Monkey Love

You've probably seen articles referencing a recent study done by an ASU professor suggesting that prayer helps the sick. And you've seen letters like this one.

I respectfully disagree, for many reasons.

Dawkins does fair enough a job of demolishing this kind of medieval nonsense in his latest book The God Delusion, and I'll skip a rehash of his work so I can eventually get to my real points.

Daniel C. Dennett writes in Breaking the Spell, Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, that belief systems evolved just as other human behaviors did, and recent studies of primate behavior strongly suggest that morality developed before religion became a part of culture.

Monkeys are nice to each other but they do not fly planes into buildings because of religious convictions, because they have none. No religious convictions, that is. Plenty of monkeys have planes, personal jets, whatever.

Anyways, all I really wanted to say here is that yeah, maybe, a little prayer never hurt anybody. For example, we all know people who maintain freedom from various addictions by relying on their "higher power" however they choose to define that.

But if you really want to help sick people, stop wasting time and money studying prayer, whatever that is, and provide universal healthcare coverage.

That's my first point.

My second one is that morality and religion have nothing to do with one another and evolved differently. Yes, evolved. These came from evolution and the pressures of natural selection, not just old books written by Bronze-Age madmen.

First came morality, then came religions, and for some of us lucky ones, spirituality comes.

Many people, however, remain spiritually deprived despite their religious protestations, and of course some are just so mentally ill, like our current President, that their "faith" makes them cry and legislate for blastocysts while calmly exploding innocent soldiers, women, old men, and children in far-off lands. Only religiosity can produce that sort of craziness.