Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Newton's Sleep
It's been a long time since there's been a Shatammu in Ninmah, or
even a Ninmah. Despite the fact that Enlil and Ninlil were major
gods - people all over the civilized western world had prayed to
them for two thousand years - was poor Mili-Shipak in fact
praying to a phantom, to a societally condoned product of his
imagination? And if so, what about us? Or is this blasphemy, a
forbidden question, as doubtless it was among the worshippers of
Enlil?
Does prayer work at all? Which ones?
There's a category of prayer in which God is begged to
intervene in human history or just to right some real or imagined
injustice or natural calamity - for example, when a bishop from
the American West prays for God to intervene and end a
devastating dry spell. Why is the prayer needed? Didn't God
know of the drought? Was he unaware that it threatened the
bishop's parishioners? What is implied here about the limitations
of a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient deity? The bishop
asked his followers to pray as well. Is God more likely to intervene
when many pray for mercy or justice than when only a few do? Or
consider the following request, printed in 1994 in The Prayer and
Action Weekly News: Iowa's Weekly Christian Information
Source:
Can you join me in praying that God will burn down the
Planned Parenthood in Des Moines in a manner no one can
mistake for any human torching, which impartial investigators
will have to attribute to miraculous (unexplainable)
causes, and which Christians will have to attribute to the
Hand of God?
We've discussed faith-healing. What about longevity through
prayer? The Victorian statistician Francis Galton argued that,
other things being equal, British monarchs ought to be very
long-lived, because millions of people all over the world daily
intoned the heartfelt mantra 'God Save the Queen' (or King).
Yet, he showed, if anything, they don't live as long as other
members of the wealthy and pampered aristocratic class. Tens of
millions of people in concert publicly wished (although they did
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