That#s quite a sizeable assertion, Shakes. Do you have any evidence to support it?
You lot claim prayer works, don't you? That it actually does something with tangible results in the world and has some effect over and above the operation of random chance? Well prove it. Otherwise the default position - the null hypothesis, backed up by Occam's Guillotine - of onanism stands unchallenged and unrebutted never mind unrefuted.
As for the bit about 'something a bit more worthwhile', don't you regard human lives as worthwhile?
No humanist (in at least some senses of the word at any rate), I wobble on that one. The only person who can regard any life as worthwhile (or not) is the individual person who has that life, so the worthwhileness of life is a proximate and not an ultimate category. I do know however that making them better involves getting off your knees and actually doing something practical to make it happen.
You can of course do that and pray as well, which is the standard get-out; but then you prayer believers need to demonstrate that the praying actually does something in addition to, over and above the direct hands-on activity, something that wouldn't exist anyway, and therefore isn't just an utterly superfluous and wholly dispensable fifth wheel which achieves nothing but the personal illusion of having done something, and the wasting of time which could have been spent doing something genuinely helpful.
Not only do we pray that you and others here come to sse the pointlessness of your piosition
What's pointless about the stance that you lot haven't proved your utterly bizarre claims about reality and thus they should be rejected by all rational, thinking people? What's pointless about highlighting the Niagaran cascade of logical fallacies, bald assertions and other aberrations of thought that you throw out instead of reasoned argument?
On the other hand, I am prepared to concede that the latter may be pointless - so many of the theists here are so utterly impervious to reason that there's little if any use in pointing out their deployment of fallacy and assertion, you being a prime example in still churning out both (the negative proof fallacy especially) despite having been schooled in why they're wrong multiple times by multiple posters over a long period of time. Saying "Don't do that - that's not a valid argument, that's wrong, and this is why it's wrong ..." does indeed seem to be pointless with some people who evidently just can't take it on board.
We pray for healing - both individually and socially, we pray for world leaders who need to see the needs that exist in their and other nations, we pray that people will be provided to go and help in such situations (often being such change agents ourselves).
Feel free to provide the methodology by which we can all evaluate your claims and ascertain the difference between prayers with an effect and the operation of sheer random chance, i.e. the difference between a prayer-answering god and random events with no god.
But of course you won't. You never do.
Then, of course, we petition our own and other governments on a number of issues, from world poverty to immigration, freedom of speech to armaments.
That's called petitioning real people to do actual things, not prayer which is the polar opposite of that.
