God doesn't care.

An interesting study:

Originally Posted by Washington Post

Praying for other people to recover from an illness is ineffective, according to the largest, best-designed study to examine the power of prayer to heal strangers at a distance.

The study of more than 1,800 heart bypass surgery patients found that those who had other people praying for them had as many complications as those who did not. In fact, one group of patients who knew they were the subject of prayers fared worse.

The new $2.4 million study, funded primarily by the John Templeton Foundation, was designed to overcome some of those shortcomings. Dusek and his colleagues divided 1,802 bypass patients at six hospitals into three groups. Two groups were uncertain whether they would be the subject of prayers. The third was told they would definitely be prayed for.

The researchers recruited two Catholic groups and one Protestant group to pray "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for 14 days for each patient, beginning the night before the surgery, using the patient's first name and the first initial of the last name.

Over the next month, patients in the two groups that were uncertain of whether they were the subject of prayers fared virtually the same, with about 52 percent experiencing complications regardless of whether they were the subject of prayers. Surprisingly, however, 59 percent of the patients who knew they were the targets of prayer experienced complications.

Because the most common complication was an irregular heartbeat, the researchers speculated that knowing they were chosen to receive prayers may have inadvertently put them under increased stress.

"Did the patients think, 'I am so sick they had to call in the prayer team?' " said Charles Bethea of the Inegris Baptist Heart Hospital in Oklahoma City, who helped conduct the study.

All kidding aside, the findings are depressing if you're a believer. I would have assumed the placebo effect alone would make people feel better, but apparantly not.

Maybe God just decided to screw with the survey results.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Terminus

Prayers I believe are supposed to maintain some kind of faith, not make wishes come true.

Exactly. It doesn't matter whether God exists and/or takes an interest in the goings on of his creations, what matters is that the sick person believes that prayer will help.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Dhsu

Yeah, I'm pretty sure miraculous healings are much more rare than a 1 in 1800 occurrence. It'd be like conducting a survey with 10,000 people asking how many of them have won the lottery, and then saying that the lottery doesn't exist because nobody has won it.

The study wasn't examining people who needed a miraculous healing. It's not like they had terminal cancer; there's a decent chance that a heart bypass patient would get well without any divine intervention.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by maneve

I don't really know how effective I think prayer is, but I'd really imagine that if it were to have any power you need to have some sort of connection with the person you're praying for.

It all depends on how you think prayer works. If prayer doesn't have anything to do with God, and instead heals a person through some sort of confluence of a bunch of people concentrating on healing that person (some sort of psychic transfer of energy, if you will), then it would help to know the person you're praying for. On the other hand, if healing is achieved through divine intervention, would it matter if you knew your prayer's recipient? God would view the prayer as a selfless act to help your fellow man, and it wouldn't matter to Him whether you knew the person.

Then again, why should mass prayer affect God's decisions? If God truly loves all His children equally, why would he be more likely to help the people who can gather the most prayers? "Sorry, Steve, but you don't have any friends that care about you, so you're not worth saving."

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?