  Schools cannot legally force students to follow the precepts of any religion.  The upshot is that public schools are simply not the venue for generating religious adherence, or (for that matter) preventing it.  It is no more teachers' place to alter their students' religious views in either direction than it is for churches to teach their congregations algebra.

As a personal case in point:

• I responded to questions about my own religious beliefs with "that isn't relevant to the discussion" -- even while we were studying fraught topics like evolution.
• I had a Bible on the bookshelf in my classroom.  I was given it by a student many years ago, and saw no reason it shouldn't be there.
• I saw students praying before exams and saying grace before lunch, and no one ever stopped them or had any problem with it.

As a brief aside, there is an explicit conflict in the "under God" part of the Pledge, in my opinion, because if it's recited by students -- which it still is, in public schools across the country -- it pressures non-religious students to affirm something they don't believe it (i.e., to lie).  I find that people who argue against taking out the words "under God" (which, by the bye, were not original to the Pledge but were added in the 1950s) often can't come up with a cogent reason why the words should be recited in a public school where (1) attendance is compulsory, and (2) there are students (and adults) of all different gradations of belief and disbelief.

But of course, that "live and let live" (or, as my mom used to put it, "your rights end where my nose begins") attitude isn't enough for the sanctimonious spokespeople of the Religious Right, who will stop at nothing to inject religion back into public schools.  And not just any religion, of course:

If there was any doubt about this, it should be put to rest by what happened in Florida (of course it was in Florida) last week.  A new law was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that will mandate a sixty-second "moment of silence" that must be observed in all public schools.  The proponents gave some lip service to a broad-minded sentiment behind this -- that students need to have time to engage in meditative self-reflection -- but the real reason was given away by the bill's sponsor, Representative Randy Fine, who tweeted triumphantly, "Just joined Governor DeSantis to sign my fourth bill of the 2021 Legislative Session, allowing prayer back into schools via a moment of silence for all our schoolchildren.  I won't stop fighting against woke radicals who which [sic] to drive out Judeo-Christian values from every aspect of our lives!"

You'd think that anyone with any sense would recognize that saying this explicitly is just asking for the filing of lawsuits to invalidate the new legislation, but DeSantis, who certainly wouldn't be in contention for the "smartest governor in the United States" award, not only didn't contradict Fine but immediately agreed.  "The idea that you can push God out of every institution and be successful," DeSantis said, "I'm sorry, our Founding Fathers did not believe that."

"Students are free to believe what they want" isn't enough for these people; Fine and DeSantis make it clear that the "moment of silence" bill is just a foot in the door for reinserting prayer -- Christian prayer, of course -- back into public school classrooms.  And call me a "woke radical" if you like, but no compulsory prayer of any kind belongs in publicly funded institutions.

And for fuck's sake, it's not like public school teachers have time to do some kind of subversive anti-religious indoctrination.  I was a teacher for 32 years, and never once did I say, "Okay, kids, we've got an extra twenty minutes today, I will now teach you how to blaspheme!"  I had enough on my hands trying to get high schoolers to understand the Krebs Cycle and Mendel's Laws and the reactions of photosynthesis, I definitely didn't have the space in the curriculum to devote to undermining students' dearly-held religious beliefs.

Nor, might I add, did I have the desire to.  I may be a staunch atheist myself, but I am firmly of the opinion that everyone arrives at their understanding of how the universe works in their own time and fashion, and while I may disagree with someone's worldview, it's not my place to criticize it -- or honestly, even to make a judgment about it at all.

Unless that worldview involves compelling others to alter their own beliefs and actions.  It's all very well to say, "I do this because it's required by my religion;" when you start saying "you have to do this because it's required by my religion," you're going to have a fight on your hands.

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One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

News from the fringe

It's getting to the point that I'm not entirely sure whether the hyperreligious types here in the United States might be engaging in an elaborate act of self-parody.

I mean, is it just me, or have their claims been getting more and more ridiculous?  As I was casting about yesterday for a topic for today's post, I ran across not one, nor two, but three stories that made me say, "Okay, be honest.  You people aren't serious, right?"

First, we had the Jehovah's Witnesses releasing a creepy cartoon aimed at children, trying to convince them that if they have friends with LGBT parents, it's their duty to make sure that the friends find out that their parents are sinners who are doomed to hell.

The cartoon features a little girl who comes to her mom, dismayed because she has a friend whose parents are lesbians.  The mom explains that this is problematic:

People have their own ideas about what is right and wrong – but what matters is how Jehovah feels.  He wants us to be happy and he knows how we can be happiest.  That’s why he invented marriage the way he did -- between one man and one woman. 

Jehovah created Adam and Eve, male and female. Then he said a man will stick to his wife… Jesus said the same thing. 

Jehovah’s standards haven’t changed.  It’s kind of like bringing something on a plane – what happens if someone tries to bring something on that isn’t allowed?

What a brilliant analogy!  Who you are attracted to is exactly like someone trying to bring a hand grenade onto an airplane.  Do go on, Creepy Cartoon Mom:

It’s the same with Jehovah! He wants us to be his friend, and live in paradise forever, but we have to follow his standards to get there.  To get there we have to leave some things behind – that means anything Jehovah doesn’t approve of...  People can change, that’s why we share his message.

Creepy Cartoon Girl then says she'll make sure to tell her friend's parents that Jehovah doesn't approve of their lifestyle, a development that Creepy Cartoon Mom pronounces "awesome."

Then we had a fundamentalist pastor in Tennessee who said that scientists are "abandoning Darwin" in favor of ghosts and UFOs, which (given that they live in the sky, sort of) are basically god.  As long as you squint your eyes and look at them really carefully.

