What Happens When We Pray? Tanya Luhrmann

Notebook per

What Happens When We Pray?

Tanya Luhrmann

Citation (APA): Luhrmann, T. (2014). What Happens When We Pray? [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

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Parte introduttiva

Nota - Posizione 1

con la preghiera la ns immaginazione ci fa xcepire + vividamente le cose di dio fugando i fastidiosi dubbi del mondo secolarizzato IMHO: detta così la preghiera sembra un autoinganno benefico ma... ma quando l autore tenta di salvare qs pratica il suo linguaggio si fa oscuro come dal terapista preghiera self help 2 preghiere tesi: l immaginazione si trasforma presto in xcezione e in esperienza religiosa apprendere pregando o ascoltando il dio persona immaginazione e xcezione 2 teorie cognitive della religione nati x credere: la preghira serve a superare i dubbi creando esperienza religiosa dubbi e secolarizzazione avanzano e la religione si fa sempre + esperienziale

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 1

What Happens When We Pray? Tanya Luhrmann

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 16

People were also encouraged to pick out only thoughts that were in various ways good: they made you feel good, and they were the kinds of things a good God would say. In short, even though the church invited this informal daydream-like prayer in which people had back-and-forth

Nota - Posizione 18

PENSA POSITIVO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 27

People learned to talk to God as they might to a therapist, and waited to hear what this wise, sensible person might say.

Nota - Posizione 28

TERAPEUTICO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 32

On the one hand, talking to God in your mind is something people do intuitively. It’s like talking to your absent spouse, your dead grandmother,

Nota - Posizione 33

INTUITIVO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 35

The great scholar of contemporary Catholic experience, Robert Orsi, remarked to me that before Vatican II, what most Catholics meant by the word “prayer” was the recitation of specific formal scripts.

Nota - Posizione 36

RECITATIVA

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 43

newcomers to this kind of church would begin by saying that God didn’t talk to them. Yet after some months they would sometimes report that they could recognize God’s voice the way they recognized their mother’s voice on the phone. I could see, then, that having an informal conversation with prayer in your mind—what Christians in this church called prayer--involved learning.

Nota - Posizione 45

IMPARARE

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 47

I brought in over a hundred people and randomized them to prayer practice or to lectures on the gospels, and I found that those in the prayer group were more likely to report more vivid mental images;

Nota - Posizione 48

IMPARARE O PREGARE

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 49

they experienced God more as a person, felt his presence more, and interacted with him more often.

Nota - Posizione 50

DIO PERSONA

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 51

I argued that paying attention to what one imagines makes the world of the mind more vivid, and that this was central to understanding imagination-rich prayer.

Nota - Posizione 52

IMMAGINAZIONE

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 54

attributing significance to inner sensation generates unusual experience: sensory overrides (or hallucinations, though the term is one that some people associate primarily with mental illness, an association I reject) but also a near tangible sense of presence

Nota - Posizione 56

PRESENZA

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 62

These findings suggest that paying attention to mental imagery alters the subject’s awareness of such inner phenomena to the extent that that it alters the subject’s decision about what the subject perceives to be real.

Nota - Posizione 63

REALTÀ

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 66

I am arguing that these prayer practices in which people imagine conversations with God in their minds really change people, because their inner world becomes more and more vivid over time.

Nota - Posizione 67

CAMBIAMENTO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 69

They sought to replace the human content of the imagination—the building blocks of the mind, the monks called them—with scripture, so that the stories and phrases from the holy text came alive to them

Nota - Posizione 71

GESÙ VIVO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 74

Many people have observed that women pray more than men. It is also true that women score slightly more highly in absorption than men.

Nota - Posizione 75

DONNE

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 85

Stewart Guthrie (Faces in the Clouds) suggests that our need to be alert to predators probably led to a hyper-awareness of possible agents.

Nota - Posizione 86

STATO DI ALLERTA

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 86

People intuit invisible agents because they see animation in inanimate objects. Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained) argues that religion is in effect a by-product of cognitive evolution.

Nota - Posizione 87

AGENTI INVISIBILI

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 90

Justin Barrett (Why Would Anyone Believe in God) points out that (in addition to the above) the developmental trajectories of young children contribute to the expectation of an invisible, all knowing God.

Nota - Posizione 92

NATI X CREDERE

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 96

“The design of our minds leads us to believe.”

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 99

While our intuitions may lead us to infer an invisible agent, sustaining the sense that God is present within our cool rational framework can be hard. That, I suggest, is what prayer does, and why it takes work.

