I will pray for you?

kylith wrote: »

I must see if I can find it, but I'm fairly sure that I read an article a while back that found that telling someone who was ill that you'd pray for them decreased their chances of recovery because they started to think that if people were praying for them they must be a lot sicker than they were. Kind of a reverse placebo; a murderebo, if you will.

It was actually quite an extensive study on the effects of prayer on those recovering from illness. It was double blinded and fully acredited, and showed, surprise, surprise, that prayer has no beneficial effects on those prayed for, and in fact the group who knew that they were being prayed for actually recovered more slowly than the group who wasn't prayed for at all. There was no conclusion on why that was.

Has anyone here tried meditation?

I'm just wondering, because meditation has been extensively studied as a way of reducing physiological and psychological stress. I think the effects also apply to people who pray regularly, such as reduced stress, lower blood pressure, diminished anxiety, and so on.

I would be inclined to believe that praying helps the prayer, and whatever motives you might think the prayer has for saying they'll pray for you, let them at it.

But then, I'm reminded of AJ Jacobs and his funny book The Year Of Living Biblically. He, of course, didn't believe in any way that prayer could be anything but futile - perhaps there could be a deeper theological discussion about petitionary prayer and God's omniscience etc - and yet AJ came to love spending time praying for others for ten minutes because it was a time when he felt it was impossible to be self-centered, and because of his experiment, judged himself to be becoming a more compassionate person.

There are a lot of similarities in Buddhists' prayer beads and the rosary beads, but I wonder if that is actually the purpose of the rosary - the repetition, and the meditation that goes along with it (on the traditional mysteries of the rosary). And in Buddhism prayer is seen mainly as something that enhances meditation. Maybe they're the same thing, essentially.

But yes, I tend to agree that it's illusory, but I mean it without any derogatory implication. Cognitive psychologists tell us that we all live in a world of positive personal illusions, and that our psyches are healthier as a consequence. All of us, atheists and agnostics and theists, embrace positive illusions about our lives to sustain high self-esteem. As psychologist Shelley Taylor put it, people "have a distorted faith in their ability to control what goes on around them."

In other words, I see it as a placebo effect, but that's not a pejorative statement since the placebo effect can have a powerful healing impact.