Prayer Booths

[beso]

http://topekasnews.com/kansas-town-installs-phone-prayer-booths-residents-can-call-god-whenever-need/

Since their inception and installation in inner-city testing areas several years ago, crime in the area has decreased in near proportionate manner to the number of people using the prayer booths. With such favorable trends, city council was quick to appropriate more land as ‘park space’ to install these ‘public service monuments of arts and counseling to the people of Kansas City’.

The move asks its own questions that are probably at least as interesting as their answers.

[Old_Geezer]

Folk feel they need a booth to speak to their God ? Does it only listen if one is in a particular designated place ? Is this like the smoking huts one finds outside company building so folk can go and do their thing there and not disturb others ?

[mibn2cweus]

Who knows? Toto might find a suitable use for it. :o/

[naomi24]

Pleased I'm not a ratepayer there.

[boxtops]

I hope they're multifaith prayer booths, then.

[vulcan42]

//The Chiefs are playing the Broncos. I forgot to go pray last Monday and for all I know, that is why [Peyton] Manning’s ankle MRI came back negative. If I had prayed, maybe God would have sprained it a little more and he would be out this week.”\\
Another example of Christian love and compassion.

[AB Editor]

Surely this is the answer to broken window theory? They've invested in an area, so it "feels" like someone is looking after it or even keeping an eye on it. People don't commit so many crimes when they think they're being "watched".

Or am I talking nonsense?

[LazyGun]

Interesting story. Just loving the claims associated with it, that everyone seems to take as read. Unevidenced, unattributed and unclear claims like this one, for instance;
"The Topeka News reports that since the booths were installed just a few months ago, they have been receiving over 100,000 callers each week."

The Topeka news reports it? Where did they get the figures from? What do they mean when they say 100,000 callers? Is that 100,000 callers using these prayer booths? Prayers to God? Calls to Topeka News? What?

Its the same about the claims of reduced crime rates, too. Who says the crime rates have been reduced? What's the evidence to support it? How have they demonstrated causation over simple correlation? I do know that such installations would be the target for just about every bored vandal out there, and does anyone else think its creepy to show women on their knees when showing pictures of how this prayer booth works?

As Vulcan referred to in his post, it also illustrates just how selfish and petty and vindictive some christians can be. One woman, without any sense of apparent irony, exercised her christian principles to pray that an opposing quarterback on a football team opposing her own suffer from a more serious ankle injury!

The author of the piece in the Topeka News, the rather grandly named Haywood Bynum III+ "leads the charge of faith at Bible Fellowship Church". Hardly an impartial observer then :) And some of his previous stories raise eyebrows;

A story, carried nowhere else, that scientists in fukushima have developed a chimera between bird and dog as a pet; That a recent massive coronal sun activity was caused "by the gays", and some weird diatribe about evolution being wrong "because squirrels have not developed mecha-armour to cross the road".

I mean the man reads like a satirical invention. If he is real and genuine, I fear for rationality in small town USA, I really do :)

[sandyRoe]

Haywood Bynum the first must have been a man of overweening arrogance to have named his son as he did. And the said son seems cut from the same cloth.

[dr b]

This article is satire. Consider other articles he's written:

http://topekasnews.com/cheating-denver-broncos-flood-stadium-marijuana-smoke-cause-dizzied-chiefs-lose-sunday-night-game/

Take a joke, folks.

[mikey4444]

I've never understood why religious people need all that paraphernalia, just to talk to their God. I was brought up a Catholic, and we were taught that God was "omnipresent" So why do these people have to go to a special place ? Surely they could pray anywhere, and him upstairs would hear them.

[tamborine]

^^ thats the clever security of catholicism, mickey

[ludwig]

This is from the same publication..

http://topekasnews.com/giant-fukushima-mutant-turtle-finally-captured-japanese-military/

[LazyGun]

@ dr.b If you read my post - I did wonder if it was a satirical invention. I took another look at the "Topekas News" website, and have now realised that the whole site is a parody site - not just that author, not just that article ;)

Being too dim today - need more coffee, evidently

[ludwig]

^ Not that dim LG. Anything's possible in America. I had to check a few other articles before I was sure.

[jomifl]

/ crime in the area has decreased in near proportionate manner to the number of people using the prayer booths. /
In my day they used to call them prison cells...

[sandyRoe]

Wasn't it in Milton Keynes that followers of Transcendental Meditation reduced crime by praying for the wrongdoers?
and the goodly unGodly claim prayer doesn't work

[LazyGun]

@Sandy Well, I cannot recall anything specifically linked to Milton Keynes, but I do know that TM proponents have long claimed the benefits of the so- called Maharishi Effect - the notion that individual consciousness can affect the collective consciousness of the surrounding society.

Some proponents have gone further - back in the 70s, they made the claim that if just 1% of a society engaged in TM, there was a corresponding reduction in the crime rate - perhaps because all the criminals were engaged in TM? :)

The big problem with their claim ,and the reason why most would dismiss it out of hand as nonsense, is the lack of substantiation for such a claim. No evidence has been provided to demonstrate a causal link, or even a strong correlation.

Claims without substance or evidence can be dismissed without evidence, and this claim is high on the list of the nonsense. They will be telling us people can fly next through the power of the mind- oh wait, they already do with claims of Yogic Flying...

[LazyGun]

Something went wrong with the vid link i attempted to post, i think. Try again...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO8HI884_zI

[jomifl]

LG, ever since I came across yogic 'flying' I thought it a wonderful example of reality denial. If someone can convince themselves that something that looks like aerobics for amputees constitutes flying then they can convince themselves of anything. But more to the point it demonstrates that these cults cannot be taken seriously. If the culmination of thousands of years of oriental mental progress is to be able jump very badly. then it looks like searching elsewhere for enlightenment might be more rewarding..

[sandyRoe]

You are all worse than Doubting Thomas. You've been presented with evidence of Yogic Flying and still you won't accept the evidence in front of you.