Prayer does not work

[Jacob(smooth)]

I disagree with the premise here. Prayer actually does what it is designed to do.

It is designed to make the pray-er feel really good about him or herself without actually doing a fucking thing for the problem at hand.

Yep!

Can be very useful when there actually isn't anything you can actually do about the problem at hand.

---

Let's put it this way. Ask a rabid fundi if he could cure an amputation with prayer. Or raise the titanic. Unless completely batshit crazy he would have to admit that prayer does not work... For that.

Now let's go the other extreme and find a hardcore atheist (looks around in manner of meercat). Would you say that a prayer for comfort for a grieving widow, vulnerable and raised in the tradition, MIGHT achieve that purpose? Of making her feel a bit better?

It probably would.

Under which scenarios would prayer be applicable? When does prayer work? Not specifically, generally. I need something to play with here.

Just gave you one. Bereaved person.

---

---

I'm not playing any games . I'm taking the dictionary definition of "work". Viz (in this context)

(of a plan or method) have the desired result or effect."the desperate ploy had worked"

In which case whether prayer "works" is entirely contingent on what the "desired Result" is.

Refrain the statement. "prayer never has the desired effect". Doesn't work does it. What if I pray for a dying man to give him comfort. It does. It worked. It had the desired Result.

I'm interpreting "work" per the dictionary. You've generated your own definition of "have an effect beyond the placebo". So which one of us is playing games ?

Tell you what. Find me a dictionary which defines" work" as you are interpreting it, which includes not only that something has an effect but also HOW something has an effect and I'll concede the point .

I'm commenting on what the thread title says. I can't comment on what you think it might infer because I don't know what that might be.

Oh And if you believe that placebos are a pointless waste of time, you've never worked in medicine!

How you got to me not believing in placebo's I don't know.

In the context of the OP we have a quest to discover whether prayer works in a medical environment. It is therefore being evaluated in as similar way as possible to any other treatment.

It is inherent in the testing (as it always is in medicine) that in order to evaluate whether a given treatment "works" it has to outperform a placebo. Anything that hasn't performed better (or as in the case of prayer actually worse) than the placebo has not worked.

So, for example, a pain tablet that produces the same results as a placebo is deemed to have failed - or not to have worked.

So again I repeat - you are playing with the definition of "work" to include the placebo effect.

And I repeat, give me the definition of "work" , from a dictionary which does NOT include the placebo effect.
And no, a tablet which performs the same as a placebo is not said to have "Not worked" in medical literature, it's said to "perform no better than placebo." because that's what it did. The peer review process comes down hard on sloppy use of Language.