Church of the Churchless

Lessons for living from a fictional assassin: the "Gray Man"

Here's how far down the churchless rabbit hole I've burrowed: I'm able to find existential "spiritual" meaning in a book series about an unstoppable assassin, the Gray Man, a.k.a. Court Gentry. 

Court Gentry is known as The Gray Man – a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible, and then fading away. And he always hits his target. But there are forces more lethal than Gentry in the world. And in their eyes, Gentry has just outlived his usefulness.

Now, he is going to prove that for him, there is no gray area between killing for a living– and killing to stay alive.

I've devoured the first two books in the Gray Man series, "The Gray Man" and "On Target." Well, I've devoured them slowly, because I enjoy reading about the Gray Man's exploits so much, I don't want the books (and the series) to end.

This is unusual for me. I'm a fast reader. Typically, when I get engrossed in a gripping spy/ killer/ espionage book I read it as quickly as I can, because I want to find out how the ending of the plot turns out.

But something about the Gray Man appeals to me on a deeper philosophical level. Again, this is weird, because the fictional Court Gentry seemingly isn't much like the real person Me. 

Seemingly. 

This excerpt from "The Gray Man" points to the main thing I like about Court Gentry. He goes through life largely clueless about why stuff is happening to him, but he manages to carry on just fine anyway.

The fight was on. The fact that Court didn't have a clue what they were fighting over was a nonissue. He did not waste a single brain cell pondering this turn of events.

Court Gentry was a killer of men.

These were men.

And that's all there was to it.

...Court rolled left, emerged from behind the pallet with his M4 raised, and fired a long burst at McVee. The man's goggled face slammed back against the wall, and his H&K dropped away from his fingertips.

The black-clad operator fell back on the bench, dead.

Gentry had killed him, and he had no idea why.

Beautiful! Not the killing, really, but the Gray Man's realization that the most reliable understanding about reality is that it isn't understandable. 

Sure, Court Gentry knows a lot about the shadowy world he inhabits after being betrayed by his CIA handlers. But in his day-to-day efforts to complete a mission for hire, and stay alive while doing so, he often has no idea what is going on. Yet this doesn't stop him from dealing in a marvelously spontaneous way with whatever is happening without an evident why.

Gentry is the Wandering Taoist Sage of world-class assassins.

Frequently he unexpectedly falls off (or is pushed off) cliffs. Bloodied, bruised, bewildered, he gets up, assesses the situation, and draws a new course of action out of his almost infinitely large bag of survival tricks. I liked this passage from "On Target."

Maurice had another saying that popped into Court's mind right then. "A plan is just a big list of shit that's not going to happen." Court had found this to be the one constant in his missions, in his life. Plans were good. Plans were necessary, but ultimately, most plans were bullshit.

Most people would consider that, at best, the Gray Man occupies a realm of moral ambiguity. However, the way I see Court Gentry, he is an intensely ethical person who doesn't care if anyone else can read his moral compass. 

Here is the Gray Man engaged in a conversation with a high-minded female International Criminal Court staffer whose life he is trying to save in Sudan. She calls him by his code name, Six.

    "Six, I think a lot of very bad people started out as good people, don't you?"
    "I don't know."
    "Be careful you don't become that which you hate."
    "I have no idea what you are talking about."
    "Yes, you do. I believe you. I believe that you believe you are here for the right reasons. Maybe in your head you are. But this place needs people who are saving lives, not taking lives."
    Court stopped her from stumbling over an anthill in the dark. He led her around it by the arm, and then immediately let go. "Saving a life and taking a life are not opposites. Sometimes they are two sides of the same coin. I may take lives from time to time, but I wouldn't do it unless I felt I was saving some, too."
    "Sounds like you're trying to justify it to yourself."
    "I have to justify it to myself. But I don't have to justify anything to you. People like you will never understand. Waste of time to try to convince you."