In fact, Pastor Charles Lawson of the Temple Baptist Church of Knoxville has a great deal to say on the topic, following the general scheme of "if you're making up random shit, make up a lot of it":

Think about what I’m saying about aliens communicating with you. Aliens from above.  Something coming down from the skies and communicating with us here on this earth. A lot of scientists, a lot of them, and there’s really no way to know specifically because of political correctness and the pressure that’s put upon them.  A lot of scientists have abandoned Darwin, but because of fear of losing their jobs, fear of losing the ability to produce papers, uh, fear, peer pressure, they have to keep it in, and they don’t come out with it, but here and there some do.  They have abandoned Darwin.  They have abandoned evolution.

Yes, there's "no way to know specifically" because it's bullshit.  But that doesn't stop him for a moment:

Scientists have jettisoned Darwin and now they’re looking up, and past, and they’re getting into the spirit world, into the paranormal world.  And the two of them, they compliment each other, and they begin to get into something that their scientific books know nothing about...  You can get a Ph.D. from Harvard and not know one thing about a spirit.

And once again, there's a reason for that, but probably not the one Pastor Lawson is thinking of.

Finally, we have Mayor Tony Yarber of Jackson, Mississippi, who is recommending taking care of the abysmal conditions of roads in the city by... praying that the potholes will get filled.  Yarber tweeted:

Yes….I believe we can pray potholes away.  Moses prayed and a sea opened up. #iseeya #itrustHim #prayerworks

Some of the residents of Jackson were less than sanguine about the idea.  Glenn Garber responded:

Are you fucking kidding me?!  I have a better idea… Pay to have them filled!

Yarber responded, apparently in all seriousness:

We tried that.  So praying is the obvious alternative.

When days went by and lo, the potholes were not magically filled, one Jackson resident posted some doubts:

I thought he was going to pray for them to be fixed.  Did God deny his prayer?

Undaunted, Yarber responded:

Absolutely not.  I’m never denied.  Go to http://data.jacksonms.gov to see infrastructure plans.

Because evidently one of the mysterious ways in which god works is through filing road maintenance plans with the city council.  

Is it just me, or is god relying more on bureaucracy now than he did back in the good old create-loaves-and-fishes days?  When the multitudes came to Jesus to be fed, he didn't say, "And I hath filed a requisition with the Greater Judea Food Distribution Network, and thy loaves and fishes will be delivered three weeks from next Thursday, as hath been prophesied in the scriptures."

The Miracles of Christ (Aert van den Bossche, ca. 1500) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So anyhow.  I'd like to think that these people aren't serious, but I'm very much afraid that they are.  Worse still, there is a good percentage of folks in the United States who read this kind of thing and say, "Hallelujah!" instead of doing what I did, which is guffawing.  I live in hope, however, that the more outrageous the claims from the fringe get, the more people will stop and say, "Okay, wait a moment.  That can't be true."

Or maybe not.  After all, this is the country where a majority of the citizens say that climate change is a "myth" while simultaneously believing that people do bad stuff because a woman created from a rib was given an apple by a talking snake.

Prayer for pay

One of the inevitable downsides of a blog such as this one is that I tend to focus on negative stuff.  People who believe (and peddle) nonsense, charlatans, hoaxers, dupers, swindlers, and thieves.  And the world being what it is, a sizable percentage of the aforementioned no-goods never get caught, never get stopped, never have to recompense their victims what they've stolen.

Today I'm going to look at a case where the good guys won.  The story, which was sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, starts out like so many of the others -- but then ends on a happy note.

The scam was the brainchild of one Benjamin Rogovy of Seattle.  It was a website called "Christian Prayer Center," where you could sign up to have prayers said for you (or for a friend or loved one) -- as long as you donated.

All major credit cards accepted, of course.

More insidious still was that if you signed up and gave Rogovy your credit card information, you were put on a list for "continued prayers," and billed monthly -- unless you specifically clicked "No, Thank You."  And as you may have experienced with other such auto-bill sites, once you were on the monthly billing list, getting off of it wasn't easy.

Complaints began to roll in, some coming from as far away as Singapore.  Unfortunately, there was little the authorities could do.  Because the Christian Prayer Center was a licensed business, and it's hard to see how you could claim that you hadn't gotten what you'd paid for (no one said your prayers were going to be answered, after all), Rogovy was making money hand over fist from people who were either desperate or gullible or both.

Finally, however, Rogovy stepped over the line by including fake testimonials and made-up religious leaders as a way of increasing his take.  And it worked, for a while; records show that he raked in $7.75 million from over 165,000 people over a period of three years.  Hard as that is to believe.  But once the false information started showing up, that gave Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson leverage to go after the sly bastard.

And he succeeded.  Last week, as part of a settlement, Rogovy agreed to return millions of dollars to the people he'd bilked.  "What I will not tolerate," Ferguson said in a statement, "is unlawful businesses that prey upon people —taking advantage of their faith or their need for help— in order to make a quick buck."  A Facebook page appeared called "Christian Prayer Center SCAM" warning people away from the site.

People seeking a refund for money they've sent to the Christian Prayer Center and its sister site, Orcion Cristiana, have until June 12, 2016 to file a claim with the Attorney General's office.

The one cloud behind all of this golden lining is that people like Rogovy rarely ever go away.  As we saw this week with Peter Popoff, the lure of relieving the faithful of their filthy lucre is simply too tempting.  Until the Attorney General's office mandated that it be shut down, the Christian Prayer Center's website had a sanctimonious message stating, "We thank you for all the prayers, and we cherish the opportunity to have created a place where Christians could meet to support each other."  As of the writing of this post, the Center's Facebook page was still up, with a pinned post at the top of the feed saying, "If the Christian Prayer Center adds value to your lives and you think online prayer is important, please type "Yes" or "Amen" to our wall!  We love to hear praise reports and testimonials," and the following image:

Because apparently the answer to "What Would Jesus Do?" is "use false claims to take money from people and claim he's praying for them, but actually doing nothing."

So it's to be hoped that the judgment against Rogovy will put a stop to the money pouring into the Christian Prayer Center.  The problem is, of course, that even if this puts Rogovy out of business, there's always another swindler waiting in line.

If there's a sucker born every minute, as P. T. Barnum observed, there are probably two thieves born in the same amount of time.

Fireproof

New from the "You Really Think The World Works That Way?" department, we have the edifying story of the guy who was in a fiery car crash, in which both he and his bible survived more or less unscathed.

The unnamed driver had his Jeep sideswiped while driving down the highway in Tennessee, veered off the road, and ran into a telephone pole.  The car burst into flames.

According to witness Anita Irby:

I just saw GOD on 385.  I'm always in awh [sic] of his wonders but today just blew my mind.  This car ran off the road and hit a metal post and burst into flames not to mention the passenger was trapped inside as the car was filled with smoke the flames began to fill the inside.  THE ENTIRE EXPRESSWAY STOPPED and people ran from their cars trying to break the windows and open the doors of this mans [sic] car to free him, as they were the others went up in prayer for God to deliver this man from the paws of the devil....  Now it appeared our prayers was in vain because he couldn't move and the flames had reach the inside of the truck.  But God!!!!!! .....the flames were on the inside but the way my God is set up The Way It Look Like and what it is, None of the flames touched him and even after the car exploded once All these God blessed people ran back up ... Now the passenger even begged them to just let him die .  End of Story he's Alive and well. ......  Jesus thats my Goddd

When the scene was investigated, they found something else -- that a bible on the front seat of the car had also escaped damage.  Another witness, Eugene McNeil, said, "That is God.  If you don’t believe it, I don’t know what to say."

Here's a photograph of the car, mid-explosion:

So that's pretty terrible, and I'm really glad the guy made it out alive.  What I'm going to say in addition should not be construed as minimizing the fact that there was a catastrophic accident in which no one was hurt.

But really -- attributing the whole thing to god?  How about the people who pulled him from the car?  How about the paramedics who helped him and made sure he wasn't badly injured?

And the whole bible thing... the cynic in me thinks that it was a deliberate plant by one of the witnesses or rescue crew.  I mean, bibles are made of paper, which last I checked was highly flammable.  Take a look at the photograph; the entire passenger compartment of the car was engulfed in flames.  The likelihood of a bible surviving unburned is awfully slim.

But even if it did -- you really think an all-powerful, all-compassionate deity would work that way?  If god really did want to protect the guy, how about keeping him from getting in the accident in the first place?  And the dude's car burned up.  Cars, you may have observed, are a hell of a lot more expensive to replace than bibles.

Yes, yes, I know, money's not the point, the love of money is the root of all evil, and so on.  But seriously.  People are absolutely convinced that god intervenes in football game outcomes, helps people find their lost car keys, and makes sure they find exactly the pair of shoes they were looking for in Walmart.  Don't you think that on the whole, there are more pressing things he should be attending to?

Evidently, the answer is "no."  Here are a few of the responses to the article about god making sure the bible didn't get burned:

"Behold, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt, and the form of the fourth is like unto the Son of God...."   If Nebuchadnezzar could say such things, then I think we can safely assume that they have happened, and continue to happen...  Only believe. 

Sometimes God make [sic] it as a lesson for the people who have a faith in him to make their faith even stronger.  And those who don't believe in God.  If you warn them or you don't do in either way they won't believe.  As they have locks on their hearts. 

Adonai, the Living God.  Glory is yours Father. 

God saved a man and proved that his word fireproof! 

Liberals must really hate it when God does things like this.  Oh make no mistake about it God is real.  The fact that the bible wasn't touched and the man got out on time like that is proof.  There is no scientific explanation.

Well, maybe this is because of my locked heart, but even if you start from the assumption that god exists, it doesn't make sense that he'd run the universe this way.  On the one hand, he answers prayers to eliminate minor inconveniences, and allows major suffering of innocent people without doing a thing?

Oh, but "God Works In Mysterious Ways."  I suppose that explains everything.

I'm not setting out to be obnoxious, here.  I just don't get this worldview.  It seems to be telling us that there's a deity who is super-concerned about trivial stuff -- not to mention disapproving heartily every time people masturbate -- but stands back and does nothing during famines, wars, and even the Holocaust.

Which is a way of thinking I simply don't get.  Probably explaining why for me, it seems far more probable that there's no deity up there in the first place.

Mass eviction notice

Buoyed by the success last month of Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Archbishop Emeritus of Guadalajara, who conducted an exorcism of the entire country of Mexico, a Catholic priest in Scranton, Pennsylvania is now suggesting that we do the same thing for the United States.

Monsignor John Esseff, who has been a priest for 62 years and an exorcist for 35, says that "Such exorcisms … have helped bring awareness that there is such a thing as sin influenced by Satan...  The devil has much to do with [influencing people in] breaking the law of God."

William Blake, Satan Smiting Job (1826) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Right.  Because things in Mexico are ever so much better since Íñiguez and his intrepid team of Satan-fighters expelled all the demons from the country.  Notorious drug cartel leader Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera escaped from jail last week, almost certainly with help, and is now in hiding.  A "killing surge" in the city of Monterrey three weeks ago left 25 people dead. Ruben "El Menchito" Oseguera Gonzalez, son of the Jalisco Cartel's leader, was arrested for the third time last week after already being arrested and released twice for complicity in "two cases of forced disappearance."  Officials have said, basically, that everyone knows he's guilty, but he almost certainly won't be tried and found guilty because of the culture of corruption, coercion, and fear that exists in the Mexican judicial system.  A study just found that Mexico has a gun-seizure rate twice that of Iraq -- and yet the violent crime is on the increase, with 2015 looking to set a record, just as 2014 did.

So the exorcism really worked well.  It's no wonder that Monsignor Esseff wants the United States to follow suit.

And if we can't get our act together to have a country-wide expulsion of demons, local bishops could still do a piece-by-piece exorcism.  "Every bishop is the chief exorcist of his own diocese," Esseff said.  "Any time anyone with the authority uses his power against Satan, that is powerful.  Every priest and bishop has that power...  During the exorcism of a diocese, the bishop calls on the power of Jesus over every court, every single institution, every individual and every family.  The whole country would have such power if bishops would exorcise their dioceses."

