Does Prayer Really Work? Does God Even Care?

[Brakeman]

My Comments were not denying a change, my comments were denying that a god conversation was going on. Once you cede that, you are simply stating that a psychotic delusional conversation is the best way that you know how to improve yourself.. how sad..

Yes, I understood that. But I didn't cede anything, other than the mechanism of prayer could be debated, but that the fact that prayer can have beneficial effects is pretty much indisputable, especially with someone who has experienced those benefits. As for 'sad', no drug-free benefits are ever sad, be they from prayer, meditation, mindfulness, etc. What is more sad, in my opinion, is closing oneself off to beneficial practices.
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Look at who does most work for charity. Prayer stimulates concern for others, and action fir others. Even people like Richard Dawkins have said that atheists need to find a way if galvanising themselves to do charitable work in the way theists do. And to be fair to RD he has made a serious effort in that direction.

What crap! The beneficial effects of prayer is certainly not indisputable!
An unintentional byproduct, meditation, may have some minor benefit to some, but over all the belief in the imaginary conversations with god is very detrimental to society. If you can't convince yourself that you can talk to god through prayer then becoming a christian is pretty close to "not gonna happen" so all the monies and effort spent on any facet of religion is wasted.
The prayer belief that you are doing something for somebody when you aren't is detrimental because it prevents you from realizing that you haven't yet done anything to help.

God believers often "pray" for god to heal their sick children and sit around land let the child die for want of health care.

True believers often pray for god guidance in raising their children and rely on the prayer instead of secular family counseling or education.

True believers pray that god will grant them wisdom and rely on his telepathic answers instead of research and fact finding.

Even yourself must admit that if you relied only on info received from your prayers, your (Biology?) work would be greatly stunted.

You don't rely on prayer to feed yourself, you get your own food.
You don't rely on prayer to wash yourself, you take your own shower.
You don't rely on prayer to clothe yourself, you get your own clothes.
You don't rely on prayer to pay your bills, you get your own job.
You don't rely on prayer to get yourself to work, you arrange your own transportation.

Yet now, you claim that there are benefits of prayer that might be more than you doing it yourself from the start? Such bullshit!

As for the Christian claim to do so much charity.. Since the majority of the world population is religious of some sort, then by shear numbers the theists would dwarf non-theistic charity giving. But charity is a poor benchmark, because it is scientists and engineers that bring up the standard of living, not priests, and agnostics and atheists make up the bulk of these. God botherers simply use charities to try to buy their way into an imaginary heaven. They enjoy and use poverty and pain to further ply their trade as the healthy and wealthy are much less eager to swallow a conditional unsubstantiated promise of a better future. Human misery is historically highest where and when the society spends too much of it's efforts on religion.

Want to help the starving kids in Africa? Fight the religious beliefs against family planing and against the religious belief that life on earth is not to be valued but rather the next life in heaven is more important than education and the liberal values of equality that prevents wars.

Want to help the disabled or the diseased? Fight the religious conservatives that block stem cell research, and that block teaching of evolution and general science to more easily push children away from fields of research that would doom their god belief.

Want to help hurricane or flood victims? Don't give to a theistic charity, Counter the religious conservatives' staunch opposition to global climate change mollification efforts

The best charity is to correct the world problems that create the need for charities, and that is what atheists do best!