Nota - Posizione 100

RUOLO DELLA PREGHIERA. MEMENTO

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 105

But it will be most important—or perhaps, most clearly emphasized as important—in a world where people explicitly struggle with secular doubt. That, I think, is why these experiential practices have grown more important in recent decades.

Nota - Posizione 107

LA CRESCITA DELLA PREGHIERA

Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 108

the sheer effort people invest in connecting to their God suggests that they must overcome inherent doubt—not, perhaps, doubt that the ancestors are real, but doubt that the ancestors care, will listen or will respond. As the consensus about God decreases, however, it becomes more important for people to experience God’s presence personally and intimately. That emphasis probably explains the spread of experiential spirituality within the United States.

Nota - Posizione 112

DUBBIO E PREGHIERA

The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life Robert Trivers - Religione ch 12

The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life Robert Trivers - Religione ch 12

• CHAPTER 12 Religion and Self-Deception
• Dawkins. Some people think of religion itself as complete self-deception, all of it nonsense on its face, counterfactual, and in the extreme having nothing but negative side effects.
• Critica a D.: but these people have no theory for how this malady could have spread so far... What some have is a metaphor. Religion is a viral meme; that is, it is not an actual virus, which can easily bring a population to its knees, but rather it is merely a thought system... This is not a very impressive foundation for an evolutionary theory of religion,
• First we need to separate the truth value of religious statements from the possible benefits of believing in them,
• Il credente e il meta ateo convivono. there is often an internal struggle within religions between general truth and personal or group falsehood. That is, the essence of religion is neither self-deception nor deep truth, but a mixture of the two,
• Esempio do beneficio. Religions tend to increase within-religion cooperation at the cost of lowered cooperation with outsiders. Often this involves a false historical narrative
• COOPERATION WITHIN THE GROUP
• the double-edged sword of religion, inside and outside: a religion urges its own members to treat each neighbor as they would treat themselves, yet also to slaughter every nonbeliever and outsider, as is ordered in the good book, for group after group, down to every last man, woman, and child.
• Dio ti vede: comportati bene. In some religions, people imagine that God is watching and evaluating their every action.
• One study shows that even a pair of eyelike objects on a small part of a computer screen can unconsciously increase cooperative behavior in an anonymous economic game.
• Sopravvivenza delle comunità. One interesting fact on the effect of religion on cooperation emerges from comparing small religious organizations—“sects”—with small nonreligious communes. There is a striking tendency for the religious to outlast the secular... So religion provides some kind of social glue that makes organizations based on them more likely to endure
• Strategie pastorali. Another interesting difference between the two kinds of communes is that the more costly the requirements imposed on group members in a commune (regarding food, tobacco, clothing, hairstyle, sex, communication with outsiders, fasts, and mutual criticism), the longer the survival of a religious commune... Spiegazione: greater cost needs to be rationalized, leading to greater self-deception, in this case in the direction of group identity and solidarity.
• RELIGION: A RECIPE FOR SELF-DECEPTION
• A Unified, Privileged View of the Universe for Your Own Group
• I prescelti. Either you are the founding people and all others degenerate dogs, or else yours are the “chosen people”either by ethnicity (Jewish)
• There May Be a Series of Interconnected Phantasmagorical Things
• Once you have signed on to a few of these notions, there are hardly any boundaries left, and very small details can turn out to be critical features of dogma.
• IMHO: sul punto vedi Plantinga vs Swinburne
• RELIGION AND HEALTH
• Religious behavior and practice appear to be positively correlated with health, a well-established fact with dozens of careful studies in support,
• tendency of religions to establish rules related to health: avoid tobacco and alcohol, pork, top predators such as sharks and lions (which tend to concentrate toxins as they move up the food chain), and generally risky or unwise behavior,
• Some effects may come from the benefits of positive belief itself—for example, on immune function—as well as benefits that flow from being a member of a mutually supporting group,
• The exalting, positive music of so many religions is probably on the high end for positive immune
• Even confessing sins to God and disclosing trauma may have beneficial immune effects.
• One benefit of religion is that it does provide a framework for understanding and acting within our world, a framework we might expect to provide some psychological and mental benefits.
• Benefici alla corteccia cetebrale. It was as if religion was providing them a buffer against error.
• PARASITES AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY
• Religions have repeatedly split into subreligions that are sometimes at one another’s throats.
• Recent work suggests that parasites and, in particular, parasite load may drive religions to split... The argument goes as follows: Where parasite load is low, an in-group and out-group member may be almost equivalent where risk of transmitting a new infection is concerned, namely, low. But where parasite load is high, an asymmetry emerges. An in-group member will in general have been exposed to the same set of parasites as the other members and will carry some of the same genes that give at least partial resistance to many of these parasites...From the standpoint of each group, the other is a threat
• What is the evidence? Two broad factors are of interest: religious and linguistic diversity. That is, how many languages and religions coexist per unit area? With high parasite load, we expect many of each, since splitting into smaller groups facilitates language formation.
• Il freddo ci rende omogenei. Canada and Brazil are roughly the same size, yet Canada has 15 religions and Brazil, 159. Canada is located in the far north, where parasite load is low;
