PSSST. I got some of Jesus High school pictures. He was on the debate team.
A Belief in Healing Prayer is an excellent way to clear the scene of crisis of all but essential personnel.
Send the Scene Stealers off to the church!
(Well, not you, specifically...)
George--
In any crisis there are praying people and there are people with mops. The Cockney Char is now extinct, but in certain circles I'm known as Ms. Mopp.
I'm also pretty handy with a bailer.
George wrote:Still, Acquiunk, I'd have thought that knowing folks are concerned would
have a good effect. Maybe it has a mostly "uh-oh" effect.
I think it might take the necessity of working hard to get better off the table. Those who think they are getting a 'special assist' from above might not be as inclined to fight as hard at their own recovery.
That makes a lot of sense to me. Fatalism.
or false hope. If I believe in the power of prayer and know that I'm getting special status, then I might not put as much effort into getting better. OTOH, even if I believe in the power of prayer but don't know if I'm getting the extra prayers, then I'll probably put more of my energies into my recovery.
It's knowing the prayers are coming in that seems to be the key.
Right. That's what I meant by fatalism, though in looking up the definition it's not quite the right connotation. I meant that they'd be thinking, "I'm just a human and it's out of my hands, God will take care of it" (false hope)... Fatalism really means just the first part.
I think it VERY odd that there was a negative impact...I do wonder if this result is an experimental artefact. I would be interested to see the results of other, properly conducted, experiments.
It really is complex. When people are deeply ill they will reach out to anything they believe will save their lives. They try Mexican clinics and "special herbs", they do enemas of god-knows-what, they pray to god, they pray to the disease, they listen to story after story about some other person who fought a similar battle and won. Anything to help them picture a brighter day.
The study brought out the feelings of some people who, because they were being prayed for and were not getting better, felt that they, the patients, were somehow responsible for the failure.
It's a miasma of guilt and sorrow, fear and lost hope and, let's not forget,
pain, sometimes unrelenting pain. All felt by the family members around the ill person as well.
Prayer, it turns out, is the easy way out. We put it all in the hands of God instead of facing the reality, the unthinking reality, of life and death.
Joe(don't hide. )Nation
I'm praying for certain posters on this thread ...
And we are praying right back.
Ticomaya wrote:I'm praying for certain posters on this thread ...
It doesn't matter unless you are praying to make me better , then I could take it as a threat.
Personally, i don't pray . . . and at all events, i don't care if that joker lives or dies . . .
Hmmmm...I remember when I was 14, and me mum was dying, and my father was lying about it to me (ie saying she was getting better...I don't quite know what he thought he was going to do when she died...say she'd gone on holiday???).
Anyhoo, I KNEW she was dying, so I listened in on phone conversations he was making, and heard the truth....but he still lied when confronted....
So, I went down to a friend of me mum's, and said what I had heard.
She leaped in and said: "But god can still help her, we must pray for her!" (She was a lovely lady and good friend to me mum.)
That's when I knew for certain.....
I'm wondering whether the people who did poorly under prayer were also people who had postponed seeing the doctor because they preferred not to think about Awful Things Happening.
I have had people pray for me and then become quite angry because I didn't attribute my recovery to the power of their prayer. I wouldn't will myself to die just to spite that sort of pious well-wishing, but....
If it was a well done study, they would have matched illnesses/stages/prognoses etc.
Jeezus H Christ, You can dress up a stupid concept and a dumass research proposal with all kinds of duble blinds and controls and scientific method s and its still a big bowl of horszhit.
Theyre arguing about a "yes it is/no it isnt " outcome about this over on the evo/devo thread .
I wanna do some research on what cookie flavor Santa prefers on christmas eve. See how dumb that sounds too?
Why do we have these obviously feel good tests of religions best voodoo tricks by scientific inquiry. Nothing it shows is meanungful no matter what the statistical outcome. I want my part of the money back, Goddammit!
Yes, Baldrick.
Do you have a cunning plan to get it back?
