I don't think people telling you to have faith realize what they are saying when they are telling you to have faith. It's like saying "push this button". When you push it you rarely get hurt but half the time we push it we get an electric shock. For people in low...
Some preferences are pretty inconsequential like whether you prefer strawberry or vanilla ice cream. However, some have huge ramifications. I'm going to focus on a person's religion here though this could be applied to other things. A person's spiritual state is like...
I've been over exposed to religion my entire life and I try to believe in all that stuff but it's like an algebra problem you suspect you got wrong but you don't know why you got it wrong or have the intelligence to derive the correct answer. Materialism is the idea...
One can ask am I taking this bike ride to get me somewhere or am I taking it to get some exercise. One is doing both simultaneously but is usually focused on one or the other. In the same way it is helpful to tease out the components of prayer, the spiritual and the...
One of the interesting things that comes out of marketing Christianity as a "personal relationship with God" is people take that paradigm to mean one can trust God the way one trusts a person. When one trusts a person it is an implicit expectation that they'll...
When Christians make empirical claims about things they generally only need to back them up with scripture or church teaching. The further the claim is from the actual evidence the more faith one needs to fill it in. It's not a level playing field. An emotionally...
When Christians ask me, "how do you do it without God?", I respond with, "I ask myself that same question". This outs what they really mean, "how do you do it without religion?". It's just assumed that religion will somehow put you in communication with God which is...
I think the people who pray a lot and the people who don't pray at all often do the most good. The people pray a lot prime themselves for action so even a materialist will see some effect of their prayer. For example someone who prayed constantly for people...
You can visit a sister site, uncomfortable questions (and comment on them if you have a Reddit account) for generally loaded questions like this: Why do people get so up in arms about people having imaginary friends while being indifferent of the fact that these...
Another wrinkle in the problem of the efficacy of prayer is the fact that most of the good things in life (jobs, friends, etc..) come through being connected to privileged informal social networks (usually consisting of people of privilege). When one does not have...