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We all have to do that all the time when the observations aren't replicable, though. Flying saucers, cryptids, and alien abductions are probably the big three that stuck around most in the USA in my lifetime, but they're the tip of a millennia-old folklore iceberg with a thousand different species of supernatural being at the bottom. I think what's interesting about the "supernatural observations plummeted when we invented cameras" quip is that it applies despite us inventing special effects at practically the same time. Most people who wanted to fool others could have kept doing so, and there were a few famous fakes like the Cottingley Fairies, but for the most part people making seemingly-inexplicable observations must have just been fooling themselves first. The human mind is a particularly fallible recording device.
Oh, I'm a rounding error here. I'm just one jerk on a website, but there's one or two hundred thousand amputations a year in the US. When I say "start praying for amputees", I don't mean because you want to win an online argument, I mean because if that actually works, even one percent of the time, then by spreading your knowledge of its effect you'll be improving thousands of people's lives every year. You'd have more positive impact than most medical researchers in history! You wouldn't even necessarily have to win the online argument in the process - if the mechanism was "some researcher coincidentally invents technological regeneration the next week" rather than "spontaneous regeneration spreads like a meme as people begin to have more faith" then I'd at least still allow for the possibility of coincidence - so even if God is shy, wouldn't it be worth trying? And yet either nobody's trying, or none of it is working. Either possibility has to be a little disheartening, don't you think?
I have. Only occasionally, these days, but also "Try out the Mormons' prayer" seemed like a reasonable hypothesis to test, a couple decades ago. In that case either I got a "no, that stuff's fiction" or I got no answer, but in neither case would it seem, based on the common
, that it would be treated as contrary evidence rather than an observation to exclude. If the billion Muslims praying 5 times a day aren't getting the same answers as them either, there's clearly a lot of room for "you're just not doing it right" in prayer.
I think what really got me, though, was seeing that they didn't take their "you can learn through prayer" hypothesis as seriously as I did.
One of the things that interested me about their theology was that their idea that some old scriptures hadn't been translated correctly meshes pretty well with my idea that the genocide in Numbers should be a "what kind of demon are the Abrahamic religions all worshiping" sort of moment for the reader, at least by the time Moses gets mad about his followers letting women and boys live. Indeed, a Mormon leader (I want to say elders here, but that's a different word in that hierarchy; maybe it was a former stake president?) brought up that translation point independently when I mentioned the problem. The epistemology of that seems a bit shaky, but I admit I was happy to see someone choose it over shaky morality.
What I didn't think of until later was ... why didn't it even occur to him to pray about it? Figuring out which religious texts are true was supposed to be the sine qua non of Mormon prayer, and yet it didn't even come up as a possibility worth trying? From the outside it's easy to see why "pray for an answer where there's one interpretation that doesn't detach you from the culture" might evoke a more easily-interpreted response among the believers and the hopeful than "pray for an answer where either way you're likely about to cause a huge rift", but I still wonder what the insider explanation would have been.
This I tend to agree with. It just has a sort of different effect on me when people say "UFOs and other things that are retarded to believe in" since I've actually looked into UFOs and I think it's very clear there's something there if you take the time to look through original sources in aggregate. (It's particularly amusing since the most mundane interpretations for UFOs involve a tight-lipped conspiracy kept up for decades - a hypothesis which I don't rule out, but which is far more convoluted a conspiracy theory than most respectable people are willing to take seriously. "The CIA creating AIDS" or whatever would be trivially easy next to "UFO psyop for 80 years.")
Now, with that being said, I think "UFOs are credible therefore the other stuff is too" is an equal-and-opposite mistake I would not recommend making.
I think what's interesting about it is that it is ~false. There are various UFO reporting data collectors out there and from what I understand that's not the case, UFO reports have steadily continued despite cell phones proliferating.
Of course the XKCD argument isn't that there have been fewer reports, it is that "cell phones would have recorded undeniable proof of UFOs by now," despite the fact that cell phones are not good for detecting or photographing airplanes. (And of course it's well-documented by now that the one organization in the world with the best aircraft detection capability allegedly encounters UFOs regularly and seems to have been encountering them for decades.)
I mean, I've heard of a technique for healing cancer that purports to be basically just what you are describing, and...I don't think things would play out the way you think. I tend to think that if an alternative healing method existed, most people would not have heard of it, and of the people that heard of it most people would not take the time to investigate its veracity (hello, it's me!) and thus would either disbelieve in it reflexively or make no use of it. Perhaps I am wrong.
I guess regenerating limbs is flashier (although much less valuable) than healing cancer, so maybe Team Miracle needs to rethink their comms strategy?
Sure, I think everyone who prays actually agrees on this. At least in the Christian faith, God is described as our Father, and, well - I find that I often don't give my children what they ask for. (Particularly not in the timeframe they ask for it in). You deserve kudos for being open-minded about it, though.
I am not LDS (or Muslim) so I don't particularly have any thoughts on their theology (besides, I suppose, thinking it is wrong).
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