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"Why won't God heal amputees?"
- Thread starter lkh
- Start date
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/04.06/05-prayer.html
major study recently compleated proving prayer does not work.
Prayers don't help heart surgery patients
Some fare worse when prayed for
By William J. Cromie
Harvard News Office
Many - if not most - people believe that prayer will help you through a medical crisis such as heart bypass surgery. If a large group of people outside yourself, your family, and your friends add their prayers, that should be even more helpful, or so such reasoning goes.
Researchers have been trying to prove this and even to measure the effect of prayer. Since 1988, at least two studies have found that third-party prayers bestow benefits, but two others concluded that there are no benefits. These and other studies have been soundly criticized for flaws in both method and outcome. The fuzzy results goaded researchers to conduct the largest and most scientifically rigid investigation to date. It covered 1,802 people who underwent coronary bypass surgery at six different hospitals from Oklahoma City to Boston. The cost was $2.4 million, paid by the John Templeton Foundation and the Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation of Memphis.
In a clear setback for those who believe in the power of prayer, their prayers were not answered. Prayers offered by strangers did not reduce the medical complications of major heart surgery. Not only that, but patients who knew that others were praying for them fared worse than those who did not receive such spiritual support, or who did but were not aware of receiving it.
major study recently compleated proving prayer does not work.
Prayers don't help heart surgery patients
Some fare worse when prayed for
By William J. Cromie
Harvard News Office
Many - if not most - people believe that prayer will help you through a medical crisis such as heart bypass surgery. If a large group of people outside yourself, your family, and your friends add their prayers, that should be even more helpful, or so such reasoning goes.
Researchers have been trying to prove this and even to measure the effect of prayer. Since 1988, at least two studies have found that third-party prayers bestow benefits, but two others concluded that there are no benefits. These and other studies have been soundly criticized for flaws in both method and outcome. The fuzzy results goaded researchers to conduct the largest and most scientifically rigid investigation to date. It covered 1,802 people who underwent coronary bypass surgery at six different hospitals from Oklahoma City to Boston. The cost was $2.4 million, paid by the John Templeton Foundation and the Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation of Memphis.
In a clear setback for those who believe in the power of prayer, their prayers were not answered. Prayers offered by strangers did not reduce the medical complications of major heart surgery. Not only that, but patients who knew that others were praying for them fared worse than those who did not receive such spiritual support, or who did but were not aware of receiving it.
Quote from vhehn:
Not only that, but patients who knew that others were praying for them fared worse than those who did not receive such spiritual support, or who did but were not aware of receiving it.
I wonder if the patients who knew they were being prayed for also knew about the "spiritual warfare" implications of the study.
Talk about adding performance pressure at an inconvenient time... "Get better to prove that God is good, or you'll be letting everyone down."
Heck, even without the study, knowing someone is praying for you could add an anxiety element.
A lot of religious folk believe that illness is a spiritual infliction, in both the active and passive sense; i.e. if you get sick, it might be because you sinned... and if God doesn't heal you, maybe you're suffering the consequences of your sin.
Would only be natural, then, for performance anxiety to kick in under medical duress, especially if one has frightening fundamentalist relatives to stir the waters.
Can you imagine having this woman leaning over your hospital bed, demanding that the demons flee from your blood? Yeesh...
p.s. duh... guess I should have clicked the link first.
"We found increased amounts of adrenalin, a sign of stress, in the blood of patients who knew strangers were praying for them," notes Dusek, who is also associate research director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute. "It's possible that we inadvertently raised the stress levels of these people."
I still wonder, though, if raised stress levels are a general medical phenomenon for people who take religion seriously.
Wouldn't that be ironic, if psychosomatic drawbacks outweighed the comforting effects of unsubstantiated belief.
Maybe that can be the next study...
"We found increased amounts of adrenalin, a sign of stress, in the blood of patients who knew strangers were praying for them," notes Dusek, who is also associate research director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute. "It's possible that we inadvertently raised the stress levels of these people."
I still wonder, though, if raised stress levels are a general medical phenomenon for people who take religion seriously.
Wouldn't that be ironic, if psychosomatic drawbacks outweighed the comforting effects of unsubstantiated belief.
Maybe that can be the next study...
How to properly beat your Islamic wife: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp3Eam5FX58
Quote from man:
i do not disagree with you at all. yet i would not write anything i
am not really, completely certain of, without mentioning that. so
my question is: why do you appear so certain? i would think only
a couple of dozen people in human history have reached the
stage of being able to heal in that way or be healed in that way.
so: are you among this group of people?
