Word: prayerful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When people engage in prayer, it's the frontal lobes that take the lead, since they govern focus and concentration. During very deep prayer, the parietal lobe powers down, which is what allows us to experience that sense of having loosed our earthly moorings. The frontal lobes go quieter when worshippers are involved in the singular activity of speaking in tongues - which jibes nicely with the speakers' subjective experience that they are not in control of what they're saying...
...Powerful Is Prayer? For most believers, the element of religious life that intersects most naturally with health is prayer. Very serious theologians believe in the power of so-called intercessory prayer to heal the sick, and some very serious scientists have looked at it too, with more than 6,000 published studies on the topic just since 2000. Some of them have been funded by groups like the John Templeton Foundation - part of whose mission is to search for overlaps of religion and science - but others have come from more dispassionate investigators...
...Francisco General Hospital found that heart patients who were prayed for fared better than those who were not. But a larger study in 2005 by cardiologist Herbert Benson at Harvard University challenged that finding, reporting that complications occurred in 52% of heart-bypass patients who received intercessory prayer and 51% of those who didn't. Sloan says even attempting to find a scientific basis for a link between prayer and healing is a "fool's errand" - and for the most basic methodological reason. "It's impossible to know how much prayer is received," he says, "and since...
...particularly in closed communities." Former Christian Scientist Rita Swan, executive director of the nonprofit Children's Health Care Is A Legal Duty, estimates that since the 1980s 300 children have died of "religion-based medical neglect" in the United States. Shawn F. Peters, author of the 2007 book When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law calls the situation an unfolding tragedy. "Americans treasure religious liberty and it's one of our bedrock freedoms," says Peters. "Most of us realize that there have to be some limits to such freedoms...
...Christian Scientists maintain that seeking medical attention is a personal decision and that the First Amendment protects their right to believe that "God's infinite goodness, realized in prayer and action, heals," as noted on the website of the The Church of Christ, Scientist. But a long list of major U.S. organizations have already called for repealing of existing religious exemptions, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association. "Too often, deference to religion in contemporary American society has resulted in us subordinating all other values," says Dr. Richard Sloan, professor of psychiatry at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital...