Monday, November 3, 2014

The Irony of Prayer

People pray for good things to happen when life is bad but I don't think I have ever heard of anyone praying for bad things to happen when life is good ... yet bad things happen anyway.

My purpose isn't to ridicule prayer as it's complex.  You know the psychic energy of people in concert the first time you hear a roar at a football game.  When many people think as one, it has a huge power even if it's entirely unmeasurable.  Also there are reports of people praying to change medical outcomes and I'm not convinced of their results but it would be interesting to see this done under a rigorous scientific protocol and not with an eye to disputing it as there's no science in that, the object is simply to look at it.  wtf is it.

Here's an example of a real scientist:  a friend is a committed atheist insofar as this is his position and it's important to him.  In his research, he discovered a faith-based venue was more effective in dealing with a particular situation than a secular one and he reported his results accurately.  This is precisely why I so loathe Fox News, CNN and a good many TV 'scientists' as I don't ever see any evidence of that kind of integrity.  It's also why I now loathe the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as they're just as narrow-minded as the people from whom they would 'protect' you.  There's no 'free-thinking' in banning religion and it's exceptionally-poor anthropology.

Note:  there's an island near India (I believe) that has never been penetrated even though it's very well-known there is a tribe of people there.  Any time anyone has gone close they have been killed as the tribe defends itself from possible attack.  They have even sent helicopters and the tribe shoots arrows at them.  However, sending those helicopters was massively-poor anthropology as well as now that they've seen it maybe it even changes their religion as instead of a Flying Spaghetti Monster it's now a Flying Shiny Noisy Thing That Smells.

'Live energy' is a similar collective vibe as playing in front of people is fundamentally different from performing alone.  You're always performing even if the only audience you seek to amuse is yourself.  However, do that in front of people and it changes.  For me, it's not just live but life as I really don't know what I'm doing with myself any other time but on-stage every millisecond is happening and it's all focused on the moment.  Your focus is on it too at that time and together we change it.  After that we drift off to our amorphous realities as we 'return' to the real world ... maybe.

Likely DARPA has already experimented with this as anything you may be able to use as a weapon will invariably get funded.  (If that ain't true, check out the Panjundrum from WWII.  Military people are lunatics.)

That leads to two possibilities:  if they researched it then either they found the power of collective thinking isn't real and they abandoned it ... or ... they found it is real and didn't say anything about the weapon.  Only about a million or so movies have been based on the latter.

I'm not getting religious on you as I'm probably even less religious now than I ever was but it burns my ass that some have the objective of denying prayer and that shows nothing to me so much as an extraordinary lack of observation and imagination.  Practically every story you ever heard was based on a wish, dream, prayer ... whatever you want to call it.  Every single one of them asks do they come true.

Answer is we still don't know and it would, in my view, be dim-witted blindness to stop asking.

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