So... the benefit is either self derived - placebo effect. Or delivered by god.
Hypothesis: If delivered by god, then, praying to an imaginary friend is 'silly'.

If you're going to use research to back up your religion. Lets test it further.

Four groups with an illness receive no treatment aside from ardent daily prayer.
- one group prays to God
- one group prays to Buddha (to prove if it's any god or just your god)
- one group prays to Chuck Norris (to prove if it's placebo or God)
- one group does not pray at all.

If all four groups are the same then the research is bull shit.
If there is no significant deviation between the 3 groups praying, then you can run tell that!

Is there really no one willing to fund a post graduate student to do a study to put this shit to bed once and for all?

Research Limitation: up front you agree not to say "God is Mysterious" if you don't like the results.

Wall of text warning. No tl;dr. Learn to read dammit (see what I did there?).

@quantumushroom

Unusual post from you there qm. But again you miss the point (what did you expect?).

First off, religion necessarily has an effect on society otherwise no one would care if you adhered or not (i.e. there would be no religious wars, no religious-based hatred etc.). The problem is not that religion enhances your sense of well-being, it's that as a consequence (or side effect if you will) you close yourself off from people of a different religion and from contrary opinions on many different matters: you trade freedom of thought for psychological safety and by doing that you deserve neither. Now, if you're a "religious scientist" type then your either not really religious or not really a scientist. Compartmentalization can only get you so far.

Second, wtf does any of this has to do with liberalism? Your tangent does not intersect my argument at any point. I bet you can't derive for shit. Do you even know what derivation is?

Third, atheism is neutral. Atheism is to theism as amoralism is to moralism. The antonym to moral is not amoral but immoral. In the same way, the antonym to theism is non-theism. A non-theist can be religious, he simply does not believe in a deity or deities. Atheism was a term invented by theists to vilify non-theist and polytheists. It has been adopted by non-religious people like "nigger" has been adopted by African-Americans, as a way of empowerment. It encompasses many views, most of them non-religious. It does not mean atheists cannot suffer from the same delusions as religious people, only that they are less likely because by identifying and refusing to accept the kind of bad thinking that goes on in religious circles, they have inoculated themselves to a point.

Fourth, on the contrary one could say that there have never been a religion without a state. Every religion needs a vector of power to affirm its authority and convert others. The Jews in Pharaonic Egypt formed a state within a state, electing their own leaders and applying the laws of Abraham to their brethren, much like Muslims try to do in western countries by following sharia law and even trying to make it official. I would go so far as to say that religion is the prototype of the state. Look at Buddhism. Not a year after the Buddha died and already sects formed and tried to control the movement he started. The conflicts may not have been overtly violent, but they were power struggles and as such quite far from the detachment from worldly matters taught by the Buddha. All prophets are dictators. Their intentions may be good, but it will always turn sour when they're gone as they, and not their god or teachings, are really what unify their followers. The continuation depends not on the person or the teachings but on the institutions that they or their successors build, just like a state. You could see what I mean if you had read the Leviathan of Hobbes (that's not what he says, but the parallels he makes and his insistence that religion is necessary for the state's well-being goes in this direction). This, to me, argues for anarchism but of course with people like quantumushroom - not to mention the potential for greed and cruelty still in all of us - I would have to say we are not ripe for it just yet. It may well be that a great part of the population will need to be forced to become atheists just to live among an atheist society comfortably, like atheists were once forced to recant their views in religious societies. While it would mean some psychological violence, as long as we stay in a democratic state it would not do more damage than what religion does now and I believe it would benefit humankind in the long run.

@Gallowflak

Nowhere did I say atheists were more rational than the religious. In fact, most rationalists (like Descartes) are religious for various reasons, one which I will explore below. I said that atheists are more reasonable and detached in their understanding of the world. Now, while "reasonable" comes from "reason" it does not mean here that a reasonable person uses more reason than another. It means that a person is more sensible than another. For example, there are no empirically verifiable evidence of a god or gods. Any religious person not mentally ill will agree. They may argue for the acceptance of anecdotal evidence or of natural phenomena as "acts of God", but just saying something doesn't make it so and anecdotal evidence is not verifiable/repeatable by a third-party and thus of very little value. So there doesn't seem to be any evidence for deities, even Pascal admitted that fact in the frickin 17th century, that's why he had to make a wager with non-believers: he tried to say that by betting on an infinite reward you cannot lose (many think that Pascal says the odds are infinite, but that would be empirical. Pascal says that since god is presumably infinite, and that you presumably gain this infinity when you die, you should take the bet since by doing so you lose nothing in this life. Of course the last part I think is false, also the dying part. Only the "god is infinite" has any kind of weight and it is very light). Of course he didn't really understand mathematical infinity and thus didn't realize that doing so meant you only had an infinitesimal chance of winning in return.

Digression aside, this means that the natural state of a rational being would be non-theistic. Only non-rational belief (based on logical fallacies or the sentiment of faith) or logical arguments based on non-empirical premises can lead to the existence of a god as part of one's thinking. Thus, while not necessarily non-rational, religious thinking most of the time is. In other cases, when dubious premises are used, we would say that the conclusions are not reasonable, meaning that they do not agree with our raw, unfiltered experiences of the world. This is exactly why many religious persons and theists resort to rationalism, as it lets them bypass primary experience in order to define god a priori as the creator of our experiences by some logical argument with dubious premises. Of course this comes from an empiric viewpoint, but then again rationalists don't have a monopoly on reason even though they let us empiricists have a monopoly on experience: that's where the Kantians enter, but that's a story for another time I'm afraid.

