{"id":619,"date":"2013-03-31T19:31:17","date_gmt":"2013-03-31T08:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/?p=619"},"modified":"2013-03-31T19:31:17","modified_gmt":"2013-03-31T08:31:17","slug":"jacques-rousseau-on-the-church-of-englands-lying-for-jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/2013\/03\/31\/jacques-rousseau-on-the-church-of-englands-lying-for-jesus\/","title":{"rendered":"Jacques Rousseau on the Church of England&#8217;s lying for Jesus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/freesociety\/church-of-england-lying-for-jesus\/#sthash.azBHwnpB.dpbs\">My colleague Jacques Rousseau has a post <\/a>on how the Church of England has engaged in meretricious propaganda relating to a recent survey that it commissioned. The survey asks, among other things, what you would pray for if you believed prayer worked (irrespective of whether or not you actually do\u00a0pray!). The question was: \u201cIrrespective of whether you currently pray or not, if you were to pray for something at the moment, What would it be for?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t pray, and I don&#8217;t believe that prayer works, but I might still have given some sort of answer. Why not? It is assuming a situation in which I <em>would<\/em> pray, which I&#8217;d only do if I thought prayer worked. In such a situation, there might be many things that I&#8217;d pray for. But nothing is entailed about whether I actually think prayer does work.<\/p>\n<p>And yet, the fact that people gave answers to this question is used to &#8220;demonstrate&#8221; that 4 out of 5 people believe in the power of prayer. This is\u00a0unashamed intellectual dishonesty in presenting the results. Whether or not this trickery was intended even when the question was developed is more difficult to tell. Either way, it&#8217;s not a good look for the dear old C of E.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My colleague Jacques Rousseau has a post on how the Church of England has engaged in meretricious propaganda relating to a recent survey that it commissioned. The survey asks, among other things, what you would pray for if you believed prayer worked (irrespective of whether or not you actually do\u00a0pray!). The question was: \u201cIrrespective of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,13],"tags":[250,249],"class_list":["post-619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-news","category-religion","tag-intellectual-dishonesty","tag-prayer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}