What strikes me as most bizarre about all of this is the seemingly complete lack of awareness by people like Esseff and Íñiguez that their Get Thee Behind Me Satan routine has no effect whatsoever. I mean, this is a lack of connection to reality on a truly colossal scale.  You'd think that the first time you had a flat tire, and you prayed to god to expel the demons from your steel-belted radials, and nothing happened, you'd go, "Huh.  What a goober I am.  I guess this doesn't work."

But no.  They keep doing their rituals and prayers and so forth, and nothing continues to happen, and they are for some reason completely undaunted by this.

When it comes to true disconnect with reality, though, they've got a good precedent in the bible itself.  "Truly I tell you," Jesus says in Matthew 17:20, "if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."

Either that's simply not true, or else mustard seeds are setting the bar for faith higher than they appear to be.  Because the faithful pray for stuff all the time -- ordinary stuff, not mountains moving around -- and a great deal of it doesn't happen.

But "god works in mysterious ways."  Which, I suppose, covers damn near every failure I can think of.

So we'll see, over the next few weeks, if American bishops take Monsignor Esseff's advice and exorcise the United States.  I suppose the whole thing falls into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  Myself, I'm not expecting anything to change much.  Life will go on, crimes will still happen, Donald Trump will still be running for president.  Just showing that some demonic entities are harder to get rid of than others.

Swing votes, squirt guns, and prayer

Most of you probably know that the United States Supreme Court is likely to announce a decision on the federal legalization of same-sex marriage some time this month, and that the decision is likely to come down to how one man votes -- Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is in the uncomfortable position of being the "swing voter."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The more liberal-leaning justices -- Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan -- seem likely to vote in favor.  The remaining four more conservative members are likely to vote against.  That means that Kennedy will almost certainly be the one who casts the deciding vote.

And this is why he is currently the target of prayer rallies.

The effort is being organized by "Coach" Dave Daubenmire, who came into the public eye after an ACLU suit to stop him from forcing the players on his high school football team to pray.  Daubenmire and the school district he worked for settled out of court (the school district lost $18,000 in the process), but Daubenmire now spends a lot of time on the lecture circuit telling everyone how he beat the ACLU because of god's power and the power of prayer.

And now Daubenmire, who in his post-coaching days runs a ministry called "Pass the Salt" (further increasing the WTF factor in the whole thing), is organizing a nationwide series of prayer rallies that have as their goal persuading god to persuade Anthony Kennedy to vote no:

We're going to have a solemn assembly of prayer and repentance, asking God, please God, help us rescue marriage.  And we're going to totally focus on Justice Kennedy, we believe he is the swing vote, and we're just going to ask the Lord to forgive us of our sins and turn the heart of Justice Kennedy that he might see the error of his ways and protect marriage. The neat part about it... is that we're asking people from all across America.  Clear out there in California, you can't come to Washington D. C., but could you organize a prayer vigil at the same time we're doing it, noon to three o'clock Eastern Time on June 14?  Could you get the people in your church to come to a prayer rally?  It's not where we're asking the politicians to do something, it's not where we're marching and carrying signs and rebelling, it's where we're saying "Lord, forgive us, how did we ever get in this mess, please, Lord, forgive us."  

Can I paint a picture here, real quickly?  I like to use the illustration of Super Soakers, the little squirt guns that look like big cannons that kids like to play with.  That's they way I see prayer.  Everybody has a Super Soaker.  There a lot of people who are praying, and they're squirting their guns, they're doing all they can, but there's a difference between putting a lot of people out in a field and telling them to shoot away, and bringing them into your living room and putting a dot on the ceiling and saying, "Hey, everybody, point your Super Soaker at the dot on the ceiling."  The end result of that, if we got a hundred people to point their squirt guns at the dot on the ceiling, eventually there'd be a hole in the ceiling.  Concentrated, focused prayer.  That's why we think the Salt and Light Brigade is so important.  They don't have to come, we'd love for people to come, but we realize they can't.  But what if they all gathered in their local churches, or with their prayer groups, or with their families, and we told them who to pray for... We're going to focus all of our power in the same direction rather than just sporadically squirting our guns up in the air.  We're going to focus our guns on the same target, and punch a hole in the heavenlies. 

So far, this all Super Soakers For Jesus business seems to fall into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department, but I do have to wonder how this could possibly work even if you accept Daubenmire's premise that there is a god who somehow likes to micromanage affairs here on Earth.  Daubenmire and his ilk always go on and on about how god knows everything and is all-good and all-powerful and will ultimately make everything work out; so it seems a little odd that anyone who believes that would think that prayer would accomplish anything.  Either your opinion is in line with what god already intended to do (in which case god was going to do it anyway, and your prayers are unnecessary) or it isn't (in which case god has no intent of doing what you say, so your prayers are futile).  Either way, it doesn't accomplish much.

Even C. S. Lewis, whose writing is usually pretty clear-headed and rational -- not that I agree with most of his conclusions -- seemed troubled by all this.  In his essay "Does Prayer Work?", he is up front that you can't change god's mind, but he thinks that petitionary prayer still somehow makes sense:

Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men?  For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it.  But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers, or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries.  Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will.

Which, frankly, strikes me as a little petty.  It's like a parent saying to his child, "I know you're hungry, but I'm not giving you food unless you ask, and you have to ask in exactly the right way."

And it also brings up the problematic situation for Daubenmire if Kennedy votes "yes."  Was god not listening?  Did the devil persuade Kennedy to vote in a more infernal way?  Did the prayers not work for some other reason?  Did they not have enough people praying?  ("You know, if there'd been 1,284,733 people praying, I'd'a had a chat with Justice Kennedy.  But 1,284,732 people just didn't quite do it for me.")

Because if god is so dead-set against same-sex marriage, you'd think he'd find a way to make sure it didn't happen regardless, right?

