Uncomfortable Questions Subreddit
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 people don’t have any real ones?
Why do both God and the devil (and their kind) refuse to be measured? Wouldn’t one of them submit to measurement to get the upper hand in their battle for our souls?
Why do people bend over backwards to support those with cancer but not do the same for chronic conditions like diabetes? Does it have something to do with the perceived threat of eminent death?
How do you justify telling people to follow the voice of God, particularly in light of the fact that those with more fragile mental health may do so in weakened mental states with catastrophic results?
Physical pain’s neurologically designed so that one cannot ignore it. Does modern anger/bitterness have this kind of property?
How can you make empirical claims about what God will do in certain situations and then tell people not to “put God to the test” validating them?
If we were forced to make the choice, would we treat our cats like we treat our pigs or our pigs like we treat our cats?
People will experience the same things but for some it will turn them into more of an everyman and others it will turn them into less of one. How would one be more like the former?
Why is suffering framed as a test of the individual’s character but not as a test of the character of those around her (ie. testing whether those people won’t drop out of her life like flies or turn against her)?
Listening to: David Dondero, Live at the Hemlock
Vulnerability
The process of vulnerability is peacemaking. You start out at a cold war (mistrusting each other) and each party tests the waters of drawing down and seeing if the other party reciprocates. There is also the issue that some people don’t have much about themselves that will send others packing while some do (I’m of the latter category). So the process of vulnerability is different depending on how much you have to lose by being outed. Popular culture encourages people to be vulnerable but the stakes are so much different depending on how adverse a reaction you’d get by having it slip out.
Also lionizing vulnerability causes people to trust the first person that expresses interest in them instead of guarding their heart and vetting people carefully. The problem is the first person is often not worth their trust (trust me, I found this out the hard way). The irony is people who are more judiciously trusting are the ones that remain more trusting.
Happiness
From a comment by MS on an article about moral courage featuring a Nobel Prize winner:
Much is made of the pursuit of happiness in US society but rarely do we talk about the two main types of happiness as delineated by ancient philosophers — hedonic vs. eudaemonic happiness. The former, centered around the usual things we think of as making us happy (status, money, love, food, sex, etc.), is overemphasized where as the latter, which is about living a meaningful life, is rarely discussed. People like Mr. Sayarthi have the latter in spades.
Power Struggle
I find, on analysis of my thoughts that a large number of them and possibly the majority involve a power struggle. I’m trying to get someone in power to take my ideas seriously because I think they are more well thought through than the existing ideas. And prayer? All that is is a power struggle with God to try to get him give you want you want.
Prayer and Privileged Social Networks
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 access to said networks one can pray but the prayer is to change someone in power’s heart, not a prayer that has an easy shot at being answered.
Opt-In
I think life should be opt-in instead of opt-out. At the end of every year one should be allowed to decide whether one’s existence continues. And if one doesn’t they should be allowed to give their credit to someone who does. For example someone who didn’t want to live anymore could opt out of life and give it to someone dying of cancer who really did.
Countering Free Will and the Declining Efficacy of Prayer
When one brings up the problem of evil (probably the worst problem there is, especially when it’s your problem) Christians trot out free will as why suffering is necessary. However they are not hesitant to use prayer to try to counter people’s free will (to get people to act justly or in their favor). From what I gather it’s harder for God to change people than non human actors and factors. As humans have mastered more and more of the world, the problem of evil is more and more on us. For example we weren’t culpable for stopping the 1349 black plague because we had no technology to do so but we are more so for the 2014 Ebola epidemic in west Africa (an Ebola vaccine research idled for ten years because a disease that only affected the most remote parts of Africa wasn’t a priority). As the culpability for the problem of evil falls ever more on us we need to redirect more and more of our prayers towards changing people. And these prayers are less likely to work hence the decline in the efficacy of prayer.
Would a Christian experience that could stand every test case be worth anything?
A battery for an electric car is run through all kinds of tests from Duluth winters to Death Valley summers. The battery that can pass all these tests won’t be the one with the best efficiency but the one that can survive every test case. Efficiency suffers for the sake of being able to handle every test case. I look at Christianity and see a religion designed for the majority’s experience that breaks on certain cases. For example, it is assumed that your experience of God won’t turn against you and somehow you’ll look back on your life and it will make sense. There is also this idea that Christians will be gracious. If we were to rewrite Christianity to accommodate every test case would it be so hollow nobody would touch it (out with prosperity, experience of God, assumption of grace/hospitality, etc..)?
ramblings on diversity
The new thing for churches is intentionally trying to become racially diverse. I can’t help them. I don’t speak white which is strange because I am white. I am non privileged in other ways, having a mental illness, a moderate physical disability, and being on the autistic spectrum. I may not be able to speak for blacks but I am not put off by their perspective when they go off script and start speaking their mind. For example after Hurricane Katrina when Kanye West stated the obvious, that Bush didn’t care about black people.
