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Can you really make it rain with a raindance?
We were learning in school about Native American Indians and what they believed before we took over the land and everything. I know from childhood they used to show Indians doing rain dances for their crops. My teacher was answering a question and said they really did do raindances to bring on the rain from the rain god or something. Maybe this is stupid and maybe it's not but do rain dances really cause it to rain? I don't get it.
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Common misconception.
Rain Dances were not meant to make it rain that day. They didn't call down clouds from the sky. Rain Dances were an organized form of communal prayer. They'd dance on a regular basis to encourage rains throughout their planting season.
By their logic, they dance throughout the planting season, and the rains eventually come. It wasn't a spell to bring water from the sky, it was just a group of people showing organized reverence for the powers they believed controlled the world around them.
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The Native American Indians believed (and some still do) that their dances could make it rain, but it is important to understand two things:
Belief that something is true does not mean that it is true.
Something being true does not mean that people will believe it is true.
We can test dancing a rain dance and not dancing a rain dance many times to figure out if this belief is true, but I do not know of anyone that has done this test. If rain dancing does cause rain, we definitely do not understand why it would cause it.
In science and logical evaluation, we choose to reject all beliefs if we do not need to believe based on the evidence we have. Since we have no evidence of rain dancing causing rain or any human movement causing any weather of any kind, we reject this belief.
Most peoples' beliefs are not evaluated in this way. Some Native American Indians believed in Rain gods in the same way that people all over the world and from all the times in history believe in other gods or spirits. None of these beliefs are true because they are/were believed to be true.
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No, you can't make it rain by dancing.
And neither could the Native Americans.
It's like prayer, or meditation. Sure, rain exists. But you can't make it magically appear, just like you can't pray for a new car and expect it to come out of thin air.
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