The Toll House Cookie recipe works with or without prayer.
I have run the experiment with a control group to test this hypothesis.
One group of cooks professed a personal relationship with Jesus. One group preferred Crisco shortening. Each group was divided into an A-team and a B-team with at least one member of each group as a control group. The control group smoked crack while the other four groups baked cookies. The control group was originally told to watch TV in the living room but decided that smoking crack would introduce a random variable and I could not argue with this line of thought.
Believers/Prayers, Believers/Non-Prayers, Pagan Cooks/Prayers and Pagan Cooks/Non-prayers had similar results except for the high levels of THC in the cookies of the last group. The control group burned themselves and the cookies.
The next step is to add an element of trained skill to each group given that the simple task of baking cookies seems within the reach of most primates. We will move to skeet shooting or low-power microprocessor development depending on the weather on the day we are all free to run the next trial. My research suggests that prayer or at least messages to heaven are very difficult to remove from skeet shooting. Even pagans mutter 'goddammit' after getting a bad shot off and missing a clay pigeon. According to my consultants at the seminary, this must count as a curse which is a legitimate form of prayer to some laymen. I have learned not to queer the results of any scientific data collected in the field and so I must footnote this and move on.
The most surprising results come from the Jesus on a tortilla experiments. We have a small collection of tortillas with either Che Guevara or Jesus Christ clearly charred into the surface of a flour tortilla from the Pagan/non-praying tortilla warmers. Each group produced at least 100 carefully warmed tortillas in a 30 minute trial. The believer/praying team was disqualified for scoring the skillet with a scribe tool to enhance the image but since these tortillas bore an image of Milton Berle and not a recognizable deity, this was judged as statistically insignificant and did not affect our conclusions; you can see almost anything on a charred tortilla that you want to find there.
ZeroTheist - ex nehilo deo ex machina. If I could actually translate latin that would make a cool tattoo. Or I could put this into some tribal pattern and just tell everyone that it MEANT "by reduction, I remove god from the machine".
0theist or 0<><. But the fish thing gets so old. Like starting a baseball team to protest baseball. Playing on the other team's home field never seems like a winning plan especially if you don't have more than two or three players anyway.
Newsweek does the usual treatment. In a otherwise sound survey, SJGould gets a big splashy pen and ink drawing next to MMO'Crazy. Both dead and both so very wrong in most respects.
The bottom line for 0theists and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies - there are never very many of either group. CEO's have so much competition and even then the ranks are thinned when you eliminate the Fooled by Randomness cohort.
Many folks behave as if there were no faith. When they open their mouths to speak, the results vary. But many people have given up on the instruction manuals and try to put things together by intuition. Let's face it, Target and Walmart sell lots of press board furniture to illiterate or innumerate or dis-graphic individuals that erect home entertainment centers by trial and error. Even when you follow every step you are left with a handful of crazy looking screws, nuts, pins, biscuits, cams, springs and even Allen wrench/torx tools that never get used. If it holds your DVD's, CD's and TV without falling over - you are a master craftsman for a day.
The educated and sophisticated tolerate party manners and cocktail party chit-chat on faith.
You do not get anywhere with a naturalistic framework showing unless you are in the hard sciences. Business texts hide the 0theist conclusion altogether. It is not necessary for the recipe to work. Steps 1-7 or Method I-IV of the new '10 second manager' do not touch on the god in the machine or the lack thereof. The Toll House Cookie recipe works with or without prayer.