So the whole thing seems to turn on a philosophical point that doesn't, honestly, make a lot of sense.  It's far from the only thing in this worldview that I can't make sense of, of course.

As I said before, however, there's no real harm in it.  If they want to spend their time trying to change a presumably all-knowing deity's mind, they can knock themselves out.  At least that's less time they'll have to try to convince politicians, who not only can be swayed, but who actually exist.

Modern-day Caligulas

Is it just me, or do a lot of high-profile members of the evangelical wing of Christianity seem to have lost their minds lately?

I mean, it's not like they haven't been saying some odd things for a while.  Pat Robertson, for example -- who at this point must be what, 148 years old? -- has been entertaining us for as long as I can remember.  But now we've got apparently insane hyper-Christians, many of whom have been elected to public office, making statements that under normal circumstances would qualify a person for medical supervision.

First we have Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, signing into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which "prohibits state or local governments from substantially burdening a person's ability to exercise their religion — unless the government can show that it has a compelling interest and that the action is the least-restrictive means of achieving it."  All of which sounds pretty innocuous until you realize that what prompted the bill was a series of cases in which Christian-owned businesses wanted government protection for their decision not to serve gays and lesbians.

Making it clear that this was what the bill was about, Eric Miler of Advance America said about the bill's passage, "It is vitally important to protect religious freedom in Indiana.  It was therefore important to pass Senate Bill 101 in 2015 in order to help protect churches, Christian businesses and individuals from those who want to punish them because of their Biblical beliefs!"

And despite this, Governor Pence swears that the RFRA has nothing to do with discriminating against LGBT people.  "This is not about discrimination," he said, in a press conference.

The state is already beginning to experience a backlash.  Supporters of non-discrimination policies have begun pulling out of Indiana, most dramatically the software company Salesforce, which operates a S&P 500 corporation headquartered in Indianapolis.  "We have been an active member of the Indiana business community and a key job creator for more than a decade," Scott McCorkle, CEO of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud division, wrote in a letter to Indiana lawmakers. "Our success is fundamentally based on our ability to attract and retain the best and most diverse pool of highly skilled employees, regardless of gender, religious affiliation, ethnicity or sexual orientation.  Without an open business environment that welcomes all residents and visitors, Salesforce will be unable to continue building on its tradition of marketing innovation in Indianapolis."

But what Pence and the Indiana state legislature has done is sane compared with what we're hearing from other right-wing Christian elected officials.  How about Senator Sylvia Allen, a member of the State Senate of Arizona, who last week proposed a way to fix the problems in the United States: mandatory church attendance.

In a debate over laws governing carrying concealed weapons, Senator Allen suddenly made the following statement, which should be an odds-on contender for the 2015 Non Sequitur Award:

I believe what's happening to our country is that there's a moral erosion of the soul of America.  It's the soul that is corrupt.  How we get back to a moral rebirth I don't know.  Since we are slowly eroding religion at every opportunity that we have.  Probably we should be debating a bill requiring every American to attend a church of their choice on Sunday to see if we can get back to having a moral rebirth.

What does that have to do with concealed-carry laws?  I have no idea.  Neither, apparently, did the rest of the senate, who just sort of sat there staring at Senator Allen with their mouths hanging open.

Then we have State Representative Gordon Klingenschmitt of Colorado, who on his television show Pray in Jesus's Name commented upon a brutal attack on a pregnant woman that occurred earlier this month, and said that the attack had happened because of the "curse of God upon America for the legalization of abortion."  Worse, still, when people reacted with outrage to Klingenschmitt's statement, he informed us that he has the right to say any damn thing he wants to, because, you know, 'Murica.

I'm against evil and I'm in favor of good. If other people are offended by the Bible, that's okay, they don't have to agree with me or come to my church or watch my TV show.  It's a free country.  If you're offended because I quote the bible in church, I ask you to forgive me but I will not apologize for quoting the Bible in church.  If the government is now going to step into my church on Sunday and say "oh, you're not allowed to do that because you are an elected official," I would ask people to take a step back and think about how the government should be protecting your freedom of worship on Sunday and maybe cut me a little slack.

Then we had a war of words between conservative Idaho State Representative Paul Shepherd and a LGBT activist named Dylan Hailey.  Shepherd had forgotten to renew his subscription to the website domain name www.paulshepherdusa.com, so Hailey bought it and converted it to a website describing the struggles of LGBT individuals in Idaho.

Well, Shepherd wasn't going to take that lying down.  In an interview with Melissa Dalvin of Idaho Reports, Shepherd made an analogy that "WTF?" doesn't even quite cover:  "Slave owners were very good Christians and good people," Shepherd said.  "They weren't terrible, rotten, horrible people.  And that's how I see gay people."

And it wasn't just the elected officials.  It appears that because of a byzantine rule regarding the way proposals for laws work in California, an attorney named Matthew McLaughlin may be in position to force lawmakers to consider a bill called the "Sodomite Suppression Act."  Here's an excerpt:

Seeing that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God's just wrath against us for the folly of tolerating wickedness in our midst, the People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.

Now, nobody thinks that this bill has a chance of passing -- it's doubtful if even people like Klingenschmitt and Shepherd would vote for something like this.  But just the very fact that it's under consideration is terrifying.

You know, the whole thing makes me think about the Roman Empire.  It worked pretty well for a while, you know?  Then all of a sudden, you had people like Caligula having his horse elected to the Senate and ordering his armies to whip the ocean because he wanted to teach the god Neptune a lesson, Nero singing songs in praise to himself while watching people being burned alive, and Elagabalus, who made up his own religion revolving around the idea that prostitution was holy, and killed anyone who refused to join it.

Actually, I hope I'm wrong, here.  Because once the Roman Empire more-or-less imploded, the whole place was overrun by barbarians, and that wasn't much better.  So let's hope we can replace our own modern-day Caligulas with people who are interested in sensible governance.

Let us pray...

