I’m not a Christian.
{Jack raises hand, perhaps a bit late.}
I’m not really sure about the mutual-falsifiable question. I tend toward the “burden of proof” being on anyone who insists that prayer are efficacious. But there is quite a bit of material here that I have not yet read in depth, only skimmed.
Not to highJACK the thread, but I wonder isf any issues are evenly “burdened” with the burden of proof. It may be good to explore this general question elsewhere.
TBJ
Hi, Jack! (heh heh)
My argument that the burden of proof is fairly equally distributed occurred after developing in the course of many posts the unconventional notion that the process of prayer can be considered without reference to anything supernatural.
I do not believe in the supernatural. Like “sharp-cornered spheres”, it’s a phrase without meaning to me.
Most atheists do not believe in the supernatural either. While I will not attempt to speak for any given one of you, it’s my general observation that atheists, if they can explain a phenomenon with reference only to things they consider to exist, consider that phenomenon to be a natural phenomenon. (Sure makes sense to me).
I do not consider God to be supernatural. I do not consider God to be an entity. I do not consider prayer to be a supernatural phenomenon. I do consider prayer to be a valid process that yields pragmatically useful and genuinely valid results.
That atheists find other, non-theistically-loaded, phrases concepts and terms to refer to (at least some) elements of the same process is not only not a problem, it is to be expected. Damn, if something is real, pervasive, and of this world, and an atheist is real and of this world, I would expect the atheist to have some familiarity with it!
The goal is not to get atheists to start using theistic terms, but to recognize that (some) theistic people are talking about things that are not non-real.
I suppose the goal is also to develop and defend the notion that I haven’t merely hijacked the terminologies used by theistic people and glued it onto different concepts and twisted definitions around to justify using words for things other than what they “really mean”, but that instead there have historically been genuine human experiences of things that are real, the describing of which laid the bedrock for the sets of terms and phrases used by religion (even if most religions, being organized institutionalized and through huge swaths of recorded human history structures of social control, turned them into fairytale phrases to be repeated by uncomprehending people… see posts I’ve made here and elsewhere comparing organized religion to taxidermy).
The conventional atheist “take” on religion is that huge numbers of people have ascribed to a belief in things that simply do not exist. I’m saying “hold on, I’m not entirely contradicting you, but I think there’s actually a ‘there there’ underneath the mold”