The Priest was another try at reviving my sense of spirituality. He’s a good chap. He really does try. He’s hoping that I’ll get a Big Feeling and realise the error of using evidence and reason. Imagine if I did have a big teary spiritual experience. That would just show that I’m as susceptible to emotional thinking as anyone else. I already know that.
This time he was talking about prayer.
“I’ve found that the Lord never lets me down,” he said. “I always get what I pray for, if I’m praying for the right thing. It doesn’t always happen immediately, though.”
“No, it sure doesn’t,” I said. “Remember that fast that happened last year, to end the drought?”
“Ahem,” he said.
“There’s still a drought, isn’t there?” I said. “And have you heard anyone mention it in church since?”
He looked uncomfortable. “Yes, well… we have had an increase in precipitation….”
He was moving the goal posts, but I ignored it.
“I have something that works like that,” I said. “I have a lucky hat. I believe that when I wear my lucky hat, lucky things happen to me. One time I found some money. Another time, I found a parking spot right where I wanted. It’s the hat that does it.
“It doesn’t always happen immediately, though.”
My lucky hat uses the same principle as prayer, the Secret, and all other superstitions. It uses selective observation, or counting the hits and ignoring the misses. And it uses the power of having no evidence and believing what you like anyway.
“You know,” said the Priest, “you’re asking for empirical evidence. I admit that such evidence isn’t available. But I think the Lord does it that way on purpose… to see if we’ll exercise faith in him. If we had evidence, it wouldn’t require us to have faith.”
I said, “That’s exactly what I would expect someone to say if they couldn’t support their claims with evidence, but they didn’t want to abandon the claim.”
NB: The Priest is not a real person. He’s an amalgam of many religious people I’ve spoken with. I only write down a conversation with “the Priest” after I’ve heard the same claims from at least three different people. As a result, the dialogue is almost entirely made up, in order to make myself sound cool. Or it could be 100% accurate. I forget.
21 September 2008 at 8:47 am
lol – is this a coincidence or did you read my post on psychotherapy?
21 September 2008 at 10:48 am
No, actually. But I have now, and I enjoyed.
I have wondered if from time to time psychotherapy isn’t some kind of placebo. There was one study once that showed that you get the same results from a real psychologist as you would from a regular person who’s been told to restate everything you say. However, since this latter resembles Rodgersian talk therapy, this may not be the best control.
I guess my old mantra applies: if it doesn’t yield empirical results, then do it if you like it, but don’t get too attached.
26 September 2008 at 10:15 pm
I love it!!!! Thanks for sharing!