This is a serious question for theists. What does prayer accomplish. Now, keep in mind I am not talking about the ritualistic prayer one finds during most church services: "Our Father, who art in heaven, blah, blah, blah,". Although, I would submit that I have never understood that practice as it seems to fly in the face of Jesus' own commands about prayer - "But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." Mat. 5:6 But that's a discussion for another time. No, I'm referring to "the prayers of healing", and "intercession".
I seem to hear two different schools of thought on this, and neither makes sense to me:
School one: Prayer is exactly what it seems to be; attempts to plead with God to intercede on behalf of the person being prayed for. "Please guide the hands of the surgeons, be with the nurses during the surgery..." etc. First, do the people who engage in this type of prayer really think that God is listening, specifically to them? Like God doesn't have anything more important to do, today, other than listen in for Kay's personal requests?
Second, are people so arrogant as to believe that they are important enough to interfere with "God's Will"? As if God had no intention of making sure the surgery was going to go well, until after Kay bothered him about it? Really??
I mean, I have many, many more problems with this school of thought, but we'll start there.
Now, the second school of thought, that I just began hearing recently is that prayer isn't about accomplishing anything at all. Rather it's just about "touching in" with God. It's about letting him know we know that everything is in his hands, and whatever happens, we're cool with it.
Couple of things. First, do we really think that we are important enough that God gives so much as a single **** about what we're "cool with"?!?! Are we really so arrogant that we think God is just waiting for our call (prayer) affirming that we know what he knows we already know? Really?!?!
Second, really? We're cool with it? So, when God put that buck in the middle of the road, causing us to flip over in the care, and our wife is now on life support, barely hanging on by a thread, we're cool with that?!?! Really? Cuz I gotta tell you, I'm not cool with it. I'm ******* pissed!!!
Since neither of these schools of thought really make sense to me, could someone please explain the point of prayer?
5 Scientifically Supported Benefits of Prayer
Here, you're referring
specifically to the type of prayer that I was excluding from my question. "75 percent of Americans believe that prayer is an important part of daily life." I'm not talking about daily, ritualistic prayer.
You probably should have actaully
read this link:
By the end of 26 weeks, a primary endpoint had occurred in 25.6% of patients in the prayer group and in 29.3% of patients in the control group. The difference was not statistically significant. The results remained nonsignificant when data were analyzed separately for high- and low-risk patients. Thus, this study showed that, as delivered in this study, intercessory prayer did not influence the 26-week outcome after discharge from a coronary care unit.
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In the two groups that did not know for certain whether or not they were being prayed for, complications occurred in 52% of patients who received intercessory prayer and in 51% of those who did not. In contrast, complications occurred in a significantly larger proportion of patients (59%) who knew for certain that they were being prayed for. Major events and 30-day mortality rates, however, were similar across the three groups.
This study therefore showed that remote intercessory prayer did not improve outcomes after coronary artery bypass graft surgery. In fact, the knowledge of being prayed for was associated with a slightly but significantly higher rate of postsurgical complications.
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Some points about this study are worth noting. The differences between groups, although significantly favoring patients for whom prayer was offered, were very small; the medians of the two groups differed by a small margin. Thus, the significance of the findings depended heavily upon the outliers who skewed the sample. Next, no attempt was made to compare for unusual biases, such as day of admission and discharge. It is conceivable, for example, that patients admitted toward the end of the week may have been investigated and treated more slowly and those due for discharge toward the end of the week may have been retained until the start of the next week.
So, in the first two studies, prayer was shown to have negligible, or even
deleterious effect, and in the third, the methodology was extremely suspect. So, basically, these studies indicate that, objectively, prayer seems to have no positive effect, at all.
And, again, this is talking about the practice of daily, ritual prayer, which is specifically what
I indicated was not to what I was referring.
