Commenting takes less energy than moderating comments, certainly.
The story would be improved by making it about hair color, actually.
It's not just prayer. I have the same problems with meditation.
The only meditation I can do is body-scan meditation. It is not particularly spiritual, just body awareness. If you are looking for the calming benefits of meditation, you might check it out.
Maybe it is just me, personally, but I don't find most recipes for making people's private spiritual experiences publicly-accessible to me to be very specific or comprehensible or operational. Is this typical-mind fallacy, or do others feel the same way?
I feel this way. I usually assume it's someone else's typical mind fallacy keeping them from explaining, or else certain word sounds are connected to different meanings, or else I am neurodivergent such that the explainer is used to people who don't need to have it explained better, or something to do with signalling that went over my head.
Don't push this all on the girls! Any boy could dress up as a girl convincingly enough to fool the magic and lift the branch himself. The only reason they did not was because they would take a similar status hit as the girls would for giving away their magic for free.
(More practical advice from an unwillingly celibate lesbian who is as disgusted with the idea of getting touched by dudes as you: learn to masturbate, and/or seek ways to relieve or avoid other types of stress that exacerbate the problem.)
Shoot I'd love a fiction section just to read a bunch of stories without exposing myself to the twist won't be 'sometimes people see spirits but keep it to themselves so they won't look stupid, even in the cool space future' so much. And you'd like to have it cordoned off so you don't see it unless you are looking.
I don't come here much because there is not too much content. I'd come here more often if there was links to content that is nice. Even if it is just a sidebar with links to off-site posts. I mean, there is the blogs people who used to post here now post at, there's other rationality blogs, there's the occasional reddit thread of interest.
I have no problem with the 'ghosts haunting the dead site' staying around.
- Trying to make their ideology more dominant (aka spreading Islam in general)
I find this the least likely as the main goal. Also, if this was the case, they are counterproductive. So far Islam was very successful in the last few decades to gain a bigger and bigger foothold in the Western world, helped both by demographics and by the predominantly left-leaning political elite in Europe encouraging the acceptance of and submission to Islamic culture in Europe instead of encouraging the immigrants to abandon their culture for the culture of the host nations. However, the recent terrorist attacks, and the many atrocities committed by the recently arrived asylum seekers, while hurting European economy, will probably lead to Europe being more skeptical regarding Islam, which might reduce the chances of Islam peacefully and silently spreading. So these events, if indeed orchestrated by ISIS, might have been successful in harming the economy of their enemies, but I don't know what an effect they had on the spreading of Islam. I'm tending on believing in a negative effect, but I just don't know enough factors to know it for sure. I believe the violent attacks in the Western world are done mostly to show their own followers at home how powerful they are and how weak their enemies are.
In fact, these results make it hard on the Islamic people who wouldn't join ISIS. This makes ISIS more attractive to these people. If a government oppresses a group than every anti-government group seems less oppressive to that group, both because oppression is relative and because of in-group vs. out-group dynamics.
So, listing some reasons:
answer: well, just make them a priority to optimize for
reason: but maaagic is wonder!
I suspect this has been explored in Science Fiction, though I've never read anything in which this idea was put into practice.
Anne McCaffery's Nimisha's Ship mentions it as a duty of the first colonists of a planet. Important families from colonized worlds still check for any harmful combinations of recessive genes before siring a child. The book is more about the politics and cool space ships though.
I've had word problems all the way through calculus, so this connection of reality with math is not novel to me. Sorry about that. Or maybe you could use that for math education?