Today I was driving into town, idly musing about some issues related to my civic activism efforts here in Salem, Oregon. I was feeling a bit anxious about how other people would look upon my actions, worrying what they'd think about me, concerned that what I was doing would be viewed negatively.

Then the Gray Man popped into my consciousness. I instantly felt way better.

Court Gentry does what needs doing. He is motivated by what he feels to be right, not by anyone else's conception of rightness and wrongness. Sure, he makes mistakes. But the Gray Man learns from what goes wrong and keeps on doing what is right. With boundless confidence.

Not a bad philosophy of life, not bad at all.

    "American, I know the Janjaweed; they destroyed my village, they raped my two sisters, killed one, let the other live,  but she crazy now after what they did. They killed my father, too. Only my mother and I left, and she at the camp at Dirra. If the Janjaweed come, nothing we can do. They have guns, camels, horses. If they come, we are all gonna die."
    Court shook his head. "We can do this. These Janjaweed are killers, but they are cowards. They don't come to fight; they come to slaughter. We make it tough for them, bloody some noses, kill a couple of them even, and they will break and run. They aren't looking for a battle, believe me. These guys kill women and children for fun. We can do this."
    "It doesn't matter if they're not real soldiers, they have guns! We don't have anything to stop them with."
    "Yes, we do."
    "We have me."
    The kid's eyes grew wide. "You crazy, man," he said, a little smile growing on his face.
    Smiling at a time like this meant Bishara was a bit crazy himself. Court could tell immediately that he'd be able to work with this kid.

Why I stayed with a religion for 35 years

Today I responded to a person from India who had some questions about my experience with Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the spiritual guru-based group I belonged to for about 35 years. Here's what I said:

_____, sorry for the delay in replying. I’m not qualified to “guide you through it all,” but I can offer some thoughts in response to the questions you posed. 

The way I see it, one reason people don’t see through religions is because they strongly want to believe in a happy fantasy. That was one reason why I stayed with RSSB so long. I really liked the promise that the guru would reveal to me the deepest secrets of the universe, and that we’d journey together through higher supernatural regions of reality to Sach Khand, where I’d enjoy eternal bliss in my soul-drop form. 

I also liked the supposedly scientific nature of RSSB and Sant Mat meditation. Disciples are told not to take anything on faith, except, perhaps, enough faith to follow the instructions of the guru. I did that. I meditated every day for 35 years, much of that time for 2 or 2 1/2 hours, but almost always for at least an hour. 

I was a strict vegetarian. I didn’t drink alcohol or use drugs. 

Because RSSB doesn’t promise quick results, the path back to God supposedly taking up to four lifetimes, I felt like I should give the meditation practice many years to bear fruit. But after three decades or so, I began to question whether The Path was a genuine one. 

Part of my skepticism came from seeing how high-level sevadars [volunteers] in the RSSB organization acted. I knew that I wasn’t close to being perfect, but I’d thought that RSSB representatives and people at the Dera [RSSB headquarters in India] who were very close to the guru must have developed into advanced spiritual beings.

Well, my experience was that they were as flawed and self-centered as I was. Maybe more so. So that added to my disillusionment with RSSB and the guru. If he wasn’t transforming the disciples closest to him, what were the chances of me being transformed or enlightened? Plus, the more I learned about Gurinder Singh, the guru, the more I came to see him as just another imperfect human being, not “God in human form.”

I also believe that social pressures affect religiously-minded people. I got to know a lot of people during my 35 years in the RSSB organization. I enjoyed those friendships, and the good feelings at RSSB meetings. At first it was hard for me to break off from all that. But then I realized that if someone wasn’t going to be my friend any more just because I no longer believed in RSSB, they weren’t much of a friend to begin with. 

Probably Indians are even more affected by social pressures, since many initiates are part of a family where many (or most) people also are part of RSSB. Given the close-knit nature of Indian families, this must make it even tougher to break away from a tradition that is shared by family members and is so important to them. Us Americans are quite independent, so going against a family tradition usually isn’t a big deal for us. 

