are you there, god? it's me, patient #1353136

[hth]

You might have heard (probably from the Daily Show -- I know you people!) about a major, expensive study done this past year to test the efficacy of so-called healing prayer...you know, the one that was supposed to prove that Good Vibes and Healing Thoughts and God and whatnot helped people come through their surgeries with fewer complications &ctera. And then what the data actually showed was that the people who were prayed for in this study had a slightly but statistically meaningful HIGHER chance of complications.

Yeah. Prayer kills.

I don't know, you have to understand. I am myself a religious person. I pray. But I loathe people who treat their chosen deity like a fucking soda machine: no, God doesn't root for your team, and he had less to do with your Grammy award than your publicist did, and the reason people die on the operating table is not that everybody forgot to pray for them, oops. I'm a religious person. I pray. And like the great philosopher Detective Frank Pembleton once said, God doesn't save anyone; God is in the next town over, creating hurricanes and hunchbacks. I suppose it sounds contradictory, but I'm happy with my theology.

Anyway, this article is a semi-humorous, semi-serious attempt to make sense out of that study's data -- what can we hypothesize about the nature of God now that we maybe didn't know before? I'm personally fond of "God hates form letters" and "God doesn't like to be told what to do," but then, hey, self-projection is the oldest theological tradition known to the species, isn't it? *g*

Comments

[datta.livejournal.com]

That's a fascinating article, and it reminds me of a question my mother once asked me when I was little: If you could talk to God, would you ask for something or about something?

Also, of Rabi'a (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabia_Basri#The_Tale_of_Torch_and_Water), whose example I try to emulate when I think about the divine.

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

That's a good way to phrase it. Honestly, everyone I've ever known and trusted who told me they felt like they'd had a prayer "answered" -- in every case it was a matter of suddenly knowing something or understanding something that seemed to come from somewhere other than their own heads. It's not, like, some kind of Harry Potter silliness. Prayer seems to me to work mainly on the basis of wisdom. Which is not a bad thing. There's really no problem that won't get a little bit better if you genuinely understand what the hell is going on.

[brownbetty]

Hah! God: dislikes being pestered.

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

You'd screen your calls, too!

[terrie01.livejournal.com]

One of the most spiritual women at our church lost her sight to macular degeneration. In one study group, they were talking about the bit in the Bible where it says God will make you whole. Someone asked her about, if that's true, why is she blind. She said God was what helped her stay herself through losing her sight. She's whole; she just can't see. That is the real power of prayer.

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

It's funny that in a religion that's so devoted to the imagery of God as a parent, it so rarely seems to occur to people that prayer is kind of like calling your parents. Which I, at least, do every single time I'm sick. And funnily enough, I'm still just as sick afterwards, but a lot less miserable. You know? I mean there are plenty of really arcane, difficult theological ideas out there, but this seems like...not one of them, to me. *shrug*

[hylomorph.livejournal.com]

They overlooked what is clearly the most rational explanation:

A subset of humanity has psychic healing powers, and some of these were included in the group of prayer-givers. Of course, their powers are weak and untrained, so having them keep the patients "in mind" has about the same effect has having them throw tiny bottles of penicillin at the patients. What is needed is a Charles Xavier to show these folks how to make it work.

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

It did cross my mind that if your healing spells got those kind of results in any game system in the world, you'd want a new system. And then I had this kind of entertaining image of people picketing God, demanding we all convert to GURPS.

[sgatlantislight.livejournal.com]

Dude! A GURPS player! Whee!

Came to your LJ about some of your Dex fic and saw this and had to comment.

I have to shake my head at the whole "health and wealth" gospel concept. Not to say that God can't or won't heal you or make you wealthy or whatever, but he's got his own agenda and it's bigger than we can even begin to conceive of, let alone understand, and to claim we can work him like some sort of a slot machine is just offensive.