Does Prayer Really Work? Does God Even Care?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Same with me, the only "prayer" I've done is when forced to at school. (I hope they don't do that anymore.) I didn't take it seriously even then, and I was 5 years old.

I've been reading a lot about this recently, and every scientific study ever done has shown no significance of prayer as far as I know (in fact some even show it makes things worse!)

(For Christians) the bible clearly says every prayer will be answered. This is clearly false. The only prayers that are ever "answered" are for things that could have happened anyway. For example, no matter how much you pray for an amputee to grow a leg back, it never happens. But if you pray for someone to recover from an illness that they may recover from anyway, sometimes the prayer will be "answered" and sometimes it won't. Or in reality, sometimes they get better, sometimes they don't. The prayer is irrelevant.

It's like George Carlin theorised, the effect of prayer is much the same as the effect of non-prayer; 50/50. Half the time you get what you want, the other half you don't. Hence why he began praying to Joe Pesci, upon which he began noticing he got a lot more than when he prayed to the biblical god.