In the latest from the Quick Comeuppance department, we have news that only three days after the Supreme Court sided 5-4 with the town of Greece, New York in supporting their right to open town meetings with a prayer, a man in Deerfield Beach, Florida has put in his official request to open a city commission meeting with a prayer...

... to Satan.

My first reaction upon reading this was, and I quote, "BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA."  Surely the Supreme Court justices must have realized what a can of worms they were opening.  Whatever your opinion about whether the United States was a Christian nation at its founding, it's pretty certain that it's not any more -- or at least, Christianity isn't the unified front it once was.  Unbelievers now account for one out of every five Americans, and then there are all of the minority religions, not to mention the fact that Christianity itself has shattered into hundreds of little sects that barely agree with each other on anything but the basics, and sometimes not even that.  So it comes down to the fact that separation of church and state protects everyone; it protects me from being forced to sit through a prayer I don't believe in, and it protects Christians from having to sit through a prayer praising Lucifer.

Which, of course, is the point that Chaz Stevens is trying to make with his letter to the City of Deerfield Beach, which reads as follows:

Dear City of Deerfield Beach: 

With the recent US Supreme Court ruling allowing “prayer before Commission meetings” and seeking the rights granted to others, I hereby am requesting I be allowed to open a Commission meeting praying for my God, my divine spirit, my Dude in Charge. 

Be advised, I am a Satanist. 

Let me know when this is good for you. 

Besties 

Chaz Stevens, Calling in from Ring 6 of Dante’s Inferno

Stevens is the same guy who responded to Florida Governor Rick Scott's support of a city-sponsored nativity scene with a demand to place next to it an eight-foot-tall Festivus pole made of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans.

And won.

Then, there is the group who is constructing a ten-foot-tall statue of Baphomet to be placed at the Oklahoma Statehouse -- after State Representative Mike Ritze pushed through a request by a conservative Christian group to erect a monument of the Ten Commandments.  The legislators aren't going to take that lying down, to judge by Representative Earl Sears's response upon hearing of the plans for the statue: "This is a faith-based nation and a faith-based state.   I think it is very offensive they would contemplate or even have this kind of conversation."

So breaking down the wall between church and state is apparently just fine, as long as it's the right church.

Kind of gives new meaning to the phrase, "Be Careful What You Wish For," doesn't it?

What gets me about all of this stuff, though, is the one question you so seldom hear anyone ask: why do people want to have a mandated prayer before a government meeting?  Or, for that matter, a government-funded nativity scene?  No one is saying you can't pray privately all you want, whenever and wherever you want, or have a nativity scene in your own personal yard so garish that the lights blind the drivers of nearby cars.  But what earthly purpose can there be to have such religious gestures carry the government's imprimatur?

Except, of course, to rub it in the faces of people who don't believe.  That, I think, is the tacit goal here -- to say to us atheists (and, probably, to adherents to other religions as well), "Ha ha.  The United States is too a Christian nation.  See?  We showed you, didn't we?"

The teensy problem with this, though, is that by so doing, the Christians who are making such an issue of this aren't even following the precepts of their own holy book.  I turn your attention to Matthew 6:5-6, wherein we read, "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.  Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.  But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

Mmm-hmm.  Wonder what Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority decision, would say in response to that?  Not much, is my guess.  Because take a look what he actually did write: "To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact."

Righty-o.  Well done.  I will be looking forward to hearing how the City Commission of Deerfield Beach likes starting their meetings with a prayer to Satan.  And to anyone who feels so inclined, I would be happy to help you write a nice invocation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to use at whatever public meeting you'd like.

Retroactive prayer pay

Yesterday there was a story in News24, a media outlet in South Africa, that a Lichtenburg man, Nelson Thabo Modupe, has submitted a bill to Eskom, the South African electric company, for 250,000 Rand (about $23,000).

The reason?  There were storms during the 2010 FIFA World Cup finals, which were held in Johannesburg.  When the weather turned bad, Mr. Modupe prayed to god that there wouldn't be a power outage, and there wasn't, because by his prayers he "saved the power utility the burden and humiliation" that would have ensued had there been a loss of electricity during the game.  So he figures that Eskom owes him some big bucks for having had the foresight to pray.

[Spain vs. Portugal at the 2010 World Cup.  Image courtesy of photographer Andrew Deacon and the Wikimedia Commons]

Predictably, there has been a significant hue and cry against Mr. Modupe's case.  "I think he misunderstands the power of prayer," one person wrote, in the comments section of the News24 article. 

"(I)t seems like it's only Christianity, people use to make a quick buck," said another.  "I can give you a few quick quotes from the bible, but that won't be enough, you must know the Author, and the Author I know is not an Author of confusion."

"For money?" said a third.  "Imagine Moses charging admission fees for anyone wanting to cross the Red Sea."

Now, wait just a moment.  I can see your criticizing him for wanting to profit out of the whole thing; after all, Jesus himself had a few things to say about money, and none of them were good.  But I get the impression that most of the folks who wrote to respond to the story were religious themselves, and they were virtually unanimous in ridiculing Mr. Modupe and his FIFA World Cup Miracle.  And I was reading the comments, and thinking, "Aren't you people the ones who supposedly think that prayer works?"

I mean, I could understand it if one of us atheists made fun of the whole thing.  Whenever I hear of someone claiming, after the fact, that something happened because (s)he prayed for it, I always kind of roll my eyes a little, because it's pretty convenient to attribute to god's divine grace something that has already happened.

But why aren't the Christians cheering Mr. Modupe along?

I've thought about this before.  Back in biblical days, all sorts of weird shit happened -- donkeys talked (Numbers 22:21-39), the Earth stopped turning so that Joshua could finish fighting a battle (Joshua 10:12), and god told a man to slit his son's throat, only saying at the last moment that he was just kidding (Genesis 22).  These days, you have to wonder what would happen if someone claimed any of this stuff.  My general feeling is if someone killed a bunch of members of another religion, and then said that god had commanded him to do so (1 Kings 18:36-40), the judge -- Christian or not -- would throw the guy in jail, or worse.

