See the gas price board on the right? This is from April, aka “the good old days,” when regular was under $4.00 a gallon even in San Francisco. Back then, someone called Rocky Twyman decided the solution to high gas prices was to ask God to lower them:
Twyman […] staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday [April 25], asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday [April 23], with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in.
He repeated the performance again on May 28. Well guess what, he was successful! Yes, according to The BBC, Twyman is claiming:
…the credit for the recent sharp drop in the US price of petrol.
Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April.
Since then, the average price of what the US calls gasoline has fallen from more than $4 a gallon to $3.80.
Well then, I guess it’s time we atheists admitted we were wrong and that God really does exist. If prayers really do work, we must have been wrong all this time, yes? Let’s take a look at the (no doubt) solid evidence that prayer worked in this case. I got this graph from GasBuddy.com, showing the prices in San Francisco and DC (the places where he prayed back in April), as well as the US average:
Click the graph for a bigger image. I’ve added a couple of arrows to indicate when the prayers took place. And as you can see, gas prices came down immediately after the prayer... er, rose despite the prayers. Actually, rose even more steeply immediately after the prayers on May 28. And they’re still higher than they were at any time before the prayers started.
You know, looking at this graph, it’s almost as if prayer is completely useless at influencing gas prices.
Did that rain they were praying for in Alabama (or was it Georgia?) ever come?
Boy skeptico, thats strange, you mean when you actually look at the data it tells a different story than what the God zombie is claiming? How strange.
Posted by: techskeptic | August 17, 2008 at 12:49 PM
Christians ignore their own principles anyhow. Why would any god lower gas prices? Don't religions go against materialism? Praying for lower gas prices is more along the lines of greed.
Posted by: Mark | August 17, 2008 at 05:11 PM
God never heals amputees.
Posted by: Amanda | August 17, 2008 at 05:23 PM
30,000 children will die of starvation today alone, but god decided to lower gas prices in the homosexual capital of the world for yuppies with SUV's that want to have those few extra cents to get the super-sized big mac meal rather than just two double cheeseburgers.
All together now!!!...
Our God is an awesome God
He reigns from heaven above
With wisdom...
Posted by: brian | August 17, 2008 at 05:27 PM
bring, God loves irony
Posted by: sam | August 17, 2008 at 06:03 PM
why would God lower gas prices to a bunch of tight-moneyed "christians"
Posted by: wei | August 17, 2008 at 06:16 PM
Well it did work it is just that god is a bit slow.It obviously takes god about 3 months to get around to answering.
Posted by: paul | August 17, 2008 at 07:18 PM
Of course prayer works... Every night I pray that no elephants come into my garden and ruin my flowerbeds. So far, So good!
Posted by: John | August 17, 2008 at 07:51 PM
Maybe god lowers prices by affecting only one of the hidden variables driving prices. You can't really expect that he/she/it do it by just setting the pump price -- so consider the delay to be typical for this kind of system given the location in the chain of the actual hidden variable involved.
Hey! Maybe we can work backwards and try to determine what that variable must be; perhaps god h'self has just given us the ultimate clue.
Fascinating. But I wonder how many other people were doing things a little more closely related to gas during that time like, for example, dumping futures.
Posted by: Gamut | August 17, 2008 at 07:56 PM
Nooooo.... no no no!
you guys have got this all backwards. Of course god exists. IN FACT, this is EVIDENCE that god exists. You see, praying for cheaper gas prices is a very selfish thing to do. God is just and fair and he would not bend the world to one man's prayers, especially if its about gas prices.
What this guy has done is deplorable and really makes christians look bad. What's really happening is that god is friking pissed off about this guy praying so selfishly so he decided that gas prices should go up. It all makes sense if you indoctrinated athiests would open your mind a bit to logic, very very simple logic rather than making your judgments based on objective empirical data.
Posted by: Salmon | August 17, 2008 at 08:49 PM
Atheism wins again!
or not
Posted by: Snoglobe | August 17, 2008 at 09:08 PM
It looks like Snoglobe got the point of this post!
Or not...
Posted by: Q | August 17, 2008 at 09:28 PM
Why didn't they just pray to have their cars not need gas? Too hard? How about pray for winning lottery tickets with which to buy gas (no less venal)? Why don't they just pray to teleport themselves to their destinations instead of using cars at all?
Posted by: Pray4brains | August 17, 2008 at 10:08 PM
A bumper sticker I saw says, "The hard work of one does more than the prayers of millions."
This seems to be a paraphrase of "One person working for peace will accomplish more than a thousand praying for peace."
I have nothing against prayer, if it increases one's awareness and compassion. Buddhist prayers seem to have that effect on me - when I 'breathe in compassion' it feels like I am readying myself to actually DO something. So many pious 'Christians' pray in such a way as to make it seem as if they are telling 'God' what to do. "Lower gas prices, God Almighty," they plead, "Because they inconvenience me, and we should never have to be fully responsible or even aware of our huge footprint on the rest of the earth."
Feh.
Posted by: ELBSeattle | August 17, 2008 at 10:17 PM
Well, duuuh! He should have prayed to Octanius, the patron saint of fractionated petrochemicals!
Does anyone else think "specialist" patron saints are just like the Roman pantheon of gods? Absolutely no difference, as far as I can see. If God is supposed to be the one with the magic powers, why do we need to pray to some middle manager?