(It is, though for people in some religions, such as Mormonism. I’ve heard that it can be very difficult for a Mormon to disavow their religious faith, as other Mormons tend to shame them or have nothing to do with them.)

I don’t know if what I’ve said here will be of much help to you. In the end, each of us has to decide what to believe in and base our life around. Interestingly, I don’t really feel like I’ve changed my life goals. I’m still committed to learning as much as possible about the mysterious universe we’re a part of, and I’m still a big lover of science and the scientific method.

But in science, you go where the evidence leads. You change your mind when a hypothesis doesn’t appear to be true. I did the experiment of Sant Mat/RSSB meditation for 35 years. I didn’t get the hypothesized results. And in all that time, I never came across anybody who convincingly had achieved those results either. So I feel completely justified in going in a different direction.

I still meditate every day. I’m still a vegetarian. I’ve been practicing Tai Chi for twelve years and enjoy Taoist philosophy. So I’m still a seeker of truth. I’m just seeing it in a different way than I did before.

Recently I put up a video of my 2-minute “deconversion” talk at the Portland Atheist Festival. It echoes some of the things I’ve said in this message. See:

http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2016/07/my-2-minute-deconversion-talk-at-2016-portland-atheist-festival.html

     — Brian

My 2-minute "deconversion" talk at 2016 Portland Atheist Festival

Thank you, Portland Atheist Festival, for making the "deconversion" talks available. Here's my tale from May 2016 about how I went from meditating hours a day in a quest for inner soul travel to embracing wonderful everyday reality.

 

Free will is an illusion: convincing Sam Harris video

Below is a 9-minute video that encapsulates Sam Harris' views about free will.

Which, in short, is that it is an illusion. And that the world would be better off if people recognized this, rather than wrongly believing that humans are able to freely choose what to do at any given moment.

The background music in the video is a bit distracting. But Harris' message is so convincing, and the video is so well done (aside, perhaps, from the music selection), I urge you to watch it.

Now, I realize that some people don't look upon free will in the way that Harris does.

Harris, like me, considers that free will means just that: we are free to will what we want to do. This is how the legal system looks upon free will. It also is how virtually everybody who believes in free will looks upon it: as the capacity to do this rather than that. 

The alternative view of free will makes little, if any, sense. Namely, that while we are not free to choose what we will, if there is nothing constraining us from carrying out that determined choice, then we have "free will." 

Well, this viewpoint simply means that humans have as much free will as a well-functioning computer does. Absent software or hardware problems, a computer is able to carry out the tasks that it has been programmed to do. But does this mean it has free will?

No. Likewise, Harris says that because we live in a deterministic universe, human actions also are determined by all of the influences acting upon us from birth onward (even before birth, of course, given genetic influences). 

If you watch the video and find flaws in Harris' arguments, please leave a comment explaining what you think he got wrong. Like I said, I find the video highly convincing, but I'm open to hearing reasons why free will isn't an illusion. So far, I just haven't come across any convincing ones.

Sam Harris - Free Will from The Inspiration Journey on Vimeo.

Tai Chi "sensing skills" -- a good guide to harmonious living

I'm a dozen years into learning Tai Chi. Which just means, I'm not a beginner. Tai Chi, an internal-style martial art, is so exquisitely subtle, most practitioners never feel like they have come close to fathoming it. 

But every class I take, I get further insights into what Tai Chi is all about. Which really is what life is all about. (Links to my previous posts about Tai Chi can be found in "Me and Tai Chi -- eight blog posts about 'Taoism in motion.'"

Last Thursday I experienced a better understanding of the key notion of sensing skills. Robin Gamble writes:

Genuine Tai Chi Chuan is very efficient at growing this ability to understand others because one of the primary training tools in the art is something called “push hands”, which requires you to give up your own motives and just listen and follow your partners moves, at least in the beginning stages.

It’s an exercise where your hands and wrists are in flowing contact with your partners, and in the initial stages, no force is used. All you have to do is flow in a circular fashion and listen to your partner’s force, or intention. You may even close your eyes to enhance the benefit of sensing.

