Unnamed pilot #fundie

Unnamed pilot #fundie irishtimes.com

A Tunisian pilot who paused to pray instead of taking emergency measures before crash-landing his plane, killing 16 people, has been sentenced to 10 years in jail by an Italian court along with his co-pilot.

The 2005 crash at sea off Sicily left survivors swimming for their lives, some clinging to a piece of the fuselage that remained floating after the ATR turbo-prop aircraft splintered upon impact.

A fuel-gauge malfunction was partly to blame but prosecutors also said the pilot succumbed to panic, praying out loud instead of following emergency procedures and then opting to crash-land the plane instead trying to reach a nearby airport.

49 comments

old comment by Brain_In_A_Jar

When you really think about it, even most theists should consider this kind of behaviour, and the implicit beliefs it represents, to be stupid and nonsensical. Why would an omniscient god need a devout believer to specifically drop everything and ask for help at the very instant it was needed? Surely a god would both know whether that person was a sincere follower or not, and whether he needed help, without that person even needing to consciously think it, let alone divert his attention and effort entirely away from the task at hand like this chump of a pilot apparently did. Otherwise, how far would this crap go? If a person must specifically pray before god will help, just how exact is the requirement, and what is the minimum required for something to constitute a valid prayer? Do you have to remember to say "amen" at the end? Does it not work if you don't put your hands together? Does diction count? Do you have to phrase your request in such a way that it couldn't possibly be construed to be "putting god to the test", in which case he'd probably do nothing anyway, on account of his apparent reluctance to provide proof of himself? Suppose a devout believer suffers an accident without even having time to pray at all, is he just flat out doomed not to receive divine help?

old comment by Brain_In_A_Jar

The fact that the panic took the form of a prayer, instead of a long girly scream and/or curling up into a ball, is largely irrelevant. Panic prayer has as much to do with religion as screaming "HOLY SHIT!" does.

Surely the fact that prayer tends to be stimulated by panic or desperation raises questions about its rational value. Besides, regardless of whether the man praying was in a rational frame of mind or not, I think it's pretty obvious that it didn't work in this case, which is evidence against the validity of any religion that asserts prayers will always be answered (or make the dual assertion that god hears all prayers and cares about everyone, which together are equivalent to this) except of course for the ones sneaky enough to define their god's actions in such a way that they'd be indistinguishable from the events that would have naturally arisen if he didn't act.

old comment by Brain_In_A_Jar

Temujin, if you reread my post, you'll notice I'm not just taking a pot-shot at religion for my own amusement but responding to what I feel to be an erroneous earlier statement by Tracer, specifically "Panic prayer has as much to do with religion as screaming "HOLY SHIT!" does."

The pilot in question may not be a fundie; his actions, however, even if involuntary due to panic, are exactly the sort of behaviour we regularly see fundies proclaiming we should take; as a practical example of just what happens when you do this, they are quite relevant to our site's observations on fundamentalism.

Some seem to take the stance that the pilot could be excused from qualifying as a fundie because he very understandably wasn't thinking clearly, but all religious fundamentalism seems to be born of irrational thought, or a failure to think at all. It can often happen to people who'd previously been entirely rational, and they have also been known to snap out of it again. Assuming the pilot to have been a rational non-fundie prior to the incident, it could be that he subsequently acted like one due to stress induced irrationality or thought failure (ceasing to take any action to preserve oneself in a situation known empirically to be life threatening to the inactive, in the apparent certainty that an unsubstantiated god will take over, sounds a lot like fundamentalist religious behaviour to me), then possibly snapped out of it again. Does it make that much a difference if the timescale over which this happened was of the order of seconds or minutes, rather than the months or years one usually sees here?

Don't get me wrong, it really wouldn't be fair to mock him for failing to be rational and acting stupidly under intense emotional pressure in the same way that we mock people who fail to be rational due to simple idiocy, and I don't intend to; but excusable religious irrationality is still religious irrationality, and still a valid illustration of its dangers and worthlessness in those idiots who would succumb to it even under no stress at all.

old comment by breakerslion

@#928726
Brain_In_A_Jar:

"Don't get me wrong, it really wouldn't be fair to mock him for failing to be rational and acting stupidly under intense emotional pressure in the same way that we mock people who fail to be rational due to simple idiocy...."

So when has life ever been fair? About as many times as the efficacy of prayer has not been a coincidence? I don't particularly care if this frightened jackass was a fundie or not. The concept of prayer contradicts what these religious types allegedly believe about the Abrahamic deity. Just another example of the extinguished critical thinking skills is all I'm saying.

Temujin: not really a great role model in terms of morality or logic.

Unnamed pilot #fundie irishtimes.com

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