This week we get into the power of prayer. After Bob came across a Huffington Post article by Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld talking about how prayer is medicine for the sick. He claims evidence from a 1988 study by Dr. Randolph Byrd where people who were not prayed for suffered more complications. However, Bob disarms this claim and we provide another study done much more recently which shows that people who receive intercessory prayer and know it had the highest rate of complications when compared with the two control groups—those who were prayed for and didn’t know it and those who were not prayed for at all. Bob even ventures a guess as to why it might be that way.
We also discuss the notions of magic medallions, namely St. Christopher , the release of my first book, The Pentateuch: A Source Critical Version of the Five Books of Moses, and touch lightly on the subject of Christian and Atheist discrimination at work.
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In “The World’s Last Night,” C.S. Lewis has an essay on prayer where he talks about his own skepticism regarding “studies” on the efficacy of prayer.