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None of your suggestions address the fundamental flaw in your vetting process. How do you determine their ability to effectively wield prayer in support of an objective? The answer is you can't. None of the characteristics you can divide them by address the ability you purport to control i.e, "some indicator of devoutness, method, and frequency of prayer" that is a viable substitute for their ability to wield prayer effectively. In one religion, the strength of belief is supposed to be the controlling factor in prayer effectiveness. How do you measure that any more effectively than we can measure the content of consciousness (we can't)?
Mystic, you're deliberately making this more complex than it has to be simply to muddy the water and confuse the situation. Phetaroi had it on the money:
Quote:
Originally Posted by phetaroi
Very simple test: Take 100 terminal cancer patients who are christians. Let them pray (which they certainly will) and then see what percent are miraculously cured. This is not rocket science.
Exactly! Its not rocket science. It's as simple as pie. Send a 100 Christian "prayer warriors" into a children's cancer ward. Pray for 100 cancer patients. Wait a week--and that's giving God a generous amount of time. Then see whether any of the children's cancer has regressed or disappeared. Why are you getting into all this crap about "some indicator of devoutness, method, and frequency of prayer". One prayer ought to do it, right? Or is God that fickle that He has to be preened with prayers until He's in just the right mood to start answering them???? Ridiculous! Mystic, sometimes I wonder about you. You can be so intelligible one moment and then make absolutely no sense the next.
Just another observation on the efficacy of prayer:
Quote:
In the most widely publicized studies of the effect of intercessory prayer, cardiologist Randolph Byrd studied 393 patients admitted to the coronary-care unit at San Francisco General Hospital. Some were prayed for by home-prayer groups, others were not. All the men and women got medical care. In this randomized, double-blind study, neither the doctors and nurses nor the patients knew who would be the object of prayer.
The results were dramatic and surprised many scientists.The men and women whose medical care was supplemented with prayer needed fewer drugs and spent less time on ventilators. They also fared better overall than their counterparts who received medical care but nothing more. The prayed-for patients were: Significantly less likely to require antibiotics (3 patients versus 16) Significantly less likely to develop pulmonary edema-a condition in which the lungs fill with fluid because the heart cannot pump properly (6 versus 18). Significantly less likely to require insertion of a tube into the throat to assist breathing (0 versus 12). Less likely to die.
Even more incredible experiments in distance healing involve nonhuman subjects. In a survey of 131 controlled experiments on spiritual healing, it was found that prayed-for rye grass grew taller; prayed-for yeast resisted the toxic effects of cyanide; prayed-for test-tube bacteria grew faster. "I adore these experiments," says Larry Dossey, M.D., perhaps the world's most vocal expert on prayer and medicine. "Because they don't involve humans, you can run them with fanatical precision and you can run them hundreds of times. It's the best evidence of all that prayer can change the world. And it operates as strongly on the other side of the Earth as it does at the bedside."
And here is a counter-argument that maybe it's something other than prayer which results in "healing."
Quote:
In a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, they present evidence showing how and why prayer might increase anyone’s ability to resist temptation. Though we can all agree that to do so requires self-control, the authors propose that the source of such control might not be supernatural. Instead, it might come from something more earthly. Something accessible to even the most devoted atheist: social connection.
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--the authors had an elegant methodological question: will people who pray be able to avoid the depleting effects of emotion suppression and not show a deficit on the stroop task? In other words, will prayer give them the cognitive strength to perform well on both these challenging tasks?
Indeed it did. Participants who were asked to pray about a topic of their choosing for five minutes showed significantly better performance on the stroop task after emotion suppression, compared to participants who were simply asked to think about a topic of their choosing. And this effect held regardless of whether participants identified as religious (70 percent) or not.
Now an atheist sees this as an innate sense that arises in us as social animals.
But I see it as God not caring whether you are an atheist or not---He will help if you pray!!!! Sometimes it just boils down to who is interpreting data!
Mystic, you're deliberately making this more complex than it has to be simply to muddy the water and confuse the situation. Phetaroi had it on the money:
Exactly! It's not rocket science. It's as simple as pie. Send a 100 Christian "prayer warriors" into a children's cancer ward. Pray for 100 cancer patients. Wait a week--and that's giving God a generous amount of time. Then see whether any of the children's cancer has regressed or disappeared. Why are you getting into all this crap about "some indicator of devoutness, method, and frequency of prayer". One prayer ought to do it, right? Or is God that fickle that He has to be preened with prayers until He's in just the right mood to start answering them???? Ridiculous! Mystic, sometimes I wonder about you. You can be so intelligible one moment and then make absolutely no sense the next.
Nonsense. It is NOT about God. You ignore the required aspect of the prayer warrior. The effectiveness of prayer is NOT separable from the person praying, period. Whether or not I make absolutely no sense or am intelligible is also dependent upon your knowledge and intellect, not just my communication skills. I and mine do and will always seek the prayers of sincere prayer warriors in all serious matters of concern to us. Lost keys or hard to find parking spaces, etc. can fend for themselves.
Mystic, you're deliberately making this more complex than it has to be simply to muddy the water and confuse the situation. Phetaroi had it on the money:
Exactly! Its not rocket science. It's as simple as pie. Send a 100 Christian "prayer warriors" into a children's cancer ward. Pray for 100 cancer patients. Wait a week--and that's giving God a generous amount of time. Then see whether any of the children's cancer has regressed or disappeared. Why are you getting into all this crap about "some indicator of devoutness, method, and frequency of prayer". One prayer ought to do it, right? Or is God that fickle that He has to be preened with prayers until He's in just the right mood to start answering them???? Ridiculous! Mystic, sometimes I wonder about you. You can be so intelligible one moment and then make absolutely no sense the next.
I wonder what is the percentage of Christians that are in hospital receiving scientific treatments for their cancer, rather than staying at home and only praying?
I wonder what is the percentage of Christians that are in hospital receiving scientific treatments for their cancer, rather than staying at home and only praying?
I would hope that 100 percent would stay in a hospital and NOT do anything so foolish as only praying!
Jeff does mystify me. I have offered to be truthful and respectful with him, yet he ignores my posts. I suspect he isn’t interested in a truthful respectful discussion with an atheist. It’s sad and unfortunate.
I wonder what is the percentage of Christians that are in hospital receiving scientific treatments for their cancer, rather than staying at home and only praying?
I wonder WHY they are in hospitals when their lord and savior invented painful cancer and , with a plan, gave it to them.
If you ask me, doctors are a product of the devil. Every time the devil saves the life of a xian is the devil foiling god’s plan.
It's typical jeffspeak. Immature and over the top. I think Ozzy has become a disciple.
I imagine one foaming at the mouth and typing with one finger at the keyboard, the typing while wearing a clown costume.
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Ridiculous! Mystic, sometimes I wonder about you. You can be so intelligible one moment and then make absolutely no sense the next. 
Sometimes it just boils down to who is interpreting data!
