Hacker News Reader

Comment by tapan_jk | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those things that you are hopeful it exists, but you also pray that people won't need.

It's so badly needed. For some US-centric perspective: "the almost 750,000 people who live with kidney failure are 1% of the U.S. Medicare population but account for roughly 7% of the Medicare budget." [0] This is obviously just one part of the issue; I don't need to describe how attritional and life-altering chronic kidney disease and, subsequently, hemo-/peritoneal-dialysis are.

[0] https://pharm.ucsf.edu/kidney/need/statistics#:~:text=Costs,....

People already do need it! In the US alone, about a half million people are on dialysis. There are many health and functional consequences to both intermittent and peritoneal dialysis; they are not exactly benign treatments.

Like the artificial bee that Amazon patented.

The big problem being that prayer doesn't work.

If prayer stops people forgetting about the problems of the world, I'd say it does.

Religión is considered by the common people to be true, by the wise to be false, and by the rulers to be useful. --Seneca

(In fact that's too cynical on Seneca's part. Religión is useful for, one imagines, the majority of it's member's, who gain among other things social connection and a safety net from it.)

This is a generalization. Go on /r/exmuslim, /r/exjw, and /r/exmormon on reddit to find countless stories of people from whom religion provides quite the opposite of a safety net. If often as not creates a source of fear, emotional and physical danger, ostracization, and shunning. Not to mention extreme cases like honor killings. You may as well say North Korea gives you a safety net and community (as long as you ignore the ways that it doesn't).

I don't dispute that those things happen and are horrible, but I believe "as often as not" is incorrect. What's your sample? If your sample is a forum where people tell conversion-to-atheism stories, it's not representative. Almost of the religious people I've met feel that way about their church.

Admittedly, my sample is surely not representative either. In particular people stuck in a church community against their will probably don't bring it up a lot with people they don't know very well.

FWIW I'm an atheist. I recently wished I was able to invoke some kind of God concept while talking to a colleague who this year lost her mother, her boyfriend, and two other family members to Covid. I intend to look for something entitled Prayer for Atheists, if it exists.

I've seen this quote before, but I haven't been able to find it myself. Which text is it from?

Here's one from a letter to Lucilius. Seneca is easy to misquote.

"Indeed, no man can be good without the help of God. Can one rise superior to fortune unless God helps him to rise? He it is that gives noble and upright counsel." - Seneca

Interesting! A lot of people on wikiquote[1] appear to believe it's a misattribution. I've only ever heard it secondhand.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Seneca_the_Younger#.22Tru...

Well if prayer make you go through hard times and give you peace and hope instead of going into depressing than yes it does work.

Prayer doesn't prevent malfunctioning kidneys, yours or those of random strangers, as far as I know. So, it doesn't work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com