(Q) and cottontop if i was the thread starter i would ask you to take your spams somewhere else since i am not, i'll ask you to google 'the placebo effect' and mount an effective defense against it
But seriously, people who believe in God, know God is true, don't they?! It is quite possible that you believe in pink dragons, but have you ever seen one? No? Still it doesn't make it less true, does it? If you believe in them, to you they are real. That's the whole point of beliveing, isn't it? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
this is the problem here the placebo effect has absolutly nothing, nada, zilch to do with a god this has everything to do with the believing mind
That's exactly what I'm trying to explain. Personally I think believing is wrong, but that's just me. It's the ideals we oughta reach for, we don't have to believe in them and try so hard to make them real. It doesn't even matter if a person existed or not as long as the wisdom is attainable. We should learn, not believe. Thus, prayer is in my perspective worthless. But still, when believing, one do believe , and one believe what one believes is real. To me, an eventual God has nothing to do with it. He could possibly be a figure of imagination, I don't know, but as we can't see Him, one must believe in Him or His followers in order to consider He is real. Thus, the placebo effect. And as our two comedians so solely stated, one can believe in anything. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
thank you.. phew now tell me what does that have to do with the reability of prayer on things like healing a sickness, for example
well, yes. dont know if you are familiar with chaos magick? i am not a chaos magickian but i have researched about its philosophy. bascially they believe that you CAN believe in a pink dragon, and if you do so enough then that beoief can have an effect. as can a belief in any other 'MODEL'---but, and this is the important bit--any moel is not 'THE truth'--it is just a model now next bit is my recent insighgt. altho a model MAY work, i also want to look at its ethics. take neuro linguistic programming (NLP). dont know if you know a Paul Daniels? he is a fairly famous hypnotist in the UK. and he did a documentary series where people with various phobias went for his help and he used NLP techniques on them etc and tey seemed to lose teir phobias.........NOW. i personally do not like NLP, because i see it as materialist. it makes ot people are just biochemical machines. and i hated and laothe McKennas fukin attitude. after tese people lost ther fears, he swanned about claiming it was HE who had cured them. not a mention of their part in healing process. so, what i am saying is is tat altho yeah, maybe that model WORKS, ethically it sucks.....nd tis is what a feel about patriarchal religion. prayer MAY work with that model. but tat model also is very very oppressive inother areas
What do they mean by 'closet'? :bugeye: I also find Mathew 6:12 quite interesting "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."
wel see previous post of mine to this. materialists will try and convince you prayer is fantasy. i am just trying to explore the roots of their ontlogical certainties.
Leopold: what about people praying for other people who do not know someone is praying for them. There couldn't be a placebo effect then could there?
is there any documented cases of prayer working for someone else? maybe you misunderstand, i am not talking about prayer per se what i refer to is the believing mind, there is a difference the placebo effect is sub-concious, you are not actually aware of it prayer is something you do deliberatly and are aware of
Leopold, the placebo effect does not work for everyone. Period. It certainly hasn't worked for me. In prayer or meds.
Well, either way you would have to ask yourself if there's an invisible outer force to pray to. The placebo effect will only work if you strongly believe that there is. If you don't, the placebo effect won't have an impact, because you don't believe in that invisible force with all your mind and soul. Say, for example, that I strongly believed in the placebo effect, and not the deity I was praying to. I was praying for my friend who was deadly sick, and by consciously using the placebo effect theory, I strongly believe that if I believe enough in his recovery it will happen. And so, what if it does. Is it the placebo effect that has healed him, or is it deity I was praying to? Cause here's the paradox I was reaching for. The fact that I don't know what happened doesn't make it less real. Exactly like the example of the dragons. The fact that you don't know what is actually happening is the essence. How could I claim that it was either the placebo effect or the deity that saved my friend? IMO it's all a matter of believing in the first place. But, believing in one thing actually rules out any other possibilities, and that's the actual paradox of believing. And yes, I am very familiar with chaos magick, because it actually appeals to the subject of the placebo effect, and the subject of believing. But as in any other topic, chaos magick too has the aspect of believing, which I have great trouble with in the first place.
my complete refutation of belief being able to change reality in a magical way- some crazy guy really believes he can fly. he jumps from a building. he falls to the ground. every time this experiment is tried the result will be the same. this having been said, our beliefs change things in our lives and others' constantly, everyday - but fantasies don't become reality unless they were possible initially, i.e. realistic fantasies. realistic fantasies? qua?
Nice one, Cole. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! But the topic here was 'Does pray work?'. If the person who tried to fly prayed in advance of the attempt, would it make him fly or not? Realistic or not, does it actually work? Who could tell? And, of course, one doesn't have the need to pray in order to accomplish realistic fantasies. Praying is all about miracles and magic. Hence the subject of believing that these magic miracles actually can be made real. That has nothing to do with realism at all.
RainDancers in Indigenous trribes have been reorted in some cases to be able to influence weather patterns There is a famous story of the founder of chaos magick, Osman Spare, who simply drew a pattern/Glyph on a pice of paper nd gazed at it and suddenly even though sky had been blue clouds quickly gathered and it rained hard------true? dont know your query regarding believing one can fly. is it appropriate, or incongruous. what would be easier, to defy gravity and be some strage creature who can fly---frightening the birds. orrrr, being able to in a form that can mofe very very swiftly, as is said o happen in OBE's NDEs' etc. ? i feel reality is creative. there are extraordinarily deep depths. and this depth is alive. and most likely as we are , and animals are, playful. Some Indigenous peoples calld this mode of Nature the Trickster-----slippery Greeks, Hermes, and before that is a goddess so te trying and trying to understand tis dimension by pople of a materialist bias is gonna create an impasse. it's like modern physics has/is grapplling with te 'strangness' of subatomic enegies, yet is only at te beginning of exploring what consciousess means and Illuminatingtherapy,,,,Welcome you ay you have difficulty wit te CM idea that beliefs/models can have effect? what disturbed ME more with teir ideas, tho i can dig that. is manys lck of sacredness bout shit. kind of a very boyish attitude--Goth, haha. whilst i feel the whole schebangle must have MEAING. Ecology shold be central, Respct of Nature and community
Yeah, but, even though I am very spiritual kind of person myself, I couldn't possibly state to know anything about where spirituality comes from. Or how it works. Or who is making it work. Hence the big paradox of spirituality, 'cause one actually does have to believe in it. Surreal, huh? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Reality is. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
but in some cases of healing, i have heard healers claim that recipient doesn't have to believe in it for healing process to happen
But then one would have to question the aspect of healing itself. Is it, or is it not real? Either way it's a miracle.
maybe prayer works like it does because it works here in the ocident something like meditation works in the east... who knows what our brains are capable of, when they are really focused on something... maybe we can alter reality with it omg teh new age