This method was originally developed so as to be able to sense the intentions of your opponent in combat and to then exploit their intentions with a suitable counter attack. However, Tai Chi Chuan is adaptable and now the same skills can be used to develop listening skills for interpersonal applications.

Agreed. One of the reasons I like Tai Chi so much is that it embodies some great philosophical principles about how to get along with other people, and deal effectively with our everchanging world. 

Consider someone being pushy towards you.

It may feel like they're on the other side of a door, leaning hard on it, trying to get into your personal space. You can hear them yelling and banging on the door, wanting to be let in.

OK, says Tai Chi. Unlock the door. Turn the door handle. 

As you stand to one side, their inward-leaning intensity causes them to stumble past you as the door swings open. Helpfully, you aid them on their way by guiding their body forward with your hands. But now they've realized they've gone too far. So they try to stop their momentum and reverse direction to get back to you.

Again, you move in accord with their own intention. Facing their back, you grab their shoulders with your hands, helping them move toward the door they'd just rushed through. 

So helpfully, their reversed energy leads them out the door. You close it. Lock it. Go back to drinking your tea. Harmony restored.

"Push hands" exercises (which really aren't about pushing, nor about hands) are used in Tai Chi to develop sensing skills along the lines of the door-opening/closing analogy I just shared. Feeling the intention of someone else, you harmonize with them, redirecting their energy as necessary rather than forcefully opposing it.

Thursday Eric and I were engaged in an exercise that started out in a ward-off posture akin to that in the photo above: our right arms were connected as we stood facing each other, right legs also forward. 

The purpose of the exercise was to learn how to deal with someone who wants to push into you, such as with a elbow into the chest (not pleasant; elbows are hard and bony). If you merely push back with your own arm, there's a good chance you'll still get an elbow in the chest. 

They could be stronger than you. They could be using their entire body weight to push forward against your arm. Strength against strength is a Tai Chi no-no. 

What Eric and I practiced was a double sort of redirection, a small circle followed by a larger circle, basically. 

When I felt him begin to push inward against my arm, I shifted back into more of an empty stance, my front leg/foot being mostly unweighted. Simultaneously, I used my own right hand and arm to move Eric's arm in a small circle forward and down -- the direction he was moving in with his own energy. 

This interrupted his inward push in a hard-to-describe, but easy-to feel, way. It wasn't exactly like the "through the door" analogy, but pretty close. By aiding his intention, I altered Eric's ability to push into me with his right arm. 

That small circle, me briefly rotating his hand/arm/shoulder forward and down, made it possible for me to then rotate Eric's arm in a larger circle, ending in a arm-bar. 

The more general self-defense lesson is that the Tai Chi A-B-C mantra of Accept - Blend - Control applies in most potentially contentious interpersonal relationships. Usually it is more effective than a Resist - Push Back - Battle sort of approach.

What I found is that the first step, accept, is key. I needed to be aware of what Eric was actually doing and intending, not what I thought he might do. 

Often we overreact when there isn't a real threat. Someone "pushes our button" and we think they're about to harm us. Probably not physically, but emotionally or psychologically. So we push back, needlessly escalating the situation. When Eric and I simply were gently resting our arms together, there was no need for me to do anything.

Tai Chi is almost entirely reactive, in contrast to hard style martial arts, which have a more assertive, attacking approach. If nobody is acting in a genuinely threatening way towards us, there is no need to get out our metaphoric Big Guns.

In fact, I learned that if I anticipated Eric's inward push, pressing on his arm to deflect it before he started to move, then now I was the one at risk of being on the other end of A-B-C, Accept - Blend - Control. Meaning, if I initiated a defensive movement before there was any offensive intent, Eric could then turn the tables on me, redirecting my energy to his advantage.

Simply put, it's almost always better to relax, while being exquisitely sensitive to the intentions of those around you. Don't over-react. Embrace mild threats, whether psychological or physical, with good humor. Do your best to either laugh them off or deflect them as gently as possible.

