"Use the force, Luke!"
Posted on 11/03/2003 12:05:39 PM PST by Heartlander
That's exactly why I asked him. He had always seemed sincere in his faith. I can't remember a time when he wasn't sitting on his bunk reading something by Mary Baker Eddy. It certainly seemed to me that he was having his cake (claiming the shots were worthless) and eating it too (getting the benefit of the immunizations).
His explanation to me was that he didn't want to create a problem with the military by refusing the shots. They meant nothing, so it wasn't worth making a fuss over them. The impression I got from him was that this was the standard reaction of CS guys in the Army.
It's not the impression the media gives us of CS, which is of people refusing blood transfusions for their children, etc. Anyway, that's how he handled it.
Well thanks for 'splaining that, PH. Still it seems to me this guy lacks the courage of his convictions; so one wonders whether he is really a CS other than in name.
It seems to me that it always comes down to a matter of faith and conscience. In the Scriptures, Paul refers to it as the difference between milk and meat. Some Christians have difficulty with the meat.
In the case at hand, an immunization might be offensive to one’s faith but not to another’s – even within the same denomination.
Judge Moore is another example. His own faith required that he take a stand that the monument was to acknowledge God and not the lesser but legally acceptable argument, to recognize the history of Western law. To other Christians, using a secular argument does not diminish the result.
Faith healing is the same. To some, once the healing has been confessed – taking any conventional medical steps shows doubt and a lack of faith. To others, the success or failure of the subsequent medical steps is the response to the confession of faith. And to others, the medical steps are taken expecting success based on the confession of faith.
My two cents...
Yes, and yes! Phaedrus. In our age of spin, words are often used to construct alternative realities altogether. Case in point: that CBS Reagan movie. Although I have not seen it, and doubt I ever will, from what I've heard, it's an attempt by a bunch of people who love to hate the former president, to "reinvent" both Mr. & Mrs. Reagan as people they are not. It's an exercise in rewriting history by falsifying it.
Best to get our heads out of our doctrines, and look closely and directly at what is really going on in "nature's laboratory." That ought to keep us honest (one hopes).
Baptists and Buddhists bowed their heads in different countries, prayed to different gods and healed strangers lying in Durham hospital beds.
It happened this year.
Duke University doctors, studying nontraditional influences on healing, lumped about 20 heart patients into a "prayer group." The patients didn't know it, but their names were listed on prayer requests sent to places like Nepal, Jerusalem and Baltimore, where people of different faiths prayed for their recovery.
Those prayers worked, doctors say. Patients in the "prayer group" performed 50 to 100 percent better than patients who weren't the prayer targets.
Results of the study -- and others from around the country -- are jolting the traditional medical establishment, where prayer has long been tagged a medical taboo.
Just a few years ago, medical researchers who hinted about supernatural influences in their work risked being branded loons. That's changing quickly as scientists at highly regarded institutions like Duke and Harvard University are linking prayer and health through scientific tests.
The American Medical Association is even budging from its naysaying stance. Its directors still warn against an "outbreak of irrationalism," but they conceded recently that more research into the healing power of prayer is needed...
The first major study that looked at prayer and its healing effects was published in 1988 in the Southern Medical Journal. Dr. Randy Bird, a cardiologist at the University of California, followed the progress of 393 patients with chest pain and heart trouble. He divided them into two groups. One was prayed for. One was not.
Three people in the prayed-for group required treatment with antibiotics, compared to 17 patients in the group not targeted with prayers. Those who were prayed for also used respirators less and suffered fewer instances of congestive heart failure.
Studies since then also have shown that prayer seems to work, even when the prayers are offered up from far away places and from people of different faiths, as in the Duke study.
Dr. Elisabeth Targ, a psychiatrist at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, recruited 40 AIDS patients for a study and found that half who received prayers -- from places as far away as Alaska and Puerto Rico -- required fewer hospitalizations and doctor's visits.
In two similar studies this year involving another set of AIDS patients, Targ recorded significantly better health in patients who received prayers than in patients who didn't...
Now that's interesting! If you can figure it out, please let us know.
Indeed, "real life" is the laboratory. But for good or ill, words are a powerful influence on what happens in the lab.
IMHO, this means that He honors all bona fide spiritual initiative; nevertheless, peril comes when ones hears but then rejects, Christ.
Those prayers worked, doctors say. Patients in the "prayer group" performed 50 to 100 percent better than patients who weren't the prayer targets.
Fascinating, Alamo-Girl -- but somehow not really surprising!
I especially liked the part about it not mattering whether the one praying for the patient (stranger!) was a Buddhist or a Christian. And that it also didn't matter where the person doing the praying was located. This rather supports the idea of consciousness somehow participating/propagating non-locally, in a universal field; and that the well-observed "group effect" may be independent of geographical location.
I recall not long ago Hank said he thought it was highly improper for people to pray for him, without being asked to do so. I wonder would he still feel the same way, if he were gravely ill, and friends and well-wishers unbeknownst to him were praying for his recovery.
So true, A-G; so true. Thanks so much for writing!
Are we finally beginning to get it?
LOL, A-G!!! Me, too! (But don't let that out....)
"Use the force, Luke!"
I'm wondering how they could even measure these effects considering the background noise of general healing. I say that because I know plenty of people, in fact, whole congregations, who pray for all the sick and infirm. Universal coverage, so to speak. Maybe, there's a threshold of prayer volume, or a specificity, necessary for these "target" effects to be noticed...
In other news, magnetized wrist bands worked in half the people of one study. The variable was whether the targets believed they would work or not. I'm not joking. There was a controlled study published about 2 months ago. Half of the subjects believed the bands would work, and for those the wristbands worked. I can't say enough good about the placebo effect.
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