Interesting religious occurrence today, thoughts?

[Brenner Hayes]

I won't repeat what many of the other responders have written, although I agree with most of them and those would have been my first points.

About prayer and cancer, there may very well be something to it, but not for the reasons you say. Science is now showing us what a profound mind-body connection there is. Psychological stress can increase your chances of a heart attack as a well known example. So to put this in its simplest terms, negative thoughts can cause negative health consequences. Conversely, positive thoughts can cause health benefits. The optimistic live longer and recover faster from surgeries. What may be happening is that this positive thinking might unleash our most optimized immune systems. So your parents prayers might have had a profound affect on their brains which had a profound affect on their immune systems. I don't think any of this if this were the case would be divine. Expert mediation techniques might have produced similar results. Notice that when people are praying for others (particularly at a distance) as in the royal family and Templeton examples, such "magical" effects never happen. Also notice that GOD NEVER HEALS AMPUTEES. This is a HUGE piece of evidence in contradiction to the possibility of an intervening god. It may very well be that we have natural immune system chemicals (more powerful than chemotherapy) that can sometimes rise up to work in what appears to be miraculous ways. They aren't really miracles, they are just rare. They may be able to be triggered by our brains through our directed thoughts. Prayer could POSSIBLY work as such a trigger. And who knows, maybe we will discover that only certain people have a certain gene that makes this mind over body capability more potent? Maybe your parents both had the gene. All of this could even make an argument for encouraging patients to pick a fairy tale god and then pray to it for best cancer recovery results, just as one could argue that giving a placebo pill to a patient might be a good thing to do. It still doesn't mean that the particular god is true or that the placebo pill is anything but sugar candy.

I think if you take god out of the equation though, we will more quickly focus our research on what is really going on here and soon find ways to medicinally trigger any kind of chemical triggers that are now possibly occassionally being triggered (in practical effect) by prayer.