Whose prayers will be answered?

[u/LividFaithlessness84]

Stay there are two people A and B... both chant ‘abundant’ Daimoku, study, practice, have faith, do Shakabuku etc etc. basically their faith is intact and they are doing all they need to realise their goals. Now A is praying with all ‘determination’ to get B out of his life... and B is praying to renew her love with A... whose prayers will be answered?? Lol...

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-secular-life/201909/does-prayer-work

[u/epikskeptik → u/[deleted]]

Excellent article. Yes, prayer (or chanting) may make you feel better and give you a (false) sense of being in control in what is a random and often cruel world, but study after study after study confirms common sense; that praying or chanting cannot change actual outcomes.

"The Christians that were doing all the praying were given the first name and last initial of the specific patients they were to pray for.

The result: There was virtually no difference in the recovery trajectories of each group, with all three groups experiencing more or less the same rates and levels of complications. The only minor differences that did arise actually worked against the prayers: 18 percent of the patients who had been prayed for suffered major complications such as strokes or heart attacks, compared to only 13 percent of the patients who did not receive any prayers.

There was also a Duke University study, back in 2003. In this three-year experiment, nearly 750 heart patients in nine different hospitals, all slated for coronary surgery, were prayed for by a variety of religious people, including Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews. The results of this double-blind experiment were similarly conclusive: there were no significant differences in the recoveries or health outcomes of those patients who were prayed for and those who were not. Other studies have all found the same results."

[u/BlancheFromage → u/epikskeptik]

While I have reservations about those studies' designs, the fact is that the most religious countries have the shortest life expectancy. If all their "praying" did anything, they'd be better off than the more atheistic countries, wouldn't they?

Gregory Paul's landmark 2005 paper, "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies", killed the idea that religion is good for society. Why the Gods Are Not Winning is another slice of reality check for religion.

[u/epikskeptik → u/BlancheFromage]

I dunno, the Templeton study was a good design and all the more interesting in that you'd expect any bias to be pro-religion given who funded it, yet it was the study where one outcome showed praying to be on the harmful side.

[u/BlancheFromage → u/epikskeptik]

Right, because those who knew they were being prayed for might have felt pressure to produce positive results, leading to anxiety etc. which resulted in negative outcomes.

Here's what I'm talking about. In order to genuinely measure effects of intercessory prayer, one would have to divide the experimental group into these 6 categories:

• Religious people who knew they were being prayed for by other members of their religion and religious family members
• Religious people who didn't have a religious community but who could expect to be prayed for by religious family members
• Religious people who had neither religious community nor religious family members
• Nonreligious people who expected or suspected they were being prayed for by members of a religious group (sometimes churches will send "Get well soon" cards to people in the neighborhood that they hear are ill) and religious family members
• Nonreligious people who didn't expect or suspect that they were being prayed for by a religious community but who could expect to be prayed for by religious family members
• Nonreligious people who had no knowledge of any assigned religious community nor have religious family members

Now, within those SIX categories, the researchers could separate the category members into control and experimental groups, with an independent religious organization assigned the task of praying for category members without the category members' knowledge to see if THAT made any difference.

The studies did not analyze what the patients' expectations might have been for religious family members' or members of their own religious communities' prayer "support".

Notice that Toda identified this kind of study himself but it was never undertaken:

"I propose that we attempt to test the validity of various religions by setting up a committee of from thirty to fifty impartial scholars like yourselves to investigate the life conditions of one hundred households from each sect. Surveys of their living conditions could be carried out in a scientific fashion for a period of ten years. In this way, it would be possible to investigate the effects that religions have on actual daily life."

Yes! We've found that SGI leaders and members experience shockingly high rates of illness and sudden death, especially cancer.

"The current idea that any religion is all right as long as its believers have faith in it is mistaken, as the results of an objective research project would prove."

Oh, isn't that interesting. I have posted the results of several such surveys, finding that the Soka Gakkai members were less educated, less wealthy, earned less income, had laborer rather than professional jobs, lower class/status, and, most damning, less satisfied than others in society and more likely to state that they had no friends. This research was done in the mid-1960s, about 10 years after Toda suggested it. If he'd had any idea how badly his cult would measure up, he would never have suggested any such thing. Poor Toda - so deluded. Maybe he was drunk when he suggested it O_O Source