One of my English teachers in HS offered Bible as lit, a few years before I got there, but he discontinued it because scary parents would buttonhole him during class and try to debate him doctrinally. Which was sad to me to think about as I considered him to be quite brilliant as well as committed.

---

I extrapolated from your dismissal of prayer to the dismissal of all prayer. If this is not what you intended, I apologise and retract my objections.

No, I'm sure my original wording was too expansive. It would have been more appropriate to say that, despite repeated attempts under favorable condtions, effects of prayer of the sort predicted by conservative Christians have not been found. Most scientists would agree that there are more promising candidates as interventions to improve human welfare at this point, and we should stop spending money on these studies.

Believing that you are being prayed for? There is an effect there, but it probably is unrelated to whether you are prayed for or not.

And there is no doubt at all that prayer has positive effects for the person doing the praying. It's a powerful effect.

---

And there is no doubt at all that prayer has positive effects for the person doing the praying. It's a powerful effect.

I actually envy the people who find such deep comfort in prayer. The cynic in me says they're only self-hypnotizing themselves into believing that Someone hears them, but the other parts remember when I believed that.

---

She either does not understand exactly how rude her communications are, or she doesn't care.

This isn't always an indicator of general assholishness though. My immediate boss has a brusque e-mail manner that can rub people the wrong way, but he's very personable face-to-face or over the phone.

---

I could have checked the shards. We were travelling with carry on only in an effort to save time and minimize human interaction. Which I think we still achieved, on balance, as the helpful USPS kiosk for mailing things that can't be carried on had no line nor attendant, and the ticket counter for checking baggage had both.

I find the baptism in absentia thing as disturbing as the idea of a bunch of Zoroastrians digging up bodies from church graveyards and properly exposing them in the center of a maze so the spirits can be properly released to heaven.

---

a bunch of Zoroastrians digging up bodies from church graveyards and properly exposing them in the center of a maze so the spirits can be properly released to heaven.

They do that? What an interesting belief.

Or, I'm being more than usually gullible today.

---

Scientists set up the prayer intervention in the way that the proponents claimed it would work and used an appropriate study to see if it did work. It didn't.

I read about this a while back, but I thought what they tested was having a people from a whole bunch of religions pray, and that overall, they could not prove prayer had any effect.

---

The thing is, no sane believer thinks s/he's got God in a box. No matter what religion you practice, it is obvious that God doesn't grant all prayers. Otherwise we'd all be bathing in ice cream and James Marsters would be worn down to a nubbin.

Some people claim prayers aren't answered because you didn't pray (A) hard enough (B) sincerely enough (C) to the right God. Me, I say it's ineffable.

---

James Marsters would be worn down to a nubbin.

Based on his prayers, or yours?

---

Based on his prayers, no fangirl would get within 20 yards of him. Based on my prayers, every book in the world would be immediately FedExed to me and nobody I love would ever get sick.

---