The problem with churches is they often hire diversity consultants. These are people paid to talk to white people, even when the group includes people of color one will get a very watered down perspective.
My philosophy for pretty much everything comes from an Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Why it works with diversity is often “nothing left to take away” matches oppressed people’s predicament. Many of them do not have their basic needs met. The best thing I can think of that you could do for poor people is partner with a service such as Uber to offer reduced rate rides to poor people to stores, work, food pantries, the doctor, etc.. The technology to do this has matured but it takes people of privilege walking a mile in a disadvantaged person’s shoes to implement.
Speaking white is about having the luxury to add and be obtuse and inauthentic because privilege has allowed you to not be careening so close to the edge that every word must count. For a person far from privilege even learning isn’t an anodyne process. Taking in past and current oppression of the non privileged group you belong to often leaves you (justifiably) angry and immobilized. And perhaps the worst part of it is it makes you unconsciously associate learning with pain often turning you off to future learning.
If I could get churches to read one article on diversity it would be Christina Clevelant’s Listening Well as a Person of Privilege.
Prayer
Praying in Faith
Long ago, I lost the luxury of being able to pray without faith. While you may think praying in faith is a sign of spiritual maturity, for me it was just a sign of desperation. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere in this ableism-soaked world without Red-Sea-parting divine intervention. I don’t think praying in faith is expecting what you get, I think it is more akin to the analogy below:
Imagine feeling quite ill with some kind of a disease; you have no idea what it is. Fortunately that day you are visiting a friend who is a doctor. During the visit you never successfully steer the conversation towards your illness. After the visit you’d most likely experience emotional pain and this would show that you had faith in your friend’s ability as a doctor.
And therein lies the gotcha–it HURTS to pray in faith. It is a lot less hurtful to pray without faith and if I had that ability I think it might have saved me from leaving Christianity.
Public Prayer
Imagine a basketball team with players so insecure that they never attempted a shot unless it was at such an easy vantage point that they were sure it would go in, or so far from the basket that it wouldn’t hurt their self-esteem if they missed because there was no chance of the ball going in anyway. I feel the church is like this with prayer. They tend to reserve prayer for crises that are likely to be resolved and situations so desperate, no one will be offended if the prayer goes unanswered. The chronic conditions (which generally don’t respond kindly to prayer) get overlooked. When was the last time you heard your pastor pray for someone with chronic unemployment, chronic pain, or a disability that continually destroyed their livelihood. Chances are, you haven’t, and for a good reason. If we prayed for things like this, it would give us a more realistic picture of prayer’s effectiveness. A picture none of us would like to see.
Why Prayer is Counterproductive
Prayer makes you think you did something when you didn’t do anything. Doing something that does nothing is not harmful in and of itself. What is harmful is when you think the thing you did (that didn’t do anything) did something. You do this thing at the expense of things that could have done something. For example, you think, because you signed an online petition to recall a Republican governor (which does nothing) you don’t have to sign an actual paper petition (that does something).
Prayer engenders a frame of mind not conducive to solving problems. Rationality and goal-orientation are generally agreed upon ways of tackling tasks. Prayer teaches us to “have faith”. Specifying a timeframe for a prayer’s answer or progress targets is considered a lack of faith (and can nullify the prayer). However, these things are just what are needed when one goes about approaching a problem logically. Worse, the frame of mind prayer produces can often cause us to gloss over others’ problems–”God” must be taking care of it–as opposed to the skeptic who might ask for an updated, rationality-generated progress report.
Prayer engenders this pernicious idea that life is not a zero-sum game. A zero-sum game is this idea that there are limited resources–that we all can’t have everything because the cosmos would have no way of sustaining it–and that me having something often necessitates you lacking it. For example, you and a spouse are sleeping together on a cold night and there is one blanket on the bed which is only big enough to keep one of you fully warm. The idea of prayer is that God is some celestial chef ready to cook you up anything out of nothing. But in most cases when your prayer is answered it is at the expense of someone else. For example, when you get that good job, someone else stays unemployed. When you get that nice house, you outbid someone else who has to rent, when you get that beautiful wife, someone else ends up single for longer if not indefinitely. On a more global level Christians have been taught to subdue the earth and that God creates good things out of nothing. This idea has permeated American culture to the detriment of the environment.
Prayer adds to the weight of ableism. Individuals with disabilities in Christian circles are often looked down upon because they somehow couldn’t get their disability prayed away.