Diane wrote:As for the baby's death--it made me wonder if the placebos were ever given to anyone with a serious viral or bacterial infection? It seems to me that there are certain afflictions that would need medication.
On a similar note, imagine my surprise when I found out that prayer has never cured an amputee.
In my opinion, there's no great harm from herbs, "tradition" medicine, or prayer, except that they often cause people to neglect real medicine.
Education helps all three cases.
(Just to put it out there, education has been shown to be inversely proportional to religiousness.)
I read a column in my paper today about a little girl who was sick and everyone started praying for her in a prayer chain kind of thing. This is how the article ended:
Quote:"I know people might say it was medicine, or 'Things happen the way they're going to happen,' " Sandee says, "but we know it was a miracle. Even the doctors said, 'This is a miracle. This never happens.' "
Sandee and Rick believe the miracle occurred because of the power of prayer and the power of love. "She had four seizures, three cardiac arrests and one minor stroke," Rick wrote in his blog. She had eight days of life support measures, more than "15 medications, two full-time nurses and seven specialists hovering over her."
Interesting that they think is was the prayers that cured their daughter....
boomerang wrote:Interesting that they think is was the prayers that cured their daughter....
Well, obviously it had nothing to do with the medication, the nurses, and the specialists. So it
had to be the prayers.
My thought exactly, Thomas.
I've been reading updates on the faith healing case and following along with the FDLS in Texas story and it really makes me wonder about balancing religous freedom with children's safety. Where do you draw the line?
I'm sure the death of the baby has been mentioned. Classic case.
Religion does not make miracles. Science makes miracles.
I put my faith, not in God, but in science. I know which one shall save me.
boomerang wrote:My thought exactly, Thomas.
I've been reading updates on the faith healing case and following along with the FDLS in Texas story and it really makes me wonder about balancing religous freedom with children's safety. Where do you draw the line?
I may have mentioned this already in this thread--i mentioned it somewhere in some thread recently: there have been cases in which states have stepped in to take custody of children in need of medical care, for rather obvious treatment which would save them, but who were being denied that treatment due to the religious scruples of their parents. It is not just religious fanaticism from which children need to be protected, either. States routinely take children whose parents are demonstrable drug and/or alcohol addicts (many states now include drug testing as a requirement for obtaining child and family services welfare checks). I have read of two cases in Ohio in which the state stepped in and took custody of children who were severely malnourished by their vegan parents.
Fanaticism is not kind to children.
Thomas wrote:Diane wrote:As for the baby's death--it made me wonder if the placebos were ever given to anyone with a serious viral or bacterial infection? It seems to me that there are certain afflictions that would need medication.
On a similar note, imagine my surprise when I found out that prayer has never cured an amputee.
Lizards, perhaps?
Well, I can't be sure their tails DON'T grow back because of prayer.....
People pray because they feel helpless. In their deepest and most essential selves, they know that life is random and unpredictable, and that they have no control over most of the elements of daily existence.
I cry out, too, at moments of absolute incomprehension. I speak the words of prayer or appeal or whatever. How could this be happening -- tens of thousands of people die in a tidal wave? Wait...aren't these the basic characters whom You said would be seen as individual players, each to be treated as special, as personal?
How do we reconcile this? It is not reconcilable
So we cry out. That is prayer.
I haven't prayed for many years, but I have this storage tank, see..
(kidding, but not entirely)
I do cry, sometimes from joy, sometimes from anguish. I see a connection in the prayer and crying, however much prayer is ritualized into a kind of zone.
(glad to see Kara)
I think the same happens to me. The placebo effect happens to me.
Unbelievably the 16 year old uncle of the baby I mentioned in my inital post has died when prayer failed to cure him:
Quote:The painful and apparently preventable faith-healing death of a 16-year-old Oregon City boy this week brings the secretive Followers of Christ Church back under legal scrutiny, just four months after the boy's infant niece died in similar circumstances.
.......
Dr. Cliff Nelson, Oregon deputy state medical examiner, said Wednesday that an autopsy determined Beagley died of complications from a constriction where his bladder empties into his urethra. Beagley became unable to urinate, an intensely painful condition that caused his kidneys to stop extracting urea from his bloodstream and triggered heart failure.
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1213854908157310.xml&coll=7
Well obviously that is what God wanted for him!
boomerang wrote:Unbelievably the 16 year old uncle of the baby I mentioned in my inital post has died when prayer failed to cure him:
Okay, so prayer doesn't work. The next time someone gets seriously sick, I'll try sacrificing a goat.
Well, many years ago and far away, my father and mother became good friends with a couple, the husband of which was high up in the strategic air command. That is probably not relevant as just a bit I remember. I was twelve and we lived in Evanston.
My father and he had likely crossed paths re their separate lives in the air force and I couldn't begin now to guess how. But they were friends enough that my dad must have mentioned he was involved in the years past WWII in the Family Theater (Father Peyton) and the Rosary Crusade.
This couple had a son who came down with acute leukemia. Our family hosted them or at least had them to dinner and met them several times while they went, and we also did at some point, to St. Jude's Shrine in south Chicago. I remember all the talk of a miracle. I think around that time we had our own need for some miracles.
I rather liked St. Jude as I understood the word impossible and, also, his feast day was close to my birthday.
Anyway, the son died and I don't remember much after that. Indeed I don't remember if I actually thought St. Jude would fix it, oh for a flash on my thoughts then. But I do well remember a general idea of the help of prayer in my particular parish in those years.
I'm different now, a half century later, re my own grasp of things, but I don't mock belief easily even now, while near wild that people obtain the sharpest medical care to the extent we can make it available. I think that particular couple had the best at that time.
My post was about prayer as miracle.
To me now, that couple was dealing in a kind of hysteria.
Going back to Boomer's original post and her latest one on a relative dying of some constriction, I don't know.
I don't know, re Norman Cousins or prayer, or sheer bellowing, or breast cancer together groups.
If anyone goes to St. Jude for me, a tad unlikely, I'll have to climb out of bed and slap them upside the head. Which I suppose could be a healthy thing.
Prayer is a method for people to control the uncontrollable.
Because it gives people satisfaction to think that they are making a positive step in an aspect of their life which is ultimately out of their control.
Due to this feeling of positivity associated with prayer people believe that it is in fact working because they are trying to look for the effects of their prayer.
These "effects" could have otherwise been observed without prayer.
Yes, but would not have been associated with prayer. People have a tendency to believe in simple cause and effect, whereas the reality is far more complex. It is because of this tendency that people attribute certain events to God.
Bernard Beckett writes about this briefly, among other things, in his novel "Genesis". Highly original and fascinating read - I recommend it to all.
