Prayer

(this post should probably be titled after the image caption at the end: Prayer: How To Do Nothing And Still Think You're Helping)

Anyone who has spent more than a few seconds on this site knows where I stand on religion. My anti-theist stance is quite clearly proclaimed everywhere here, from the scarlet A and Random Evil Scripture block to the various books I've read, even those of faith have no trouble figuring out my views.

I have my email address easily accessible in the footer, available for anyone to contact me if desired, and I do get some genuine and interesting emails from time to time.

I also get signed up for religious mailing lists and newsletters. Most are reasonable enough to require an email confirmation, but a large number appear to let someone use my email address to sign me up without my confirmation or consent.

Not really a big deal, but as a result, I get to see some interesting emails. Religious spam is often disguised as traditional theistic solicitations, but I cannot help but recognize how many features of spam some of these possess.

One arrived today from Open Doors, a Christian group which focuses on helping persecuted Christians worldwide (side note -- notice how these US Christian groups are only ever interested in two things outside of the US: converting unbelievers (missionary work) and helping persecuted Christians -- why not anyone being persecuted? Why not concentrated on bringing help to anyone being tortured, starved, killed, or imprisoned for any reason? Why do they have to be Christian?). Here's a look at the email:

Simple enough, right? Ignoring the fact that I never signed up for anything from Open Doors, the email features an innocent child with a text stating that "over 100 million Christians around the world face physical violence, imprisonment, and even death because they choose to stand firm in their belief in Jesus Christ". Again, ignoring whether this is actually true or not, the email suggests that I offer my prayers. Please, will you pray for me? it whimpers.

Below the image is text that includes a mission statement:

It takes less than 1 minute to log your prayer support. Your participation will help Open Doors meet the goal of mobilizing 100,000 Christians to remember their persecuted brothers and sisters in prayer this year.

Seriously? The goal is to mobilize 100,000 Christians to pray? How exactly will that help? Christians have been praying for the selfish protection of their own for two thousand years, and yet 100 million Christians are still facing violence due to their beliefs according to the email. What does that say about the power of prayer? How about mobilizing 100,000 people of any belief or non-belief to help anyone who is facing violence, not by asking for prayer, but asking for money, volunteers, education, real help?

Worse, just above that statement is an outright lie:

The number one request from these persecuted Christians is for your prayers

Bullshit.

I don't even need to look into it to be certain this is an utter lie. It's nonsense. The number one request these miserable people have from those of us reading the email is prayer? Again, bullshit.

So, anyway, I visited the site to see exactly what they had to say, and what do I find but a signup for another newsletter.

And again, all I'm doing is affirming that 'Yes, I will Pray' and signing up for the "Free Frontline Faith" email or snail mail newsletter, which is "filled with news and inspiring true stories of faith from the front lines of Christianity today." Not stories of people helping people (although these may be so, they aren't emphasizing it here), but of 'faith'. Just like the fact that Open Doors only asks me to pray for these poor Christians, not to actually do something to help them out.

Prayer has been shown repeatedly to offer no help for healing the sick, how could it possibly stop an innocent child from being beheaded or tortured? How does my praying help these persecuted Christians? Why o why can't I just pray for everyone the world over to be safe from harm? Why must it be only for Christians? How exactly does my prayer help this innocent child splashed on my screen? At least the Christian Children's Fund (renamed Child Fund International in April, 2009) asks for money, volunteers, actual assistance!.

So why is Open Doors sending me spam requesting only that I pray and sign up for more spam? Let me rephrase the question with a different spam subject: Why is Big Cock Pills, Inc sending me spam requesting only that I want a bigger cock and sign up for more big cock spam? The latter, of course, would not expect you to just want a big cock, it would also offer to sell you the big cock pills, the tangible things (they claim) actually do the trick. Paying for the pills is the tangible action that leads to a bigger cock (praying for a bigger cock has never worked, ask any guy).

Open Doors doesn't even go that far. They just want a prayer... for now. Like all good, long-lasting spam, the money part comes later after it has gotten under your skin or softened your resistence. For now, they just need you to trust them and do something simple which costs you nothing. Big Cock Pills, Inc hasn't got that luxury. Either you'll buy Big Cock Pills or you won't, so they aren't wasting time on you. Open Doors, though, baits the hook with the easy-but-worthless 'Send your Prayer' route, valuable to those of faith and utterly worthless as real action, but I guarantee that down the line, requests for money will come pouring in. They'll know that I've already invested my prayers, my emotions properly tugged, this poor child with one foot inside the jail cell, so throwing a few hundred dollars in will be the least I can do.

I signed up for the email newsletter, just to see what sort of second-level spam and propaganda get sent by Open Door. The prayer bait sure feels like a 'try it free' sort of proposition, so I fully expect to start getting donation requests any moment now.

Reminds me of this excellent pic that has been around for quite some time:

Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist found a disgusting and disingenious 'interpretation' of the results of one of the most well-known empirical studies of intercessory prayer known as STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer). I covered this study previously and noted that the results released in 2006 demonstrated no difference in recovery for patients prayed for compared to those who received no prayer. The results were clear cut here, there is no advantage to being prayed for. God, it seems, does not care who gets prayed for. Or does he?

This new article from Christianity Today, though, offers a rationalization I’ve never heard before. You can tell they’re really straining to find a silver lining…

Ironically, STEP actually supports the Christian worldview. Our prayers are nothing at all like magical incantations. Our God bears no resemblance to a vending machine. The real scandal of the study is not that the prayed-for group did worse, but that the not-prayed-for group received just as much, if not more, of God’s blessings. In other words, God seems to have granted favor without regard to either the quantity or even the quality of the prayers. By instinct, we might selfishly prefer that God give preferential treatment to those who are especially, deliberately, and correctly prayed for, but he seems to act otherwise.

True to his character, God appears inclined to heal and bless as many as possible.

So the fact that the prayers had no effect on the sick? Don’t think about that, say Gregory Fung and Christopher Fung, the authors of the article. Instead, they want you to consider that prayer works because the un-prayed-for people didn’t die a horrible death.

Yet again, religious folks choose to interpret solid science as a function of God's mysterious ways rather than accept that they are simply wrong about their assumed supernatural powers.

Via the blog Epiphenom, I'm alerted to another study finding absolutely zero evidence that praying for a sick person can offer them any better recovery or health than those who are not the recipient of such prayers.

Every few years, a group based at Hertford College at Oxford puts together a statistical analysis of all the studies conducted to date that have looked at whether praying for sick people helps them get better (or at least stay alive).

The latest has just been published, and it contains something pretty radically new in their conclusions: the evidence is now so clear cut that they think that no more studies should be done. The book is shut. Praying for sick people simply doesn't work.

In both Dawkins' God Delusion and Hitchens' God is not Great, there were references to a large Templeton Foundation experiment which attempted to determine whether prayer could indeed have benefits. Interestingly, as each author pointed out, not only did praying for the sick fail to increase the likelihood of recovery, those patients who were aware that others were praying for them fared worse than those who did not. Please, religious people, stop the nonsense faith in pseudoscience and that 'God' or prayer will see you well.