The power of prayer

Posted by Jesus on March 12, 2007

Today I decided to dig up an old article, what with nothing else being on my radar except a couple of priest molestations, the beheading of a Christian by some muslims somewhere, and a couple of billion Christians continuing to spread hypocricy and idiocy around. I know a huge chunk of people saw this article when it landed a year ago, but I wonder how many of you really thought about what the results of the study meant.

The basis of the study is thus: a group of heart surgery patients are drawn up and some are prayed for and some are not. Some of the people undergoing surgery are told they’re being prayed for and some are not. In the end the people being prayed for had no better results, and those who knew they were being prayed for had worse results than those who didn’t or weren’t sure. On the surface it looks like a big loss for prayer, but given some of the things you folks are praying about today I’d like to address this for what it is.

From the article:

Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and other scientists tested the effect of having three Christian groups pray for particular patients, starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks. The volunteers prayed for “a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications” for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.

The patients, meanwhile, were split into three groups of about 600 apiece: those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren’t prayed for but were told it was a possibility.

The moment they started putting this experiment together we up here in Heaven already knew the results. No amount of prayer was going to change them, much like no amount of prayer is going to make your situation better if it hadn’t already been scheduled to get better. Now, your situation can get worse if you don’t pray, but generally praying does very little to convince us to alter our plans for your benefit. It would have to be somethign really, really major to have that kind of effect - a study bent on disproving the power of prayer cerrtainly won’t, for instance.

I know, that makes it sound like prayer doesn’t matter. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Think of it like this - every Sunday you get up and go to church (why you still go to church on the first day of the week still baffles me), and even though millions and millions and hundreds more millions are doing the exact same thing you still put your cash in the collection plate. Now if your little bit of cash (which if I’m not mistaken totalled somewhere around 1.4% of your income, well below the expected 10%) was found to be insignificant up against the billions, if not trillions, of dollars the church takes in every year, would you still give it? Of course you would, it’s one of the things you have to do to get to Heaven. Using that same logic, if you were to pray about something, even if you were pretty darn sure that your prayers wouldn’t directly lead to a remedy, would the prayers even be necessary? Well of course they would, because they’re also a path to Heaven. Sometimes you are supposed to do things just because you’re supposed to do them, not because there’s some big reward waiting as a result.

More from the article:

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who didn’t take part in the study, said the results didn’t surprise him.

“There are no scientific grounds to expect a result and there are no real theological grounds to expect a result either,” he said. “There is no god in either the Christian, Jewish or Moslem scriptures that can be constrained to the point that they can be predicted.”

Within the Christian tradition, God would be expected to be concerned with a person’s eternal salvation, he said, and “why would God change his plans for a particular person just because they’re in a research study?”

See, even in the article this is made clear. I wonder if the people conducting the experiment asked people in the know about Biblical things whether there was any expectations of Dad altering the results. And moreover, what about those people that Dad just decides he needs more? Are we supposed to stop taking the people we really need up here in H.C. to keep this massive salvation engine running because their kids beg us to let daddy stay for another few years? Who’s to say that a couple of the people in that study weren’t supposed to make a full recovery and cure some disease we’ve been using for a hundred years or more to inflict pain and suffering on the lot of you, and now as a result of this idiotic prayer study are among those who have done poorly in recovery? I can tell you for sure that at least one of the people involved would otherwise have had a miraculous healing hours before his surgery had he not decided to take part in this mess. It’s not a huge deal or anything, but that’s the kind of thing that can happen when you challenge Dad to prove himself. You’re all just lucky He didn’t level the city. There are rumors that He’s got a really big something or another planned for a good decade or more now, so I’d be very careful about agitating him in this manner.

You see, when it comes down to it we’re not going to prove anything to you because we just don’t have to. We put you on Earth in our image and to do our Good Work, and that’s all the proof you really need. The real test is in how you do what you were put there to do. If every time you prayed for something you got it we’d have no incentive to keep you around. You’d all be fat, lazy, uninterested, uneducated, hateful, spiteful, hypocritical pseudo-Christians.