Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of PrayerPrayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.
And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested. ... A significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain. ... The study also found that more patients in the uninformed prayer group — 18 percent — suffered major complications, like heart attack or stroke, compared with 13 percent in the group that did not receive prayers.
In other words, telling people you are praying for them will only hasten the cold hand of death cluthing their hearts, and dragging them into the black, endless void, where nary an angel, harp or cloud may be seen.
(back to the story:) Analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.
A 1997 study at the University of New Mexico, involving 40 alcoholics in rehabilitation, found that the men and women who knew they were being prayed for actually fared worse.
What I find interetsting here is this:
- The people who get prayed for do worse.
-The researchers then look for a rational scientific reason for this.
-But if the research had shown that prayers made people better, all the money-stealing religious leaders out there would say, "See? We told you prayer works! God loves those who worship him!!"
-So why aren't we accepting the religious reason that these alcoholics and weak-hearted failures got worse? It's that their measly prayers ANGERED GOD? And God, being the capricious and vengeful fuckwad that he is, decided to punish them by making them into drunks and blessing them with a multitude of heart attacks? Perhaps the
Jews were right, and what God really wants is millions of animal sacrifices.