• Processo. Presumably, no one is saying, “Look, worm density has increased alarmingly in ourselves in this area for the past ten years. Perhaps it would be wise for us to be more focused on in-group interactions, including mating. Let’s up our racism level.”Instead, as I imagine it, religion provides substitute logics with similar.
• WHY THE BIAS AGAINST WOMEN?
• Contro l'argomento prevedente: molti parassiti sino favoriti dalla riproduzione intra druppo. We know that sexual reproduction—and the recombination it promotes—is strongly associated with evolutionary protection from coevolving parasites.
• Consider greater sexual promiscuity, or diversity of mating partners, well known to be higher in both birds and humans in the tropics, and presumed to represent an adaptive response to parasite load by increasing genetic quality of offspring.
• Tradimento. women would benefit more from such activity (improved genetic quality of their offspring) and thus provoke greater male countermoves, the kind of behavior we described so vividly in Chapter 5: mutilation, beating, terror, and murder?
• L'obbligo di castità. There are very few genetic dynasties in the Catholic Church (contrast North Korea, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, India, Haiti, and the United States), so the Church is likely to be corrupt but not nepotistically so.
• Bioetica cattolica. The Catholic Church outlaws all control by a woman over her own reproduction short of abstinence from sex at the very moment that she is most eager for it. She is not allowed to prevent conception if copulation occurs, and she is not allowed to terminate a pregnancy, however induced (rape and incest included). This appears to be a simple strategy for maximizing group reproduction.
• POWER CORRUPTS
• the powerful are less attentive to others, see the world less from their standpoint, and feel less empathy for them.
• Dimmi con chi vai e ti dirò che dottrina hai. The religious effects are that humility, fairness, forgiveness, and neighborly love are more apt to be virtues preached among the powerless.
• Religioni di minoranza. Islam’s more peaceful injunctions came when it was an oppressed minority, its more assertive when it reemerged with military power.
• monotheistic religions: with state power comes a new source of bias.
• Pope Paul XXIII and Vatican II inspired in the Latin American Church a new “liberation theology”in the 1980s closer to the humble, persecuted church (prior to Constantin), the time when Jesus’s teachings were actually written down.
• RELIGIONS IMPOSE MATING SYSTEMS
• Religions tend to impose their own mating systems, and these in turn affect degrees of relatedness within and between religions.
• inbreeding has well-known effects. Products of inbreeding show less internal variability than do products of outbreeding. This genetic similarity can have two detrimental effects. On the one hand, relatively rare negative traits that require two copies of the same gene for expression (for example, sickle-cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease) become more common. On the other, greater genetic variability has well-known benefits in defending against rapidly coevolving diseases,
• Mitigare gli effetti dell' in breeding. The second form of in-migration is simple conversion (initially unconnected to marriage), and religions differ in their rules regarding this. Thus, Christianity has usually been a proselytizing religion,
• RELIGION PREACHES AGAINST SELF-DECEPTION
• It is often argued that self-deception interferes with one’s ability to know not only oneself and others but also God herself.
• Regola aurea come tegola gnoseologica. If you are told to treat others as you wish to be treated, then you have a rule, which, if actually followed, would counter much of your unconscious self-deceptive tendencies.
• Religions also preach explicitly against self-deception. Consider Jesus’s famous teachings about not judging others (Matthew 7:1–5):
• Pagliuzze. Why do you see the minor fault in your neighbor but fail to see the major one in yourself?
• Another argument against the speed—and injustice—with which we judge others comes from the case where Jesus is presented with a woman about to be stoned to death for committing adultery. His reaction? “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
• one that is opposed to the in-group/out-group bias. In the parable of the Good Samaritan
• Padre nostro
• 1 assertion of humility: “hallowed be thy name” and “thy will be done.”
• 2 you may ask that your own sins be forgiven but only insofar as you forgive those of others. This is critical: no blanket amnesty. You must give to get; you must forgive to be forgiven. This binds you to a psychological
• 3 ask not to be led into temptation—really an injunction against allowing yourself to be tempted—and to be protected from all evil (self-induced included).
• Salmo. hard to imagine looking God straight in the face and lying—to
• Islam. the jihad against oneself, called the greater jihad... This is a personal struggle that requires controlling your bodily desires (for money, pleasure, satisfaction) in order to purify your soul. These desires occlude self-knowledge, in our system of logic, by encouraging self-deception.
• Greek sage Thales once put the general matter succinctly. “Oh master,”he was asked, “what is the most difficult thing to do?”“To know thyself,”he replied. “And the easiest?”“To give advice to others.”
• Eastern religions also sometimes urge rather extreme systems of physical self-denial
• INTERCESSORY PRAYER—DOES IT WORK?
• Then came a multimillion-dollar study, carefully organized with six hospitals in which groups prayed for given patients from the day before they entered surgery until two weeks later, while another group of patients received no such prayer. Meanwhile, some of those being prayed for were told that they were being prayed... no effect whatsoever of intercessory prayer on the outcome... One hypothesis is that when told people are praying for you, you interpret your situation as being more dire than it really is, with associated stress.
• IMHO. Per ina confutazione vedi Swinburne sullo studio Benson
• RELIGION AND SUPPORT FOR SUICIDE ATTACKS
• Religion has an external, social aspect and an internal, contemplative one. Across a variety of suicidal conditions (Palestinian surveys, a hostile prime for Israeli settlers), religious attendance (the social aspect) is positively correlated with support for suicide bombings, but prayer (the contemplative) is not.
• RELIGION → SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS → WARFARE
• Religions tend to contribute to war in several ways. They encourage an in-group mentality,
• But there is one final gift of many religions: self-righteousness.

