Only Prayer

TheNextTurn sent me the following email. He is trying to limit the debate to prayer and not religious practice. I feel like when push come to shove he has begun to agree with my main point (which is good). Also, I feel like he has been acting like an adult so he has won my respect.

HI Poetsong,

I think I found why we seem to be talking past each other.

"To clarify our argument was "Did religious practice contribute the suffering during the plague or was it a help?”" but then I protested that we should only look and Christian religious practice and you did not have problem with that."


You see I was under the assumption that we are debating if prayer and repentance specifically helped or hurt the effort to defeat/stop the black plague.

We better clarify this before we continue.

If the debate is did religious practice as a whole help or hurt during the plague I would say it both helped and hurt depending on the specific situation but I would certainly say it would have been way worse if religion was not there and there was nothing to replace it

TheNextTurn

Here was my reply.

Hi TheNextTurn

I think it will be really difficult have any meaningful debate about just prayer and repentance as a method of combating the Black Plague for a couple reasons.

1) You come into this, disqualifying any possibility of miraculous mercy from God, which I think very possible. Any debate we have will really be about this and I don’t believe either of us will be able to prove our positions.
2) The context of this topic is going to be really Catholic and with the Catholics (and some Protestants) there is not always a sharp distinction between things like worship, repentance, and prayer. Prayer can be an action.

Repentance has to be an action, it can be things like talking to a priest or going on pilgrimage (which would seem unhelpful) but it can also be caring for the poor and giving back stolen things (which you would find helpful).

3) There is no real alternative except things we will both have to make up, prayer and spirituality have always been part of human society. There is no “control set” as it were.

Also, in general our disagreement is really starting to be the point of me being a Christian and you being an atheist. We might be well served to move on to another topic.


Peace

Angela