So you have to wonder if the self-proclaimed bible-believing, god-obeying Christians really believe what they're saying.  If god told one of you to kill your own child, would you do it?  If he told you that you should jump off a cliff, because he would catch you with his Mighty Hand and Outstretched Arm and lower you gently to the ground, would you do it?  Why did such miracles happen every second Thursday, back in biblical times, but now people who believe such things are considered to be crazy -- even by the Christians themselves?

Kind of strange, isn't it?  Being an evidence-based kind of guy, myself, all it would take is one or two such miraculous occurrences to turn me into a True Believer, so you'd think it'd be in god's best interest to exert himself a little.  But there have been no talking donkeys, no times the Earth has stopped turning, nothing but things like "no power outages at the World Cup."

Oh, but wait.  "Thou shall not put the Lord thy God to the test."  (Matthew 4:7)  Mighty convenient, that.

In any case, I expect that Mr. Modupe will lose his lawsuit.  I mean, the power of prayer is one thing, but the power of the almighty dollar (or South African Rand, as the case may be) is another thing entirely.  But it does open up some pretty major philosophical questions, which I don't begin to know how to answer.

After all, I'm not the one who's claiming that all of this stuff works.

God, games, and prayers

Many years ago, when I lived in Seattle, I was intermittently part of an amateur theater group.  I had several minor roles, but then finally, in what turned out to be the last play I'd be in, I got a lead role in Paul McCaw's musical comedy The Trumpets of Glory.

The idea of The Trumpets of Glory is that angels are constantly interfering with human affairs, all the way from major world events (wars) down to minutiae (sports).  Angels take sides, and manipulate things so that their side will win, thereby scoring points and moving up in the hierarchy.  I played the villain (which will come as no surprise to former students) -- an archangel named Zagore, who was undefeated in the past 3,000 years, until he meets up with a hapless newbie in a contest over the outcome of a high school football game.

Of course, being musical theater, the underdog wins, and Zagore goes down to ignominious defeat.  Still, it was a fun role, especially since I got to strut around on stage being extremely badass while wearing renaissance garb, including a cloak and a velvet hat with an enormous feather in it.

All of this comes up because of a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, which indicates that half of the Americans polled actually believe that the universe works more or less like McCaw's play -- in spirit if not in exact detail.

"As Americans tune in to the Superbowl this year, fully half of fans — as many as 70 million Americans — believe there may be a twelfth man on the field influencing the outcome," PRRI CEO Robert Jones said.  "Significant numbers of American sports fans believe in invoking assistance from God on behalf of their favorite team, or believe the divine may be playing out its own purpose in the game."

Of the fifty-odd percent of Americans who believe that god cares about the outcome of the Superbowl,  26% reported that they have prayed that their team will win, 19% say that the winner is determined by god, and 25% suspect their team is cursed by the devil (this year, this last group probably includes 100% of the fans of the New Orleans Saints).

Furthermore, 62% of white evangelicals who responded to the poll said they thought that god favored athletes who were Christian themselves.

[photograph courtesy of Ed Clemente Photography and the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, I know that being an atheist, I'm to be expected to view all of this with a wry eye.  But even trying to be open-minded and ecumenical, and putting myself in the shoes of religiously-inclined sports fans, I find myself asking: how could this possibly work?  Does god employ an accountant, who keeps track of the number of prayers offered up on behalf of each team, and then he awards victory to the team that showed the greatest number of prayers?  (If so, the Washington Redskins fans may have some 'splainin' to do.)  Does the fervency of the prayers have an effect?  If so,  how do you measure the intensity of a prayer?  ("O Lord, the Seahawks fans offered up a total of 14,879 prayers, but their average prayer intensity only measured 3.47 tebows.  Do I let them win?")

What if everything comes out about even -- both teams have equal numbers of religious players, and the fans are all praying about the same amount?  Does god then just kind of sit back, crack open a beer, and say, "Heh.  Maybe I'll just wait and see what happens this time."

In all seriousness, I find the whole thing really puzzling.  As I've mentioned before, the concept of petitionary prayer has always struck me as the weirdest idea from conventional Christianity, as it seems to imply that you can change god's mind.  Even C. S. Lewis was uncomfortable with the idea, and in his essay "Does Prayer Work?" said that prayer doesn't exactly change god's mind, but it does influence things in some vague way: "He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will."

I dunno, the whole thing sounds kind of peculiar to me.  It boils down to my asking for god to do something, which either he already intended to do ("Yay, god is so awesome!") or else not ("Oh, well, god works in mysterious ways.").   Either way, it's hard to see how my praying (or not) had any influence whatsoever, and honestly, it seems to be more a way for me to feel good about having done something to help the situation without actually doing anything to help the situation.

But in the case of sports, it's even weirder, because then you not only have to believe that god exists, and considers the content of prayers, but cares who wins the Superbowl.  Which is just stretching credulity too far, even considering some of the other things religious people believe.

Of course, I guess it's to be expected that I'd have this response, and I'm writing this more in complete mystification than I am out of disapproval.  If any religious people who read this are so inclined, and want to explain to me how any of this could possibly work, I'd be willing to listen, even though I have to say up front that I doubt it'll convince me.  The suspension of disbelief I'd have to undergo in order to buy into any of this is just too great.

So I'm left where I started, which is that I really don't understand maybe half of the people who live in this country.  Which, I guess, is not all that shocking, considering the material I write about daily.  And if I'm entirely wrong, and there is a god up there, and he does factor in prayer in determining the outcome of events, allow me to say that had I known, I would have put in a good word for the Saints, because when they lose I kind of stop paying attention.

The power of prayer vs. the power of litigation

Today we have a rather ironic story out of Brazil.

Cabaret owner Tarcilia Bezerra, in the city of Fortaleza, wanted to expand his business.  He had experienced great success with his liquor-and-dancing-girls enterprise, and thought it was time to make the place bigger.  So he applied for, and got, a building permit, and construction began.

