I read . . . an article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children to be skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything. In other words to weazen and kill in themselves all spontaneous love, passion, enthusiasm, all creative power.I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax (Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write, 173).
I’ve been reading some skeptics’ web sites, which have proved interesting and educational. It’s great to live in an era that offers so much freedom of information. I have to admit, though, that I got tickled (as my grandma used to say) about some of the skeptics’ ideas about prayer and faith healing. The research on healing prayer is ambiguous, with some studies showing positive and definite results from prayer, and others showing few or no additional benefits from prayer. Skeptics claim that the research proving the effectiveness of prayer is flawed; the faithful claim that the research proving the ineffectiveness of prayer is flawed. Jesus and Buddha taught that people are flawed.
I think I’m going to go with Jesus and Buddha on that one.
Rather ironically, and in spite of the ongoing debates between atheists and believers (or skeptics and the faithful), research has proved that faith works, beyond any doubt, and that there is a god: Placebo is his name. In his 2005 article titled “Running on Faith,” Edzard Ernst reported on research about the effects of spiritual healing through prayer, characterizing the results as “staggering. Improvements were so remarkable that several patients practically abandoned their wheelchairs during the study.” There it is: scientific proof that prayer works, right?
. . . Well, not exactly.
