puertopez, it depends on the situation. If your friends mention something in passing, it'd best for you to just leave it. For example:
"I'll pray he gets better"
In this situation you might be tempted to respond with:
"Pray? You do realise that prayer has been tested in double blind studies and has been proven not to make any difference at all? And in some cases, it was correlated negatively with recovery?"
Really, you'd be better off letting the point slide, or at the very most you could say "why don't you actually DO something instead of praying for God to do all the work?
"
However, if somebody were to claim positively that they believe in the power of prayer... well, the claim has been made! It is your intellectual duty to combat it. And the same goes for ALL bad science and ANY bigotry.
It's probably best that you only debate in moderation, for friendship's sake. However, even if you pick out every single fault with everything they ever say in a relentless mission to turn them into atheists, you're still not as bad as the religious. You're spreading facts and fighting bad reasoning, not promoting ancient propaganda and terrible science
"I'll pray he gets better"
In this situation you might be tempted to respond with:
"Pray? You do realise that prayer has been tested in double blind studies and has been proven not to make any difference at all? And in some cases, it was correlated negatively with recovery?"
Really, you'd be better off letting the point slide, or at the very most you could say "why don't you actually DO something instead of praying for God to do all the work?
"However, if somebody were to claim positively that they believe in the power of prayer... well, the claim has been made! It is your intellectual duty to combat it. And the same goes for ALL bad science and ANY bigotry.
It's probably best that you only debate in moderation, for friendship's sake. However, even if you pick out every single fault with everything they ever say in a relentless mission to turn them into atheists, you're still not as bad as the religious. You're spreading facts and fighting bad reasoning, not promoting ancient propaganda and terrible science
