Originally posted by DA Morgan:
Easy Life wrote:
"As scripture says 'Do not test the Lord your God'"
When my wife was dying from cancer members of her family and church prayed for her.
In retrospect, looking at your statement, it appears god ignored their prayers as it was obviously just a well disguised test.
She recovers ... one result.
She dies ... the other.
Now if I had just know this a decade ago I could have saved her life by forbidding her family to pray.
Has it occurred to you that the reason some unknown writer put that into the text was precisely because he knew WHY nothing would happen?
-------------------------------------------------
So you now show your distinct lack of knowledge of how scripture came to us. No doubt you think you can add Bible Scholar to your list of extensive areas of expertise. And once again you use subterfuge to wriggle out of an argument.
1. This experiment is not science.
2. God is not a constant that can be experimented upon. He simply cannot be predicted and neatly boxed up. How laughable is your presumption?
3. You would not accept a study that went the other way.
As I said, the last opens you to the charge of hypocrit, for instance just googled a few...
http://www.plim.org/PrayerDeb.htm http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/religionhealth.html http://altmed.creighton.edu/prayer/Scientific%20Review.htm From last...(Then, in 1988, Byrd published a famous, randomized, controlled, double-blind trial of intercessory prayer conducted on patients in the coronary care unit at San Francisco General Hospital. He took volunteer patients between August 1982 and May 1983 (393 total patients) and randomly divided them into two groups - a prayed for group and a not prayed for group. Each patient being prayed for had a group of three to seven intercessors praying for them daily. The intercessors were chosen based on being ?born again Christians? who were already practicing an active Christian life with daily devotional prayer and active participation at a local church. The intercessors were all told to pray for rapid recovery, prevention of complications and death, and any other prayers they believed would be beneficial. The hospital staff, doctors, patients and Byrd, did not know which patients were being prayed for in the study. The results showed that there was no difference between the two groups in the length of stay in the hospital, in the mortality rate (death rate), or in the number of medications prescribed upon leaving the hospital.
However, he found that the prayed for group had significantly less congestive heart failure, fewer cardiac arrests, less pneumonia, less use of diuretics and antibiotics, and less need for intubation and mechanical ventilation than the not prayed for group. As another way to measure outcomes, Byrd developed a scoring system that would rate a patient?s hospital course as good intermediate or bad based on adverse events that occurred during the hospital stay. The results showed 85% of the prayer group had a rating of good versus 73% in the not prayed for group. An intermediate rating was given to 1% of the prayer group and 5% of the no prayer group and a bad rating was given to 14% of the prayer group and 22% of the not prayed for group. Byrd concluded from these results that ?intercessory prayer to a Judeo-Christian God has a beneficial therapeutic effect in patients admitted to a coronary care unit?.)
But I wouldn't try to prove anything from this study. Science cannot get at it.
Aye, Easy.
