Posted: May 29, 2016 3:13 pm
surreptitious57 wrote:John Platko wrote:
I was cooking eggs this morning while pondering atheists praying to large long haired lesbians and such it dawned on me that
the risk reward of atheists engaging in such prayer might lean more toward the reward column than it would for the average theist who often seems to get their idea maps into the weeds because they actually believe that the God they are imagining exists beyond the substrate of their neural fabric. History is littered with the batty ideas that actual belief can lead to. It is
just a hypothesis mind you and there are reasons to think it not true Prof Lurhmann seems to highly rate the importance of believing in the God you imagine and the word imagine might make belief difficult for some. Still it is worth pondering
What exactly is the point in simply imagining God exists as opposed to actually thinking he does ? You might as well
forgo such an obvious self delusion if it is the extent of your belief. I would suggest that for all believers God is real
As has been demonstrated in this thread and elsewhere, it is simply not true that for all believers God is known to be real. What is true, is that what all believers know about God comes from their imagination or the imagination of others, we know this to be true because how else could people know about God?
Why would someone what to believe in something they know they are imagining?- because it has been demonstrated to be an effective thing to do. It can work before a golf or tennis shot. And if praying to a large long haired lesbian is what you need to do to loose weight then why not get on your knees and ...
See here for links to how praying to a long haired lesbian helped an atheist loose weight. I've provided links to a psychological anthropologist who explains how prayer is like self-talk in CBT therapy. In short, prayer can be an effective form of psychological therapy. There also seems to be some scientific evidence that it helps with certain metacognitive skills.