If someone truly is out to get you, though, act to defend yourself. Wait for them to make the first move. Then respond by recognizing their energy, redirecting it, and controlling them so they don't hurt you or anyone else. 

This applies equally to what usually is the most common form of self-defense: defending ourselves against our own self. 

We imagine unseen enemies when no one is actually threatening us. We worry about being attacked when the only danger is in our own over-active mind. Religions, of course, are notorious for fostering paranoia, with all their fantasies of the Devil, Evil, Hell, Negative Powers, Satan, and such.

And even if we aren't overtly religious, our tendency to over-react to threats that aren't really there can make us fearful about opposing political views, cultures different from ours, people who see the world from a varying perspective than we do. 

It isn't necessary to learn Tai Chi to develop sensing skills.

Do your best to sort out real and present dangers from false and distant dangers. Feel what is actually there before you, not what your anxious, worrisome mind imagines could be there. Yes, there are genuine things we need to be concerned about and deal with. 

The trick is seeing them for what they are, and not mistaking our own internally-generated fear and trembling for the tremors of an actual approaching threat. 

Behold my humble web page devoted to... ME!

Let's see.

There's got to be some way for me to publicize my totally revamped www.BrianHines.com web site and also make this blog post into something philosophical. Or pseudo-spiritual. 

I'll give it a shot...

When I sat down yesterday at my MacBook Pro laptop, determined to replace my hugely outdated old personal web site with an Adobe Spark page, I started with a blank Brian Hines slate. 

Meaning, I had to decide what I wanted to say about myself. 

Since I've got 67 years of living as raw material, obviously I had plenty of options to work with. An Adobe Spark page starts with a title, subtitle, and a photo. Here's how mine looks.

(The entire page is embedded in this link; click on the "back" button of your browser to return to this post.)

Adobe Spark is free. I encourage you to make your own page about yourself. It's an interesting exercise. 

What do you reveal? What do you keep private? What do you want people to know about you? What would you rather they not know?

As noted in a post on my other blog, Adobe Spark doesn't provide many design or formatting options. It is content-driven. Pretty much, all the user gets to decide with an Adobe Spark page is what text, photos, or video get included on the page, and in what order things get presented.

So what is the Story of You? How do you present yourself in a single flowing web page? 

Obviously there isn't any right or wrong answer to these questions. When I clicked on the first "+" button after the title section, I was faced with innumerable options. Yet it only took me a few seconds to decide what to present. 

Whatever felt right. To me. 

That was my sole guide throughout the several hours I spent working on the Adobe Spark page. Which didn't really feel like "work," because I was enjoying myself throughout the process.

I can't say that this was an enlightening experience. I also can't say that it wasn't. I learned some things about myself -- even though this clichéd phrase doesn't really capture the feeling I had after clicking "share" and making the page public. 

I think it is more true to say that we create ourselves through our interactions with the world, than that we reveal ourselves. There's isn't a Real Me inside myself. There's just a bunch of memories, thoughts, emotions, neuronal connections, and such within my brain. 

Which, of course, isn't "my" brain, because there is no me apart from my brain. So when I created a Brian Hines web page, in essence I added to the ever-changing creative history of what I referred to in my subtitle as a "blip of existence."

I'll end with this.

Fairly frequently, I get comments on my Church of the Churchless blog posts along the lines of, "Brian, you're obsessed with attacking religions. You need to get a life, man."

I always think, Huh? What are you talking about?

Very little of my life is spent writing for this blog. I hardly ever think about religions, or the people who embrace them. Read my BrianHines.com web page. There is a link to Church of the Churchless, and another link to a single post on this blog.

That's it. Criticizing religions isn't a big part of my life.

I have very little concern with what almost certainly doesn't exist: God, soul, spirit, heaven, afterlife. Every day I focus on what is right around me -- my wife, dog, house, rural property, citizen activism causes, nature, outdoor elliptical bike, friends, family, television, red wine, legal (in Oregon) marijuana, and so much else that offers pleasure and meaning to me.