>> ^Payback:

>> ^honkeytonk73:
They should look for the Jesus particle. Not only the God particle. I suppose there is also a Muhammad, a Buddha and a Xenu particle too.

Yeah, but the Xenu particle goes around talking shit about the other particles and uses embarrassing gluons it stole from well-known molecules that were edited by its brainwashed quarks.


Could very well be! Maybe the 'body thetans' stick to us via gluons after they get blown up by hydrogen bombs in volcanoes! We may just be on to something! Or.. ON SOMETHING. Yeah. Maybe that is it.

>> ^honkeytonk73:
They should look for the Jesus particle. Not only the God particle. I suppose there is also a Muhammad, a Buddha and a Xenu particle too.


Yeah, but the Xenu particle goes around talking shit about the other particles and uses embarrassing gluons it stole from well-known molecules that were edited by its brainwashed quarks.

They should look for the Jesus particle. Not only the God particle. I suppose there is also a Muhammad, a Buddha and a Xenu particle too.

We'll see. Conway is gonna let it drop, sorta, largely because there are substantive things wrong with Paul's policies, and would rather drive the focus back towards that, now that the press-bait of Aqua Buddha has done its job.

In reply to this comment by AmandaF:
Buddha is being brought up again and again. Paul is nevertheless facing the disappointment of his university-days prank. The NoZe brotherhood was a group of students Rand Paul was a part of at Baylor. The group was founded to trigger aggravation for the administration. The disputed reports of the NoZe Brotherhood cover an array of intrusions. One of the many stories is that they kidnapped a female and asked her to "worship the Aqua Buddha". This is a little embarrassing for Paul, I wonder if there is enough personal loans in this world to sweep this under the rug.

Buddha is being brought up again and again. Paul is nevertheless facing the disappointment of his university-days prank. The NoZe brotherhood was a group of students Rand Paul was a part of at Baylor. The group was founded to trigger aggravation for the administration. The disputed reports of the NoZe Brotherhood cover an array of intrusions. One of the many stories is that they kidnapped a female and asked her to "worship the Aqua Buddha". This is a little embarrassing for Paul, I wonder if there is enough personal loans in this world to sweep this under the rug.

>> ^gwiz665:

He used to be in a secret society that mocked religion... doesn't that just mean that he's actually not an idiot, and instead - like most other politicians - just lies about his religion to have a chance to get into office?


It doesn't mean he's not an idiot, it just means he's a different kind of idiot.

He could easily say "I was an irreverent and confused young man when that happened, and now that I've brought Jesus Christ into my life, I beg for forgiveness for the things I did when I was younger."

Instead he calls Conway a slime merchant, and lawyerly refuses to contest the specifics of the accusation.

The former would've made Conway look like an ass, the latter is making it look like Conway has hit a legitimate nerve.

Still wrong, still going strong eh...

"The foundations of Buddhist tradition and practice are the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma (the teachings), and the Sangha (the community)."-wiki

Buddhists have belief. That you don't understand what they believe, or how they believe it, means nothing.

>> ^quantumushroom:
"There is a sufficient belief in a supreme being or entity to constitute a religion for the purposes of charity law," declared the Charity Commission for England and Wales in response to the Druid Network's application.
By that definition, Buddhism is not a religion, because it has no god.
Now, for no reason at all, here's Twinkie Henge.

Should've made it iDiety, with your choice of Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, Moses, or Allah. Instant Deep Profound Political statement instead of unimaginative troll.

I loved the one statement: "I'm free to change my mind if it seems that I should."

That really encapsulates the difference between science and religion. Religious freaks keep saying that atheist "deify" science and have "faith" in it and I really think the statement above serves to show what the major difference is: Religion takes holy texts (or the words of people who have declared that they somehow channel god through their words) as being unwavering truth. Science works towards truths, but is ALWAYS willing to reexamine its conclusions should new evidence appear.

Earlier in the month, someone on VS tried to call me on believing in Dark Matter (which some speculate is unmeasurable) but not believing in the possibility that Jesus is running around controlling the universe (which is also unmeasurable).

The difference is that dark matter is predicted by measurement. It doesn't clinch that it exists and my mind is entirely open to another explanation about why the rotation of the outer parts of galaxies seems to move contrary to what one would expect given the amount of mass one would predict at the edge of a disk. That said, there is absolutely nothing in nature that predicts Jesus, or Buddha, or Mohamed, or the flying spaghetti monster.

She looks very well

Ancient leaders did have posthumous problems with that sort of thing alright, just look at Buddha who explicitly stated he wasn't a god and that he shouldn't be worshipped.>> ^entr0py:

That is a very nice dress.
Also, I thought that Mohamed commanded his followers not to depict him so that they wouldn't end up worshiping him as a god. Which is pretty wise in light of what happened with Jesus. If so they missed the point spectacularly.

are you sure this isnt buddha bar? nor bart?

>> ^Shepppard:

It's late. I'm tired. And I'm not gonna lie, I read the title wrong.

And now I'm semi-disappointed that this video did not contain a Buddha fart.


LMAO I guess it could kinda read like a blissful Buddha fart? No flatulence here, but you have to admit is very relaxing anyway lol

It's late. I'm tired. And I'm not gonna lie, I read the title wrong.


And now I'm semi-disappointed that this video did not contain a Buddha fart.