Interesting "study", but I'm not impressed. I was never one to follow fads in high school either. Given the inherent difficulty in measuring the spiritual, I think a prudent person might conclude that this study is severely lacking. No control groups are mentioned at all, for example, nor is any form of standardization specified. There is no mention for instance, of the state of the souls in the test subjects who had the surgury or the participants who prayed. There is no way to prove how the participants prayed, or if they prayed at all. It occurs to me that one could pray for John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer to be spared his life from capital punishment, but if your prayer is counter to God's wishes, would God answer your prayers? The "study" leaks like a sieve.
Might not GOD take a dim view of mere humans attempting to empirically catoragize, measure and evaluate what is usually considered to be a sacred personal communication between man and God? If you postulate the power of prayer, you can also postulate the power of God to answer or ignore.
If the power of the placebo, which demonstrates the power of belief in a subject, is accepted as scientific fact, why do you think similar results are not "found" for the power of prayer?
I'm not defending prayer, but this is a joke. If there is a God, he just might be able to put two and two together and arrive at the same conclusion. I think there was an agenda here, because it wasn't a serious study, and it doesn't pass muster - the kind of a joke that might be repeated on liberal blogs, and passed on by easily led liberals because bashing those who believe in God happens the current fab fad.