So again, I recommend playing around with an Adobe Spark page about yourself. You'll need to decide what to share about the being called You. In the process, you might learn something. And have some fun.  

"Be Here Now" -- actually, it isn't possible to do anything else

I started studying yoga and meditation in 1969, when I was a student at San Jose State College. I've got a well-thumbed 1972 sixth printing copy of Ram Dass' "Be Here Now" book, which was published in 1971. 

I haven't re-read the book for a long time. I guess the title alone was enough for me to keep in mind. 

But today, when I was meditating in the morning, as I have virtually every day for the past 47 years or thereabouts, I was struck by how meaningless those words, Be Here Now, seemed to be in my present churchless approach to life. 

What else is possible, but being here now? 

My brain is the source of my consciousness. No brain, no consciousness. (Many would disagree, but there is no demonstrable evidence that consciousness can exist without a functional brain.)

My brain doesn't exist in the future. Or, in the past. It exists now. As does everything else in existence. So no matter what my brain is doing, no matter what form my consciousness takes, it is happening here and now. 

Awareness of sensations, thoughts, emotions, intuitions, abstract reasonings, concrete perceptions -- all of this, every bit of it without exception, is happening here and now. So what's the big deal with that oft-heard adage, be here now? 

Turning to the "Time and Space" chapter on page 90, there's a contradiction in Ram Dass' book that reflects how I was feeling about its central admonition. On the one hand, I read:

Begin to notice that wherever you go or whatever time it is by the clock...it is ALWAYS HERE AND NOW. In fact you will begin to see that you can't get away from the HERE and NOW. Let the clock and the earth do their "thing"...let the comings and goings of life continue...But YOU stay HERE and NOW. This is an exercise to bring you to the ETERNAL PRESENT...where it all is.

Verbiage like this used to appeal to me. But now it strikes me as New Age nonsense.

OK, the book correctly says that it isn't possible to get away from the HERE and NOW, which is ALWAYS present. But then it proposes an exercise to bring me to the ETERNAL PRESENT, even though this apparently can't be gotten away from.

For specific periods of time focus your thoughts in the present.
DON'T THINK ABOUT THE FUTURE
JUST BE HERE NOW.
DON'T THINK ABOUT THE PAST.
JUST BE HERE NOW.

(The book has a lot of capitalizations and bold-facing.)

Now I'm confused. When I think, I'm thinking here and now. If I think about what might happen in the future, or about what has happened in the past, those thoughts are happening here and now. 

So why is not thinking about the future or past especially here-and-now'y?  Ram Dass has just said that "you can't get away from the HERE and NOW."

There I am sitting in my chair, meditating.

I'm aware of physical sensations: my breathing, sounds in the house, the weight of my body. I'm also aware of thoughts: what I'm going to do after my morning quiet time, memories of the trip my wife and I just took to see relatives in Indiana and Kentucky. 

Today it struck me more strongly than usual that any sort of Be Here Now advice is ridiculous. Again, there's no way we can do anything else. Brain activity always is happening within my cranium in a succession of present moments. 

Thinking about the future is happening here and now. So is thinking about the past. 

I realize the appeal of believing that stopping thoughts about the future or past somehow is more "spiritual" than envisioning what might happen, or has already happened. But this doesn't make any sense. It just creates an artificial division within us, an erroneous assumption that thinking about the future or past takes us away from the present moment.

No, it doesn't. Whatever I think about, that is happening in the here and now. Likewise, if I'm not thinking and am focusing on the sensation of my breath, that also is happening in the here and now. 

Admittedly, what I'm talking about isn't anything new. This is Mindfulness 101, really: accept whatever is happening in consciousness, whether it be sensations, perceptions, thoughts, emotions, whatever. Don't reject anything, because there is no need to.

