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Well duh. Or are you in favor of allowing parents to sacrifice their children if that's what their religion dictates?
tl;dr Secularism >> superstition.
why are americans so religious & conservative compared to other western nations?
- Thread starter abracadabraone
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Well duh. Or are you in favor of allowing parents to sacrifice their children if that's what their religion dictates?
tl;dr Secularism >> superstition.
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Oh god, yes, that's exactly what I meant when I asked that completely innocuous question.
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I am not sure how this is a response to my statement. It pretty much says random prayer doesn't help patients. I was making the case that faith (within an individual) may give a person mental strength during a time of illness. The same could be said about love, strong will, ect.
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It may. Or they may perceive that they're hopeless and "in God's hands" and give up entirely. These people were informed that they were being prayed for; whether the prayers themselves were 'random' or beamed directly from the Pope with a laser-like focus or nonexistent control prayers is interesting, but not really the important part.
Maybe I misinterpreted your statement but you started by saying that medicine sometimes kills people, and seemed to implicitly set up 'faith' as an unalloyed good. This is the prevailing view here in America; 'faith' and 'prayer' are warm and fuzzy words right up there with motherhood and apple pie. And yet they didn't seem to help these people, who I'm sure had as much love and willpower as anyone else.
Just trying to give some perspective here. I was raised religious, and I'm quite familiar with the whole Power of Prayer idea, even when it's couched in secular terms like 'mental strength'. That's why I like to question it.
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