Prayer physics

[liveyoungdiefast]

Add to the list if thee hast faith.


- Your prayer will be answered if a shitload of strangers pray for you. However, you should probably ask them all to pray right there in front of you. Because if your prayer isn't answered the only thing to assume is that some of the strangers you asked to pray for you forgot to. Soliciting prayer over the internet definitely works. Atheists will stay far away from your grammatically deficient prayer requests. They're too busy doing college assignments on evolutionary biology.

- If you pray in an incoherent 'speaking in tongues', perhaps you will accidentally say a word in God's language and get something. Of course you'll probably accidentally ask for the flu or an old and useless guitar string. God definitely does not understanding English though. Or Spanish or French or German or Arabic or Russian or Chinese or any currently used human language. You have to speak in god language and that is done by incoherent babbling.

- If a successful answer to a prayer coincides with a bright light, then God did not help the person, but an angel did. Random flashes of light are angels - always. God is busy... learning English.

- People who pray for snakebites to healed have a much more significant chance that their prayers are answered than people who pray that their AIDS goes away. This has absolutely nothing to do with the existence of antivenin and no existence of a cure for AIDS yet. Snakebite victims just have a lot of faith. Except for snakebite victims nowhere near a hospital, they traditionally have no faith and die.

[iNow]

Funny stuff.  My faith is in reality, and the reality is that prayer does not work (and, in fact, is often harmful).



http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/full/20/9/1278

Funded mainly by the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research at the religionâ€"science interface, the $2.4 million study was touted as ‘the most intense investigation ever undertaken of whether prayer can help to heal illness." (4) It found that patients undergoing CABG surgery did no better when prayed for by strangers at a distance to them (intercessory prayer) than those who received no prayers. But 59% of those patients who were told they were definitely being prayed for developed complications, compared with 52% of those who had been told it was just a possibility, a statistically significant, if theologically disappointing, result. Benson et al. came to the objective conclusion that "Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications."

http://www.springerlink.com/content/x7rtu32722145572/

There is no scientifically discernable effect for IP as assessed in controlled studies. Given that the IP [intercessory prayer] literature lacks a theoretical or theological base and has failed to produce significant findings in controlled trials, we recommend that further resources not be allocated to this line of research.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_o ... 0a9c2a5ee3

Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.

http://jme.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/32/8/487

The empirical results from recent randomised controlled studies on remote, intercessory prayer remain mixed. Several studies have, however, appeared in prestigious medical journals, and it is believed by many researchers, including apparent sceptics, that it makes sense to study intercessory prayer as if it were just another experimental drug treatment. This assumption is challenged by (1) discussing problems posed by the need to obtain the informed consent of patients participating in the studies; (2) pointing out that if the intercessors are indeed conscientious religious believers, they should subvert the studies by praying for patients randomised to the control groups; and (3) showing that the studies in question are characterised by an internal philosophical tension because the intercessors and the scientists must take incompatible views of what is going on: the intercessors must take a causation-first view, whereas the scientists must take a correlation-first view. It therefore makes no ethical or methodological sense to study remote, intercessory prayer as if it were just another drug.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/healt ... wanted=all

In the study, the researchers monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals who received coronary bypass surgery, in which doctors reroute circulation around a clogged vein or artery.

The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers.

The researchers asked the members of three congregations â€" St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City â€" to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names.

The congregations were told that they could pray in their own ways, but they were instructed to include the phrase, "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications."

Analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.

In another of the study's findings, a significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for â€" 59 percent â€" suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain.

<...>

The study also found that more patients in the uninformed prayer group â€" 18 percent â€" suffered major complications, like heart attack or stroke, compared with 13 percent in the group that did not receive prayers.