continua

Intercedi per noi...

A volte pregando facciamo delle richieste a Dio. Ha davvero senso chiedere qualcosa a nostro Signore? Potrà mai esaudire le nostre richieste? Potrà essere efficace la nostra preghiera?

Ci sono almeno due problemi teorici.

1) L' onniscienza divina: Dio sa tutto, conosce anche il nostro futuro, come potrebbe mai cambiarlo. Se lo cambia in seguito alle nostre petizioni, evidentemente, prima non lo conosceva.

Soluzione migliore: open theism. Dire che Dio è onnisciente significa dire che Dio conosce tutto il conoscibile ma non che conosce l' inconoscibile. Poiché la libertà che Dio ci ha donato è radicale, nemmeno lui sa esattamente come ci comporteremo di fronte a una prova. La libertà rende inconoscibile il futuro.

Da notare che l' open theism risolve anche il problema del legame tra vita terrena e giudizio universale: perché vivere e sopportare il male se Dio sa già come ci comporteremo e come dovrà giudicarci? Perché predisporre un banco di prova quando si conosce in anticipo l' esito di qualsiasi prova?

2) La perfezione divina: Dio crea il migliore dei mondi possibili, come potrebbe cambiarlo?

Soluzione migliore: non esiste un unico mondo migliore degli altri, possono logicamente esistere più alternative e Dio vira sull' una o sull' altra anche in virtù di richieste meritevoli da esaudire.

Poi c' è un problema pratico: alcuni studi statistici non sembrano confermare l' efficacia delle preghiere. Come mai?

Soluzione 1) Dio soddisfa solo desideri meritevoli, e quindi sinceri. Mediante l' opera di soddisfacimento vuole creare un grande bene. Domanda: è meritevole un desiderio che tra le sue motivazioni contempla anche quella di sottoporsi a un test sperimentale sull' efficacia delle preghiere? Se io fossi un miliardario e volessi fare del bene vaglierei le varie richieste ma difficilmente prenderei in considerazione quelle che vengo a sapere mi sono state avanzate con il fine di testare la mia sensibilità.

Soluzione 2) Lo standard ottimo delle ricerche statistiche richiede campionamenti random ma per realizzarli è necessario che alcuni gruppi di preghiera preghino per gruppi di sconosciuti. E' una preghiera sincera quella fatta per uno sconosciuto? Difficile che lo sia fino in fondo, ci vuole un Santo per amare intensamente un emerito sconosciuto e pregare per lui mettendoci tutto il cuore. Purtroppo i santi sono pochi e non hanno rilievo statistico.

