Poles apart

Last evening my wife and I had drinks on our neighbor's newly resurfaced deck. The sky was beautiful at sunset. As we talked I watched the buddhist prayer flags attached to a bamboo pole on the corner of his deck wave in the brisk breeze. The idea of these prayer flags is that the wind will carry the prayers away across the land bringing blessing on everyone that the breeze reaches.

Our neighbor lives in the eastern half of our two-dwelling townhouse. We live in the west side. Each house is the mirror image of the other and both are three stories tall. So my wife and I have an almost identical deck on our side and in the corner of our deck is my pole. Mine is made of aluminum and has a set of rods pointing up and down on the top, a configuration called a ground plane antenna. As I sat there having drinks and talking about life, religion, politics and home improvement projects I marveled at the difference between our two poles.

In an earlier blog I made an off hand comment about cell phones being a more effective prayer machine than standard prayer. It wasn't really a joke. People have always wanted to connect with people far away, loved ones, business associates, children especially, god. Buddhists want to bless the world with their prayer flags. And ham radio operators want to connect with people around the world to see if they can do it and to prove to themselves and the world that electromagnetic radiation is real even though we can't see it, feel it, taste it, hear it, or smell it. But, using science we can hear it. We can build a device that picks the invisible vibrations out of the air and turn them into sounds: a radio.

Where, is the prayer radio? Prayer has been around a long time. People have used it for centuries. And there is no evidence that it does anything. In medicine prayer has been looked at many times to see if it hastened healing and no effect has ever been found, except one minor detrimental effect when people with heart attacks did worse if they knew they were being prayed for. If they didn't know they were being prayed for there was no effect. Yet people keep praying.

So, if you would, imaging yourself broken down along side a remote highway with a broken axel on your car. You can't fix it and your can't drive it. You need help. What do you do? You pray. But you do it by dialing a number on your prayer machine, that works by electromagnetic radiation, and standing there in the middle of nowhere, no wires, to smoke signals, just you and this little device and you send out a prayer to your nearest tow truck company to come and get you. Or you could use the older method and just send out an unaided prayer, using only your hands held together in front of you as an antenna. What do you think? Both are remote ways of communicating but which one works best? Which one would you use?

And why does it work? It works because hundreds of thousands of people looked carefully at how the world actually works and took notes. Then they tried an experiment to see if they had observed accurately. If the experiment worked they went on with new observations and experiments, new charts filled with observations in the form of numbers, until they knew enough about how things operated to build a cell phone. It took science.

Religion starts with the answers and avoids looking at things might conflict with those answers. In terms of making the world a better place, the scientific approach will get us there far sooner than any religion. The Enlightenment is still dragging us forward away from poverty, illness, famine, darkness, back breaking labor and even war. If we had relied on religion and prayer to make the world a better place, we'd still be in the middle ages.

So next time you are stuck and need a helping hand, I suggest you use your cell phone if you want results. And if you want to send messages of love and blessings around the world, why not really do it using a ham radio, so that hovering around us all will be loving electromagnetic radiation bringing the message of peace and progress.