It's like icons - they're graven images as far as I can see. Of course Catholics say "oh, no, we don't pray to the STATUE of the Virgin Mary - that's just a focus!" What's the difference? Did native Americans think a totem pole was an actual god - or just a FOCUS?
I am very interested in the Catholic Church - the more I look into it, the more I see echoes of pantheistic Rome. I'd be very interested to know how nuns' habits stack up against Vestal Virgins' robes - they do have the same "quirk" that their virginity is supposedly magically restored on taking the veil, regardless of its former state.
Posted by: Big Al | August 18, 2008 at 02:59 AM
Maybe it's a conspiracy, the gas prices did indeed go down, but the oil companies kept them high.
Oew, darn those godless oil company excecutices..
Posted by: Sven | August 18, 2008 at 03:42 AM
Big Al:
Dawkins addresses the polytheism of the Catholic Church in the second chapter of The God Delusion in a rather humerous manner.
Posted by: Bourgeois_Rage | August 18, 2008 at 06:26 AM
Thanks for the heads-up, Bourgeois. I'll have to read through again. It's a book I never keep far away.
Peter Hitchens' God Is Not Great is, I must admit, another favourite.
Well, I just waited for the Almighty One to strike me down with a righteous bolt of lightning, in His infinite mercy... but the old bastard must be saving me for worse things, I suppose.
Posted by: Big Al | August 18, 2008 at 07:40 AM
Peter Hitchens' God Is Not Great is, I must admit, another favourite.
So great that you attributed authorship to this neocon
Im just foolin with you, but christopher hitchens may get mad. :)
ELB,
A bumper sticker I saw says, "The hard work of one does more than the prayers of millions."
Thats perfect, i'm totally amking one of those!
I may start it out with "Piss a Conservative off..."
Posted by: Techskeptic | August 18, 2008 at 09:01 AM
Kinda, but more the genii loci than the big ones like Jupiter and Neptune. Personally, I think the link is, in many cases, stronger to non-Roman paganism - see, for example, Brighid / Bride / St Bridget. Plus there's the whole relic-worship thing that looks like it has its roots in certain Northern European funerary practices involving assemblages of skeletal materials and / or mummified remains, practised from the Neolithic through the Iron Age.
It's a bit of a mongrel, really.
Well, the whole thing was re-designed as a replacement Imperial religion under Constantine, so yeah...
Posted by: Dunc | August 19, 2008 at 04:54 AM
HOW HOW HOW is it possible to be this stupid? Prices skyrocket, demand plummets and prices go down. Add to that an upcoming Presidential election and, well, prices ALWAYS fall before an election. Always. And they sure didn't fall much. And besides, why don't these guys, if god really does listen, turn their attention to world peace? This is utterly stupid.
Posted by: Scy | August 19, 2008 at 02:14 PM
Dunc - not only pseudo-pantheistic, but also seems to be some kind of throw-back to human sacrifice - all that Jesus on the cross and blood and eating him business.
Posted by: yakaru | August 19, 2008 at 03:51 PM
You cannot petition the Lord, with prayer
Posted by: web design company | August 19, 2008 at 03:55 PM
Praying for lower gas prices is more along the lines of greed.
Silly, you don't pray for lower gas prices for yourself! You pray that gas prices will be lowered to assuage the suffering of widows and orphans. If gas prices go down for you as well, then that's just an unexpected side effect.
He should have prayed to Octanius, the patron saint of fractionated petrochemicals!
That would tick off http://www.luckymojo.com/saintjude.html>Saint Jude, who I think is in charge of stopping Global Warming. My experience is that it's safer to run everything past God directly. If there's a squabble between saints with conflicting goals then you don't want to get dragged into the middle of it.
Posted by: chaos_engineer | August 19, 2008 at 05:08 PM
Techskeptic, I hang my head in shame. All I can say in mitigation is that I have a good friend called Peter, and I'd just spend the night down the pub in Hitchin (Hertfordshire, SE England) with him!
Dunc, some interesting insights there. As an aside, I understand the bishop's mitre actually comes directly from the Mithraic cult.
And then there's all the Horus/Jesus parallels I'm sure you know...
And of course Christmas is celebrated on Dec 25 as a perfect replacement for the Roman Saturnalia festival...
Can you spell "syncresis"? I knew you could!
Posted by: Big Al | August 21, 2008 at 03:48 AM
hahaha loving your work.
have to say though you wanna try living with the UK atheists fuel prices for a while before you whinge too much about it. prayer seems to still be working pre-etty well for you guys.
give it another month or two of steady rises and you'll be up to, hmm yea, HALF what we pay in the UK.
Posted by: dog | August 23, 2008 at 12:34 AM
Yes, and the UK has a fantastic public transit system to make up for it. American public transportation has been steadily dismantled for decades or longer, until it's mostly relegated to the large cities and a dwindling amount of railway stations.
Posted by: Tom Foss | September 06, 2008 at 04:21 PM
Tom, the public transportation system in the UK is second to none as long as you live in London. It's useless if you live anywhere out of town like I do.
Last time I went to catch a bus into town, I waited half an hour after the allotted time and then walked instead.
A mile and a half down the road, the bus went past me.
A car is the only realistic option.
Posted by: Big Al | September 07, 2008 at 12:54 AM