Speak for yourself. We have new members joining everyday who may wish to contribute to this debate. If you have nothing to add, no one is forcing you to participate. Just because your mind is made up doesn’t mean the issue is settled for everyone else.
Also from Carlin, “The Interview with Jesus” from the A Place for My Stuff album:
As a lowly, flawed human, I don’t know if there is or isn’t a God. Even though I converted to Judaism, I still consider myself somewhat agnostic. As with aliens and women who will find themselves attracted to me, I want to believe.
Despite that, I still attend services at a local Reform synagogue, still pursue my exploration of Judaism, and still pray. I don’t pray for things, though. If there is a God, and I have a soul, and my soul is a gift from God, I want him/her/it to hear my thanks for its existence.
God might not be able to answer our prayers in the way we want, but we can try to ease the suffering of our fellow man, and work to make their path a bit less treacherous. In that way, God’s will and many of those prayers can be answered.
I’m pretty sure we’ve had threads on this exact thing before. And I think my response was:
If a study like this had found that prayer “worked,” this would be evidence that prayer was an impersonal force, like vitamins or penicillin, or a way to manipulate God. It doesn’t say anything one way or the other about the existence of a personal God who listens to prayer and decides how to respond.
In other words, an experiment like this, in order to be valid, has to be double-blind. But there’s no way of performing such an experiment so that it’s “blind” on God’s part.
That’s exactly right…even people who do believe in intercessory prayer do not believe that God always answers these prayers (anyone could see that this is not the case). No one knows how or why God might choose to answer some prayers and not others.
The article I read about the study gave me the impression the results of the study were published recently, not last March. They did not give the precise publication date. Sometimes articles are bumped a few months and there is a gap between the time they are written and the time they are published. I was wrong in calling it recent.
So what??? Why do you keep harping on that detail? Have you theists changed Gods or something since last March? Is Heaven under new management?
The results of 10-year study of this kind costing over $2 million and involving 1800 people do not become invalid after a few months.
So I was wrong about the publication date. I am sorry. Get over it!
Here’s a fun game! Take the above quote by Oakminster and change the word “prayer” to “astrology” or “tarot cards” or “tea leaf readings” or “good-luck charms” or “sacrificing chickens to the voodoo gods.”
Isn’t it amazing how the sentence still works? 
Does that tell you something about prayer?
How many frakkin threads does it take to debate atheism? What’s to debate? Atheists don’t believe, and ain’t gonna. Religious folks do believe, and won’t stop. Umpteen repetitive threads rehashing the same tired points ad nauseum add no value.
Guess what? I’m not a theist. I just see no point in constantly attacking those who are. It’s tiresome.
Until no one asks the question again.
The existence of god.
Is this a fact, or an opinion?
To you. Others may disagree. You sound like the apocryphal patent office clerk who proclaimed, “everything has been invented”. You don’t know that with any more certainty than anyone else. How does it clarify anything to shit in a thread you have, by your own admission, nothing to contribute to?
Actually, I’ve contributed more than the OP, who did not even bother to provide a link to anything about the year old study he thought was recent. Not only did I locate relevant information and provide a link, I also offered criticism of the methods employed. The OP never wanted a serious debate, he just wanted to go “neener-neener”. And then later he returned to whip out that devasting “religion is a fairy tale” argument. Like nobody’s ever seen that before. As I said, nothing new here. This is just another militant atheist recruiting drive.
Exactly! what’s your point? I don’t care if you read your tea leaves or the horoscope in the morning as long as you show up showered and ready to work.
Amen.
Florida just had tornados. They flattened Lady Lake Church. How much praying had permeated the structure. If it had any impact ,churches would be spared.
It sounds like you’ve confused prayer with incantation.
An understandable error.
How does prayer differ from wishful thinking?
That seems useful.
Sure. It tells me that prayer is a ritualistic practice that has no discernable effect on real world outcomes, but provides relief and/or comfort to the practioner. I’m not sure why that would be “amazing,” though.
Bottom line, you’re not going to get any kind of concession from a theist on this sort of issue. From my perspective, these sorts of studies qualify as a “foolish test” (Deut 6:16). In consideration that I believe faith can only remain faith (as opposed to knowledge) as long as there is no concrete, indisputable proof, then had this produced noticeable results (e.g., those prayed for had a noticeable statistical difference), it would do that end a disservice.
Further, by strictly enforcing a pattern and length of prayer (only two weeks??), any spiritual inspiration is practically stripped away. That is, if I’m going to pray for something, I’m not going to pray “God, I pray for John S. for a fast and speedy recovery.”, I’m going to pray for him in the way that I feel inspired to pray, for as long and as often as I feel inspired to do so. Even still, when I see prayer requests go out, they’re usually from people of faith with whom I (or of the people their requesting) have at least some connection (even if it is as slight as being members of the same congregation). As was stated earlier by Oakminster, I think the moment any enforcement on the form of the prayer, it directly affects its quality.
The study reported in all by itself? That’s quite an achievement for an inanimate object.
This sounds like rather vacuous description. How many studies of the effects of intercessory prayer on the health and recovery of 1,802 patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery in six different hospitals have ever been done?
Is it possible for you to tell what the flaws in the methodology were, or am I expected to take your word that they exist even though they can’t name them?
Every believer I’ve known has denied that since they started believing, so it did not happen all of a sudden.
Actually this is precisely the opposite of the cause. Prayer cannot be studied because it makes perfect logical sense. Science studies things that make no logical sense. Gravity, for instance. There is no way to use propositional logic to prove gravity. There’s no logical reason why objects should attract each other with a force proportional to the inverse square of the distance between them. They just do. That lack of logic makes gravity a fair target for scientific study. Logical things such as basic arithmetic and prayer are not open to scientific study.
Suppose that Alice and Bob love each other and Alice gets sick. It will be immediately obvious to Alice that Bob wants her to get better. Even so, Bob will still say to Alice that he wants her to get better, probably many times. As humans beings say things to other human beings that communicate no new information, it’s no surprise that they’d also say such things to God.
I can’t say as I don’t personally come to God pleading as if He were some oriental monarch on His throne. Since you used a first-person pronoun, you apparently come pleading to God as if He were some oriental monarch on His throne. Why don’t you tell us why you do so?
Only an idiot or an ignoramus would believe that the idea of prayer is that asking God to grant something increases the chances of that thing happening. Your sentence would be like saying, “The idea of medicine, that juggling billiard balls will raise the stock market, is unsustainable.”
This was a rather severe change of subject.
It cannot be.
Right, though we could be mroe precise and simply say that there is a God.
Hypothetical reasoning where the premise is false is a meaningless mental exercise, but I’ll answer this anyway. It is not logical to suppose that any person in any circumstance would gain comfort by asking for help from a non-existent being. To state the obvious, non-existent beings do not offer comfort.
No. Even if there were any logic in your premise on an individual basis, which there is not, it’s still absurd to suggest that billions of people in hundreds of generations across tens of thousands of cultures would all choose to pray to the same imaginary being. Hence if we see such widespread belief in some being, that being must be real.