The local church, however, didn't think that was such a hot idea.  All of that skin showing and alcohol flowing was just sinful; the idea that the godly folks of Fortaleza had to put up with Bezerra crowing about how well he was doing, and making the place bigger and better, was just naughty in god's sight.  So the pastor (who was unnamed in the story) encouraged his flock to pray that god would intervene and smite Bezerra and his unholy Temple of Tawdriness.  Prayer sessions were organized morning, noon, and night for weeks, as the construction went on.

And then, only a week before the grand reopening, lightning struck the cabaret, destroying most of the roof and almost all of the new construction.

The pastor was overjoyed, as were the members of his congregation.  The pastor spoke in a sermon the following Sunday about this demonstration of "the great power of prayer."  The church members bragged all over town that their petitions to god had been heard, and that the lightning had been sent by god himself to strike down the wicked cabaret.

So Bezerra sued the church.

His lawsuit read, in part, that the church and its members "were responsible for the end of my building and my business, using divine intervention, direct or indirect, as the actions or means."

The pastor, of course, was appalled, but was forced to respond to the lawsuit.  His response, predictably, was to deny "all responsibility or any connection with the end of the building."

Now, wait a minute: isn't this backwards?  The cabaret owner is the one who believes that praying works, and the church pastor doesn't?

The judge in the case, which has yet to be decided in court, evidently agrees.  In his opening statement, he said, "I do not know how I'm going to decide this case, but one thing is evident in the records. Here we have an owner of a cabaret who firmly believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church declaring that prayers are worthless."

It all, somehow, makes me wonder how much folks really believe what they're saying.  I remember, during the Cold War, Americans praying for the destruction of the Soviet Union.  How would they have reacted if Moscow had been struck by a giant meteorite, causing millions of deaths?  People pray for political candidates, and sometimes sports teams, to win.  What if it actually happened, as per biblical miracles, with the losing candidate (or sports team) being eaten by a lion, contracting leprosy, or being "swallowed up by the earth?"  Each Sunday, there are thousands of prayers given asking for Jesus' return.  What if he just showed up, and said, "You rang, here I am!  Okay, leave behind your comfy house and all of your stuff.  Give everything away to the poor, like I told you to.  What, weren't you listening?"

Oh, I'm sure that there are some people who would be thrilled if this happened.  The members of the Westboro Baptist Church, for example.  But I'll bet that most ordinary churchgoing folks would freak out so badly that they might never freak back in.

I suppose the take-home message, here, is "be careful what you pray for, because due to random chance, it might actually happen, and then you'll have to admit that you honestly didn't think anyone was listening."

A question about intercessory prayer

There are many things I don't get about religion, but one of the ones I understand the least is the idea of intercessory prayer.

The bible is full of examples of intercessory prayer, of god's wrath being turned away by a devout word in the divine ear.  In the episode of the Golden Calf (Exodus chapter 32), god apparently intended to destroy the Israelites for idolatry, but his judgment was altered by Moses' plea.  Even Sodom and Gomorrah, those pinnacles of depravity from the book of Genesis, would have been saved had Abraham found ten or more "righteous men" there.

All of this, to my admittedly unqualified ear, sounds as if god could change his mind.  The problem, so far as I can frame it, is this; in the typical Christian model of how things work, god is changeless, eternal, all-good, and all-knowing.  As such, the whole idea of a person's prayer altering the course of what god wants is a little silly.  God presumably already knows not only what is the best outcome, but knows what will happen; why on earth would the prayers of one person, or even of everyone on earth simultaneously, change that?

So, in my effort to understand this idea, I turned to C. S. Lewis.  Even if I often disagree with Lewis' conclusions, I find him to be generally rational, and certainly a clear, sober-minded writer on the subject.  Here's what I found:

Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers, or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will...

I have seen it suggested that a team of people—the more the better—should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors.

The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer could go on under such conditions. “Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” says the King in Hamlet. Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment. You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying. The experiment demands an impossibility. (from an essay called "Does Prayer Work?")

Interestingly enough, such an experiment has been done, and not with "poorly trained parrots" but with entire church congregations who were honestly desirous of a positive result, despite Lewis' objections (and despite verses such as Deuteronomy 6:16, "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test."). A well-publicized experiment in 2006 called STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Efficacy of Prayer) tested the medical outcomes of over 1800 coronary bypass patients, who were sorted into three groups. Group 1 and Group 2 were both told they might or might not be prayed for; only Group 1 was. Group 3 was told that they would be prayed for (and were). The thirty-day serious complication or mortality rate was nearly identical between Group 1 and Group 2 (51% and 52%, respectively); Group 3 had a significantly higher rate of complications or death (59%).

I won't go into the possible confounding factors for the higher death rate among Group 3; what interests me is more how a Christian would explain why, if intercessory prayer works at all, Group 1 didn't show a lower risk of complications.  "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test" sounds good, but my thought is, if ever there was an opportunity for god to show that what the Christians claim is correct, this is it.  You would think that if presumably god wants people to believe, and to pray (and in fact Christians are positively commanded to pray, in a variety of places in the bible), some sort of results would have been forthcoming.

You get the impression that even Lewis was a little uncomfortable on this point.  He said, "Prayer doesn't change God -- it changes me."  Again, I have to wonder how this would work.  How on earth would praying for something, to a deity whose mind I can't change, who knows what is "supposed to happen," and who will do what he chooses regardless, have any beneficial effects on me?  Imagine a parent whose mind could never be swayed by his children's requests -- and telling the children, "You should ask anyway, because it's good for you."

While I am not religious (obviously), I can at least understand the concept of other sorts of prayer -- prayers for enlightenment, prayers for understanding, prayers for courage.  But I really have no clue what the possible logic could be to praying for intercession, other than "the bible says we have to -- never mind why."  Perhaps some reader will have a good explanation of it -- which I would welcome -- but on the face of it, it seems like the most pointless of pursuits.