Like Ram Dass correctly said, it isn't possible to get away from the here and now. Unfortunately, he went on to say that thoughts about the future or past DO take us away from the here and now. 

And therein lies a lot of wasted effort by the many meditators -- one of whom used to be me -- who mistakenly believe that stopping thoughts is a "spiritual" exercise. Thinking is just one thing the brain is capable of doing. Here and now, like everything else the brain does.

Think. Or don't think. It doesn't matter. Whatever we do, it always is happening HERE and NOW. 

"#Pray for Turkey" -- a demonstrably useless gesture

Prayer has no effect on anybody or anything. Except, perhaps, the person praying. There is no scientific or other sort of demonstrable evidence that praying helps make the world better. 

In fact, the largest research study on the efficacy of prayer found that not only was it useless in helping heart bypass patients recover, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slighter higher rate of complications. 

Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and other scientists tested the effect of having three Christian groups pray for particular patients, starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks. The volunteers prayed for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.

The study looked for any complications within 30 days of the surgery. Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.

So when my local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, published an editorial called "We Must Also Pray for Turkey," my first thought (and also my last thought) was that's a stupid idea. 

Stupid, because the point of the editorial was that people should be as concerned about the recent terrorist attack at the Istanbul airport as they were about attacks in Paris and Brussels. 

OK. That's a good point. But it has nothing to do with prayer. 

Along with hundreds of millions of others in the world, I don't believe in praying. Our ranks include atheists, agnostics, humanists, Buddhists, Hindus, and anyone else who doesn't accept the unproven hypothesis of a personal god who responds to entreaties.

I do believe in doing something about problems.

If the editorial had been called "We Must Also Do Something for Turkey," I would have had no problem with it. However, calling for prayer actually is even worse than a useless gesture, because it encourages people to believe that an ineffectual religious practice is doing something about a problem.

Hemant Mehta's short piece in the New York Times, "Prayer is Useless, and Has a Downside," expresses this well. 

While the main purpose of prayer may be to help others, it never demonstrably does that. Prayers benefit only those believers who say or hear them. Prayer gives them comfort. It lets them think they have some control over a situation that may be out of their hands. It’s the last resort of people who have run out of ideas, and the first resort of people who never bothered to think about how they could actually fix the problem at hand.

This is not harmless. There’s a very real downside to praying.

It lulls believers into a false sense of accomplishment. We cannot solve our problems – much less the world’s – through prayer. We often see people with good intentions praying for victims in the wake of a tragedy, but prayer is useless without action, and those actions make the prayers irrelevant. To paraphrase the great Robert Green Ingersoll, hands that help are far better than lips that pray.

I have no problem with “prayer” as an act of meditation. In fact, many atheists can tell you the benefit of silent self-reflection. The delusion occurs when you think someone else is hearing your thoughts and acting on them.

When it comes down to it, prayer is illogical, even in religious terms. If God has a plan, why try to thwart it? If God can be swayed by prayers, what kind of God would allow the horrors we see in the world? And if two devout believers pray for different things, how does God choose the winner? (I'm sure the San Antonio Spurs would love to know the answer to that.)

Prayer is nothing but a powerful placebo. We’d all be better off accepting that.

As evidence of this, there also was a call to pray for Turkey in 2013. A Christianity Today article, "Turkey: What to Know and How to Pray," advised this (I've boldfaced an especially pertinent part):

So, how can you pray? Well, I will share how I am praying. I'm praying:

1. That the protests geared toward the government will lead the people away from increased Islamization and to greater religious freedom.
2. For the safety of "workers" serving there right now.
3. For the safety of Turks and for a just end to the violence.
4. That Turks in Turkey (and the 75 million Turks around the world) will turn to Christ in the midst of the tumult.

Well, praying for Turkey in 2013 didn't stop the violence in 2016. Thus praying for Turkey now will do exactly nothing to help that nation in the future.

Like I said, only doing something concrete and practical will help Turkey. Stop with the prayers; start with the doing. That's the best advice after every natural or human-caused disaster.