DV82XL said:

I was recently treated to the spectacle of watching my uncle’s wife and her sisters constantly praying over his bed while he was incubated and gurgling out his last breaths. He lasted through three days of this and died anyway, whatever she believed.

As the Russian (I think) proverb says – pray to God, but keep rowing to shore. God may help you if you ask, and if he’s happy with that, but if you don’t bother to do what you can off your own back then perhaps you don’t really want it all that much.

Sometimes, to ‘do what you can’ is to just accept that it’s time to go.

        drbuzz0 said:

That’s a little surprising. I mean, how do you seperate royalty into control groups? They already are set apart from the public by virtue of the fact that they’ll be expected to get the best medical specialists and the best living enviornment that can be bought at any price.

I’ll see if I can find the reference. It might have been in one of Dawkins’ books.

        Finrod said:

Actually, I believe that someone once did a study on the health outcomes for European royalty of various stripes to see whether or not all that prayer from the public in their favour (God save the king/queen) which was publicly mandated for so long actually produced any statistically significant results.

Apparently it didn’t.

That’s a little surprising. I mean, how do you seperate royalty into control groups? They already are set apart from the public by virtue of the fact that they’ll be expected to get the best medical specialists and the best living enviornment that can be bought at any price.

To play devil’s advocate here, maybe god is a lot like many people when it comes to asking for something. If you ask for something and he says no, you can resort to begging and maybe he’ll do it just to shut you up, but if you go too far, then begging turns to nagging and he just gets fed up and won’t do it out of spite.

Apparently it didn’t.

        DV82XL said:

I was recently treated to the spectacle of watching my uncle’s wife and her sisters constantly praying over his bed while he was incubated and gurgling out his last breaths. He lasted through three days of this and died anyway, whatever she believed.

Magic doesn’t work.

May I ask what their conclusion was? That they did not pray hard enough?

I’m guessing they thought that God heard their prayers but decided it was his time to go or something. In that case, there are some other logical implications. Does god take prayers into consideration when deciding if someone is to die? In other words, does praying at least increase the probability that god will change his mind?

Does praying harder increase the probability even further? IF this is the case, how can you ever be sure it’s not your fault because you didn’t pray quite hard enough?

Also, doesn’t this seem very unfair? What about those who don’t has as many people to pray as hard for them? What if someone becomes ill and dies before their relatives can be informed that they’ve taken ill and need prayers? Isn’t it unfair that they should not have the benefit?

Then again, if it is all part of god’s great plan, then why pray at all? Isn’t god already decided? There’s no point in begging the umpire once the call has been made!

        deadatheism said:

Einstein puts the final nail in the coffin of atheism…

Funny, actually Einstein was an atheist. Of this there is no doubt. He used the word “god” on several occasions in a metaphoric sense or to describe the unity of physics and the universe, but he never meant it literally. He explicitly stated this in letters he wrote that he absolutely did not believe in a “God” as religion states nor did he believe in any higher spiritual intelligence. He also said that while he appreciated his heritage as a Jew, he only saw this as being a cultural and ethnic thing and he called the Jewish religion “Superstition.”

Looks like you have not done much reading on this, buddy.

Einstein puts the final nail in the coffin of atheism…

*************************************
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7vpw4AH8QQ

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atheists deny their own life element…

        Awaiku said:

@drbuzzo The conspiracies you stated do seem pretty boring, especially when you compare them to congressional hearings (two which I don’t even think you are aware of) on JFK’s assassination, or MK Ultra (CIA mind control little per project)…

At least get your terms right. It was not a single hearing, you’re talking about the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations. By the way, since you probably don’t know anything about it, let me tell you that their conclusion was that the Assassination of Kennedy was carried out by Lee Harvey Oswald. The only statement made was that it “may have been part of a conspiracy” without naming the conspiracy. This was based entirely on acoustic evidence which was rejected by a review by the National Academy of Sciences.

G. Robert Blakey was the real hold-out for conspiracy theorists.

The committee also found no evidence of government involvement in the King assassination and reaffirmed James Earl Ray as the shooter.

In other words, I do know what I’m talking about

That’s not quite how it works. The idea of a “Manchurian candidate” or brainwashed sleeper is pure fantasy. You can’t program a human brain to override all other things and do a command. There’s no such thing as mind control per see.

Yes, it is possible to convince someone of things through “brain washing” which includes very intensive psycological conditioning for a long period of time, but it’s not like you can control their actions and make them do things against their will as you seem to think. Even conventional indoctrination has limits of effectiveness per subject.

Yes, I’m totally aware of MKULTRA. It was a failure – which is exactly what modern medicine would expect it to be. They tried hypnosis and failed miserably.

They tried LSD, and as, would be expected, it gave no useful results. It made some people think they were turning into turtles and others think they were in a room full of giant candy canes with Coronel Sanders – random stuff like that. Not exactly tactically useful.

Get a grip on reality, seriously.

The government also did experiments with remote viewing and “psychic spies” it was equally fruitless.