We Don’t Need Prayer
We Don’t Need Prayer.
Part One of the “We Don’t Need God” Series
Recently my daughter was in the hospital for a severe case of pneumonia. While she was there, being treated with modern medicine, using the latest advances in science and technology people would tell me an odd thing. They would say “We are praying for her.” While I certainly appreciated the sentiment, which was something like, we feel bad for your situation and wish there was something we could do to help, I couldn’t help thinking, if prayer actually worked, why would she have gotten sick in the first place. Surely there is someone out there praying that innocent children don’t have to suffer needlessly if God can stop it at will. And further, if prayer worked, why did I need to have her at the hospital at all? If god was going to miraculously heal her, you’d think he could do it in my living room, instead of at a state of the art multibillion dollar hospital that specializes in child care. Also, if god has a plan for everything, then it was part of that plan for my daughter to get sick. What makes these people think he would change his plan, god being all powerful and perfect, simply because you asked? God supposedly knows everything anyways; surely he knows you want a baby to recover from an illness. So what is the point of asking?
That sentiment in itself didn’t seem too bad until my daughter actually did recover from her illness. Then “God had answered everyone’s prayers.” Never mind the hospital, doctors, nurses, medication, equipment, and the minds of the scientists who had discovered so much about the human body and had invented all these procedures my daughter had undergone to make her well again. To me it seemed that these superstitious people were spitting in the face of the doctors who saved my daughter’s life. It was not their achievement, and an achievement of science that she is alive today. It was because of prayer. It wasn’t because of the people in the hospital who spent a full month working with my daughter, using the scientific method to discover what was wrong with her, and then applying technology developed through scientific discovery. It’s not right that religious people should belittle those doctors by crediting the results of their studies and labor to prayer.
The truth is we didn’t need prayer for my daughter to get better. We didn’t need God at all. We needed the power of the human mind and the achievements of science.
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Do you not take into consideration that had God not given those individuals the ability and knowledge they wouldn’t have had the privelegde to take care of your daughter!
Atheism is accepting what you know.
Religion is rejecting what you don’t.
http://i.imgur.com/HHE3h.jpg
God doesn’t make people doctors. Desire, focus, hard work, perseverance, sacrifice, and a lot of money for tuition make people doctors.
If god were giving away ability and knowledge then there wouldn’t be need for colleges and medical schools. Nothing was given to those doctors, they worked hard for it and are likely still paying off the student loans.
No, I don’t take that into consideration. You, again, spit in the face of the doctors who spend years in college, who, with their own effort have mastered life saving skills and techniques. Shame on you.
How would God have “given” someone knowledge and the ability to learn medicine? If God was real, all he would have given the medical staff would have been life. not abilities and smarts.
Your experience is purely anecdotal and completely one-sided. I’m happy to hear your daughter has recovered, but your expereience neither proves nor disproves the existence of God. As a Christian I would never suggest that you withhold modern medicinal care from your daughter (nor would I from withhold it from my daughter).
That which can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
I’m happy to hear that you value logic and empirical evidence, and consider them necessary to the acceptance of an idea as the truth! Speaking of things that are purely anecdotal and completely one-sided, how about that big book that is the basis for your entire belief system?
“Your experience is purely anecdotal and completely one-sided.”
That is what defines it as My experience.
“but your expereience neither proves nor disproves the existence of God.”
I don’t claim that it does. My statement was in the title of the article: We don’t need prayer.
“As a Christian I would never suggest that you withhold modern medicinal care from your daughter (nor would I from withhold it from my daughter).”
If you have read my article on miracles you will find three cases of Christians who did demand such a thing. Their children are dead. There is an entire sect of Christians who believe such things, they are called “Christian Scientists.” And of course you take your daughter to the hospital. Only the really insane, really put their “faith in god” to do anything important.
I had the exact same response when my own daughter was seriously ill and required surgery at one-day old. I was in awe of the people at Childrens Hospital in Wisconson. The surgeon, especially, was amazing, to be able to operate on a one-day-old baby. She had a D-hernia, and her intestines were crowding around and blocking a lung … which meant he had to grab the intestines, put them back where they belonged, and then sew up the diaphragm. Amazingly, she made a full recovery and is now a very healthy 11-year-old.
Besides being incredibly grateful for the medical expertise of everyone who helped her, I also sent some love out to their hish school and college science teachers – and science teachers everywhere – for turning these gifted people on to science in the first place.
I accepted prayers from my friends and family because, as you said, I recognized them as their way of sharing their concern. But in my heart I knew that prayer had nothing to do with her recovery. It was training, commitment, skill, compassion and perhaps even brilliance.
“Do you not take into consideration that had God not given those individuals the ability and knowledge they wouldn’t have had the privelegde to take care of your daughter!”
People like you need to be slapped. You just got done reading an article about how people credit God with saving his daughter’s life using totally man-made achievements, and the only thing you can think of to say is that God gave us those achievements? How DARE you credit God for everything those doctors did. They are the real heroes. God is a fairy tale. If you ever have a daughter who’s contracted a deadly illness, let’s see how much faith you have in God then. I bet you’ll take her straight to a man-made hospital with equipment and techniques invented by brilliant scientists to have her life saved by brilliant, skilled doctors. Think about THAT the next time you evade the facts of reality and try to convince yourself that she survived by the grace of God, thereby spitting in the faces of the people who were REALLY responsible for saving her life.
Who gave those doctors and nurses life in the first place? Who gave the brilliant scientists their brains in the first place?