Empirical Religion- Consistency, Coherency, Correspondence

The other guy quoting from my previous comment: "As such, my inferences are not based merely on observing people´s prayer, but on a range of empirical sources and their larger patterns, meaning religious experience of individuals and their consistency, coherence, and correspondence to reality."

The other guy: Let's evaluate the "evidence" you drew on in your earlier comment, viz. prayer, for those three things: consistency, coherence and correspondence to reality. Consistency: Everybody prays for different things, in different ways, to different gods, for different reasons, and gets different outcomes, none of which point to its efficacy. Nope, no consistency there.

Coherency: People believe the being(s) to whom they pray are sufficiently powerful to hear and grant their requests, but not sufficiently powerful to anticipate them, and that such beings have a master plan for everything, yet will deviate from that master plan in order to fulfill the petitioners' requests. Nope, no coherency there. Correspondence to reality: I'm just going to let that one speak for itself. Pray to win the lottery and see what happens.

You claim that Hitler and Franco demonstrated high Christian integrity? No, I don't. Nor, as far as I can see, does any significant body of Christianity claim that one must demonstrate "high Christian integrity" to be a Christian. To the contrary, the vast majority claim that believing in Christianity is sufficient to make one a Christian, and that belief, rather than action, is the necessary prerequisite of salvation. However, while Ruben isn´t projecting in the ways you try to limit the behavior to as "the projecting of motives," he is projecting simplistic and denialistic assumptions. Nice save /s. Next time learn what the accusation means before you hurl it.

… My response to the other guy: You say, "Let´s evaluate the evidence....Everybody prays for different things in different ways....No consistency....." Indeed, clarity about the meaning of the term "consistency" is necessary. So, you even include in your view, "gods."

Now, my point of view is an empirical one long cultivated based on my foundations in Bio Anthro and Unitarian Universalism that apparently represents the state of the art in the field. The argument I make does, however, justify important points in those more traditional theologically based ones.

No less,your unempirical assertion that there is "No consistency" also exposes the unexamined, and unscientific, assumptions in your own negationist viewpoint. Instead of posing that AS A HYPOTHESIS TO BE CAREFULLY EXAMINED, you reflexively and prejucially equate prayers, gods, and so on, based on nothing more than a poorly informed ideology, mechanicist secularist egalitarian in nature, that is acompanion to Scientism. The maxim, "Easier said than done" captures your superficial reduction of the detailed empirical phenomena and theoretical treatment studied in the Social Scientific and Humanities. The first thing to do is to establish the point of view you, I, and any interlocutor are operating in here in 21st century globalized society. A common and shared point of reference between me, you, Richard Dawkins, and John Lennox. Imagine that!

Unsurprisinglhy, Dawkins and Lennox operate in and around their base in the main British Universities, Cambridge or Oxford. As the "Adam and Eve," or better, non-"missing links" evolutionary nodes in the cultural development of Anglo-Saxon Universities, they represent the Christian origins and principles operating in the original founding of modern "Western" Universities themselves. Oxford and Cambridge, like Harvard and the US colleges and Universities in sequence after them, owe their origin and historical sociology of meaning, principles, and purpose to the University of Paris, founded in 1150 from a cathedral school, itself based on the monastic schools.

Christian monasteries, in the West in particular, represented a special focus in the higher integrity of their better cases on Christian spiritual growth training and practice. It is thus that Science itself, i.e. Scientific Philosophy, with significant doses from the Benedictine Bishop Raymond´s Toledo School of Translation in the 1150s and the Oxford Franciscan School with such illustrious members as Roger Bacon in the 1300s, all part of the broader contemporaneous philosophical developments of St. Thomas of Aquinas at Paris itself in the 1200s. Galileo studied at the U of Pisa starting in 1580, DesCartes left France and based himself in Holland where he studied at the U of Leiden, among Kepler and so on and the writing of them all was facilitated by the church system and its Latin language central to the monasteries and society at large, now including the Universities and Luther´s Protestant Reformation they had largely generated around 1520.

Thus, Science is actually Scientific Philosophy, and a Christian cultural phenomenon that represents the real world modernization that has occurred in Christian society that has not yet been incorporated into many or most Christian doctrines. Unitarianism in the US and UK led to interfaith Unitarian Universalism in the US, along with the the US´s United Church of Christ´s pastoral letter on Science are two noteworthy efforts of updated doctrines. It is thus that the Christian God can be clarified by supplementing its notions with Scientific insights. The UK´s Interfaith Network itself reflects the Freedom of Religion developed in a sequence from Grotius and Locke to Jefferson et al in the US, and FD Roosevelt´s vision of the UN and Eleanor Roosevelt´s leadership in the UN Universal Dec of Human Rights.

Within this perspective, Biological Anthropological analysis following the insights of Malinowski, Pavlov, Ogden and Richards, Korzybski, and Chapple allows a semantic analysis that can identify the scientific components and the spiritual-religious components and their branched classificatory relationship to the one Creator God.

As for prayers, reasons, and outcomes, as I´ve begun to indicate, those are high order abstractions in need of empirical resolution and detail-oriented specifics for classification. The epistemological discipline of Psychology provides a major basis of analysis within Christianity alone if applied properly, along with Chapple´s framework. For example, the appearance and rise of the Christian Science Church is based on Mary Baker Eddy´s discovery, insights, and development of a spiritual-religious system of thought that demonstrated exceptionally high practical benefits.  It is worth contextualizing it in terms of the thought itself in relation to prevailing thought patterns at the time, since there is a recognizable relativity dynamic at work.  However, with the diverging efforts following Christian into other denominations and further emergence of known healing practitioners like Joseph Murphy and Louise Hay, along with developments in Psychosomatic Medicine, analysis can be done on thought systems to identify the elements distinguishing Mary Baker Eddy and her many remarkable healings from CS members and practitioners who like famed actor Val Kilmer who struggled, but apparently succeeded in healing his throat cancer, and them in turn from Jimmy Carter´s sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, for example, who died of pancreatic cancer.  An additional comparison of note is the testimony of a British CS soldier in a Japanese POW camp along with other CS soldiers.  Their form of practice was distinct such that it maintained their health as CSers to such a degree amongst prevailing malnourishment and nutritional disease in the camp that they were able to conduct such activities as classes in electrical engineering and were asked by American officers to stay until last. 

Consistency, moreover, applies to a psychosocial analysis back in time all the way to Abraham´s covenant at least through the 40 plus prophets leading from Jesus and his legacy. That covers the superficial  and poorly informed logic you apply then in terms of coherence and correspondence.