What waits in perfect certainty beyond salvation is not our concern. The miracle alone is our concern at present. Here is where we must begin. And having started, will the way be made serene and simple in the rising up to waking and the ending of the dream. When you accept a miracle, you do not add your dream of fear to one that is already being dreamed. Without support, that dream will fade away without effects. For it is your support that strengthens it.
There is a way of finding certainty here and now. Refuse to be a part of fearful dreams whatever form they take, for you will lose identity in them. You find yourself (self-realization) by not accepting them as causing you, and giving you effects. You stand apart from them, but not apart from him who dreams them. Thus, you separate the dreamer from the dream, and join in one, but let the other go.
Like you, the amputee thinks he is a dream. He is an "amputee" in a fearful dream. You think you are a "man", vulnerable to amputation. Neither of these are your true ID. To heal the amputee, share not in his dream of himself, for your Identity depends on his reality. Think rather of him as a mind in which illusions still persist, but as a mind which brother is to you. His is not brother made by what he dreams, nor is his body, "hero" of the dream, your brother. It is his reality that is your brother, as is yours to him. Your mind and his are joined in brotherhood.
No mind can be sick until another mind agrees that they are separate. And thus it is their joint decision to be sick. If you withhold agreement and accept the part you play in making sickness real, the other mind cannot project it's guilt without your aid in letting it perceive itself as separate and apart from you. Thus is the body not perceived as sick by both your minds from separate points of view. Uniting with your brother's mind prevents the cause of sickness and perceived effects. Healing is the effect of minds that join, as sickness comes from minds that separate.
Anyway, these are some basic principles that went to "reattach" Peter's ear when a Roman soldier sliced it off during a struggle in the garden of Gethsemane.
I did not have to call any surgeons because I am always alert to the "call" for a miracle.
Jesus
Quote from I am...:
What waits in perfect certainty beyond salvation is not our concern. The miracle alone is our concern at present. Here is where we must begin. And having started, will the way be made serene and simple in the rising up to waking and the ending of the dream. When you accept a miracle, you do not add your dream of fear to one that is already being dreamed. Without support, that dream will fade away without effects. For it is your support that strengthens it.
http://www.sexualcontrol.com/masturbation-addiction.html
Hey I Am, you've got some competition -- unless this is you:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16840066/site/newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16840066/site/newsweek
Quote from archimedes:
Hey I Am, you've got some competition -- unless this is you:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16840066/site/newsweek
I will respond to this gradually.
First of all, Christ is everyone's inheritance, and represents you in your natural state of perfection. This is the Son of God. Bodies are alien to Christ, and yet he can use them to communicate. The teachers of God will almost inevitably appear imperfect while still the body walks the earth, unless the "integration" is 100%, and unless the perceiver chooses otherwise.
There is no "competition" between those who are integrating with Christ. Happiness is the will of all those integrating, the path back to that state sometimes varying according to lingering individual perceptions. All will "integrate", rather, reintegrate...and that will be "the second coming of Christ". The second coming is the waking up of ALL from this nonsensical dream, for "all" is Christ. I am "Jesus" Christ. You are "archimedes" Christ. Same name, same inheritance.
Let me point out what is right first about his message. He is equal to God, just as I was almost stoned because I said I was the "Son of God" making myself "equal" and therefore "blasphemous". But he is no less equal to God than you - archimedes - are. God is incomplete without YOU. The One Who Created you is greater only in that He created you. Yet, having given you everything, even the ability to create like Him, you are equal.
Therefore, yes, everyone is predestined to be saved, because everyone is part of Christ. Yes, there is no sin, no "Satan". I now use the concept of "ego" to describe the unreal aspects of "devilish" thought.
If I were to walk into most churches today, I would be labeled "anti-Christ". This is because I am about magnitude, while churches insist on littleness. I am about innocence, they, sin. I am about equality, they, hierarchy. I am about Oneness, they, separation. Sameness vs. differences. Spirit vs. bodies. Yet not they, the ego, which is not real. "Either you are with me or you are against me" is true today as when I said it 2000 years ago. If you are not for Christ, you are anti-Christ. If you are in a body, you are anti-Christ until you choose Christ, for a body is everything Christ is not..."proof" that Christ can be destroyed.
Christ is about abundance, having everything. Therefor you have everything, for nothing can separate you from Christ. How that "looks" is debatable, but meaningless to those who think in terms of abundance vs. fear.
Long story short, get used to more of this. Those "Christs" who truly integrate will have a "role" to play in the overall plan of salvation. This means YOU, your part, is indispensable to the whole. Therefore, YOU, are the savior of the world as much as the next.
Peace
Jesus