Back in April, I wrote about research showing that the power of prayer to create medical miracles appears to be a myth, and that people can even suffer medical complications if they know that they are being prayed for. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that prayer is worthless. The act of praying might still have some kind of benefit for the person who prays, just as meditation can bring mental discipline to Buddhist practitioners, even if it never leads them to attain the Buddha’s enlightenment.
That Baylor University study I cited the other day, however, shows that prayer doesn’t actually appear to play a significant role in the lives even of most religious people in America. Of those respondents who said they were affiliated with a religious tradition, 68.4 percent said that they never prayed. Only 10.1 percent said that they prayed on a daily basis.
So, operationally, prayer doesn’t seem to have much power within religion, much less as a force of change upon the physical world. Remember, next time you hear someone going on about the power of prayer, that that person represents only a tiny minority of religious belief in America.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being part of a tiny minority. Sometimes, a tiny minority is in the right.
However, if prayer really did have any power, you would think that that power would, at the very least, be able to motivate people who are already receptive to religious teachings to pray. The way I see it, prayer is kind of like a tool that goes unused in the workshops of 68 percent of carpenters – and the other 32 percent of carpenters insist that the tool works, but that its effects are invisible. I’m not going to buy that tool.
Now, now, jClifford, if you read the comments, you know the study said nothing of the sort. In fact, people who dropped out of the study were coded as having complications when the researchers actually had no information about them. People reviewing the study said the patients probably dropped out of the study becasue they got better and went home. The study DID show strangers’ prayers were associated with a lower rate of readmission and a lower rate of mortality.
In addition, it is also clear that EVERYONE in the study thought someone was praying for them, and the study just added some extra prayers from some extra people they didn’t know. So the study doesn’t tell us anything about people who weren’t being prayed for, it just tells us about adding extra prayers from strangers.
That Texas trip must be a real bummer if JCLifford is now thinking about prayer. Wonder if there isn’t a Gideon bible in that hotel room somewhere giving off vibes.
Are there any strangers out there who will join me in praying for jClifford’s peace of mind and his safe return trip?
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