Conclusione. L' unico dato fattuale a disposizione è questo: chi crede e chi prega sta mediamente meglio degli altri, anche in salute. Non sappiamo se cio' sia dovuto all' efficacia della preghiera, una possibilità resta comunque aperta.

What Happens When We Pray?

What Happens When We Pray?:

'via Blog this'

Pregare previene l' alcolismo

Quando parte il programma pubblico? Lo mettiamo nella prossima finanziaria? Fatemelo sapere.

Scherzo? Per legami molto meno evidenti si spendono miliardi.

link

Rosario miracoloso

In vista di esami delicati vengo invitato a dire un Rosario per la bambina in arrivo affinchè tutto vada per il meglio, si tratterà di una preghiera per "chiedere".

Secondo mio costume lo farò solo se trovo la cosa razionale, e devo dire che di primo acchito le ingiunzioni specifiche alla divinità mi mettono un po' a disagio.

La piccola è lì e si sviluppa secondo le leggi naturali, se qualcosa non va per il giusto verso, solo un miracolo puo' intervenire per correggere il decorso.

Vediamo allora di approfondire un po'.

Per chi trova ragionevole credere in Dio, è ragionevole anche credere nei miracoli, sarebbe incoerente il contrario. Di fronte a certe evidenze storiche, il miracolo è la spiegazione che da persona razionale mi sento di privilegiare.

Ma la ragione mi dice anche un' altra cosa: i miracoli sono rarissimi, altrimenti il male non potrebbe generare il bene: come potrebbe l' uomo "conoscere" se l' ordine venisse turbato di frequente? Se il malato di cancro venisse graziato non avremmo mai una ricerca, e magari neanche una cura.

Noi non viviamo semplicemente in un mondo "buono", noi viviamo nel migliore dei mondi possibili. D' altronde il cristiano sa bene di essere salvo grazie ad una preghiere non esaudita: quella del Cristo nell' Orto degli Ulivi.

Ci sono due motivi, dunque, per cui stasera dirò il Rosario: primo, trovo sensato chiedere un miracolo; secondo, trovo ragionevole che Dio non lo esaudisca.

Il primo motivo mi protegge dall' irrazionalità, il secondo dall' eventuale delusione.



P.S. lettura consigliata sul tema: Response to a Statistical Study of the Effect of Petitionary Prayer.

Ha bisogno di me

Colui che amo
mi ha detto che
ha bisogno di me

per questo mangio questo pane
per questo divido questa mensa
per questo guardo dove cammino


amen

Ricostruisci ogni giorno e per sempre la mia dimora

... sculture cristiche nel legno (link perduto)...

***

Dio, benedici qesto pane. Mio Dio, non ti lascio finchè non benedici questo pane.

Dio, tu che sei possente ricostruisci la mia dimora. Apparecchia la mia tavola. Fallo presto, prestissimo. O Dio, ricostruisci la mia dimora ogni giorno e porta il pane alla mia tavola.

Egli Che è prescelto ricostruirà la Sua dimora presso la mia, lo farà presto, prestissimo, nel corso della mia vita lo farà. O Dio, ricostruisci, ricostruisci presto la tua dimora presso la mia!

Egli Che è grande ricostruirà la Sua dimora presto, prestissimo, già durante la mia vita l' avrà ultimata. O Dio, ricostruisci, ricostruisci presto la tua dimora presso la mia!

Egli Che è onorato, fedele, giusto, pio riapparecchierà la Sua tavola presto, prestissimo, durante la mia vita lo farà. O Dio, ricostruisci, ricostruisci presto la tua dimora e apparecchia la tua tavola accanto alla mia, mangeremo insieme già nella sera della mia vita!

Egli Che è puro, unico, possente, saggio, re, dotto, forte, prode, liberatore, giusto ricostruirà la Sua dimora presto, prestissimo, già durante la mia vita lo farà. O Dio, ricostruisci, ricostruisci presto la tua dimora presso la mia!

Egli Che è santo, pietoso, onnipotente, forte ricostruirà la Sua dimora presto, prestissimo, durante la mia vita già potrò vederla. O Dio, ricostruisci la tua dimora presso la mia e apparecchia la tua tavola accanto alla mia. Mangeremo insieme il pane di vita eterna di cui mi farai dono. Lo mangeremo come amici. Lo mangeremo presto, prestissimo.



riadattamento di una preghiera ebraica pasquale link