"Praying Doesn't Help the Sick Get Better"
"Study on Power of Prayer Finds it Actually May do You More Harm"
"If You Want to Get Better - Don't Say a Little Prayer."
And so, with seeming authority and finality these headlines, and many more like it, are being splattered worldwide.
Really.
Let's look at the design of the "study," shall we, before we leap to any conclusions.
The study is reported in The American Heart Journal. 1,800 heart bypass patients were involved in a John Templeton Foundation study costing $2.4 million. Unfortunately, the study was built on two incredibly ignorant and completely false assumptions. Basically, they set things up so that no real prayer would take place, then said "see, prayer doesn't work!"
Here's what happened:
Three groups of people were asked to pray for patients who were strangers to them. Those praying included two Roman Catholic groups, and a New Thought Christian group.
The Patients were divided into three groups:
1. Patients who were told people would pray for them
2. Patients who were not told people would pray for them, but people did pray for them
3. Patients who were not told anything, and nobody prayed for them.
One night before surgery, the patients who had people assigned to pray for them, would be "prayed" for. Then the worshippers would "pray" for them for a period of two weeks after surgery. The prayers would ask God to grant ‘a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.' [my emphasis - SpiritPainter]
Among two groups of patients, one having people praying for them but not knowing, and the other receiving no prayers, there was no difference in their health and recoveries. The group that was being prayed for and knew about it had more complications after surgery than the other two groups.
(The thinking on this last result is that the patients may have been frightened and worried by the news that "you are being prayed for" assuming that there was something extraordinarily serious about their condition to require extra prayer.)
But let's look at the "prayer" part of this, since that's what the study is all about, right? I mean the study was supposed to determine whether "prayer" was effective.
Well, what if the "prayer" was set up in such a way that it was guaranteed to fail? Surprise, this is exactly what happened.
Here's how. Look at the part I emphasized, above, again:
The prayers would ask God to grant ‘a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.'
The first problem, or false assumption this study is built on, is the instruction to request (ask God to grant). Prayer can be effective when using the importuning, or begging, mode, but this may not always be (in my experience seldom is...) the most effective form of prayer.
But far worse, and the second false assumption, is that the above formula is not a prayer, it is an incantation. An incantation is merely a formula that is read, and not a communication from/with spirit. It is like writing out the exact words that someone would say to their lover, with no deviation allowed.
Would anyone be surprised that a lover spoken AT in this manner would not be exactly thrilled with this, and the hoped-for response would be shall we say, disappointing?
The point, of course, is that prayer is something that engages the universe and the whole person, not a verbal formula that's just recited mentally or aloud. Not to deny that the people praying were most likely sincere, but go back to my example. Even the sincere lover who is so concerned with sticking to the formula that s/he doesn't engage the reality of the other won't achieve the hoped-for results. In fact, we'd be surprised if the object of one's affection were not driven further away by this kind of robotic and idiotic behavior.
Prayer is not a magic formula to be recited from a book of spells. But then, prayer is little understood even by those in religious organizations, so how can we expect those who operate in a materialistic worldview (scientists) to understand that you can't "design" a good prayer in the first place, so any attempt to do so is built on a false premise?
Science is wonderful, but in order to be good science, it has to control all the variables. And of course that's what this experimental design tried to do. But study of prayer is more akin to the study of weather. The variables can't all be controlled. They can't even all be known. The best you can do is collect ever more complete data, apply it to what actually appeared to happen, and hope you can eventualy begin to discern patterns.
You can pretend to control all the variables, then say you did it, and pronounce the results, voila!
But that's just playing pretend.
The sad part is, a lot of people will believe this so-called "science."
Pray.
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