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| The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
One of the recurrent themes you can expect to find addressed repeatedly on almost every atheist blog involves the degree to which religious believers actually believe what they claim to believe. In observing their behavior, there is ample evidence that most do not. Here are just a few of the previous posts in which I've addressed this subject:
J.T. Eberhard (What Would JT Do?) recently
posed an interesting hypothetical:
Imagine if you hired a company to build you a house, and then you immediately started building the house yourself. This would be silly, and would confirm that you didn’t think the company would do the work for which you hired them (and, thus, would probably offend the contractors).
He went on to point out that this is similar to what Christians do when they pray for something and then act as if their prayers will have no effect. They pray for the sick child but take him or her to the doctor anyway. They pray for their loved one to arrive safely at his or her destination but take the car in for scheduled maintenance just the same. They pray that their family will be safe in their home, but they buy guns and an alarm system. In short, they consistently behave as if they knew that their prayers would not produce the requested outcomes. J.T. notes:
For people who will wax lengthy about how prayer never fails, their actions depict people who assume prayer never actually succeeds.
If prayer worked, the world would be a very different place. For Christians, there would be no need for
vaccinations,
health care, or
disaster response services or rescue workers. They would have
no political opponents, there would be no separation of church and state, and their preferred team would
win the Super Bowl every year. This might be the world they want, but it is not the world they have. And it seems like most of them recognize it.
