LogFAQs > #886315141

green dragon posted...

_AdjI_ posted...

It's mostly just self-gratification

No it isnt, at least not more so than sending supplies. People that are praying believe that they are helping. It's no more self-gratifying than sending supplies down. You could argue that people helping in any way is self-gratifying

If I sent supplies to Bermuda because I believed it would help, should I be lauded for trying to make a difference, or criticized for not caring enough about the issue to learn that Barbuda and Bermuda are not the same place? There is no reason to believe that prayer alone will make a difference. Anyone that actually cares about disaster victims has paid enough attention to realize this, just as anyone who actually cares about the victims would pay enough attention to make sure they sent supplies to the right island. The only ones that don't are the ones for whom "k I prayed for them back to other stuff" is the full extent of their attention to the suffering, and that's not caring about it. That's briefly acknowledging that it sucks, which is the barest minimum standard for human decency.

Again, kudos to them for meeting the minimum standards for basic human decency, since having even minimally decent people improves the world, but praying for disaster victims (especially publicly) and doing nothing beyond that is pretty much the humanitarian version of masturbation.