The very basic belief in prayer is questioned.

There was a news item in Deccan Chronicle dt 1st April entitled " Surgery prayer may harm" by Benedict Carey of New York Times Service.

True to human nature, this caught my attention I read on. Given below is the gist:
John Templeton Foundation has sponsored so far $2.4 million so far on the research of prayer's effect apart from research into spirituality. The US Govt has spent so far $2.3 million since 2003.

Their decade long study on 1800 patients revealed that prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people. And patients who knew they were being prayed for, had a higher rate of post-operative complications because of the expectations the prayers created.

While proponents have believed that prayer is perhaps the most deeply human response to disease and that it may relieve suffering by some mechanism that is not yet understood, sceptics have contended that studying prayer is a waste of money and these are things beyond the reach of science.

Dr.Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, said the findings were not the last word on the effects of so-called intercessory prayer.

Dr.Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioural medicine at Columbia and author of a forthcoming book, Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine has an interesting and thought provoking say: " The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion"

I generally agree with Dr. Richard Sloan. And also if the persons praying are fully conscious of their deed as their own and attch themselves to the outcome, giving credit to their prayer, forgetting about divine intervention, this might have resulted in some negative findings as the study points out.

But I feel strongly against dissecting faith. If you have faith, just nourish it daily, safeguard it aginst these kind of news items.

Human Limitations-a Virus.

In my first post dt 5th March, I said that the purpose of this blog is to share whatever affected me positively when I read some wonderful books.

In between I got carried away with my quest to earn money and a few posts appeared here.
I realised that I am deviating from my predetermined path which was shown to me by God.

From today onwards I return to my journey of sharing and creating a chain. Let those money related posts of mine remain here as such and serve as a reminder to me.

I read more about 'power of thoughts' by Linda Miller which I reproduce below.

"Everything in the Universe is composed of energy, including you and me.

Even our thoughts are energy. Trhough energy, everything in the Universe is connected.
The Universe creates without effort. Just look around you. Trees, rocks, air, plants etc are created without stress, effort or over-analyzation.

You are part of this Universe and through the power of thoughts, you have the same creative power that manifests everything you see. The only thing that limits your potential is your own belief system.

Everything that occurs in your life is interpreted by you. You add the meaning, you add the emotional response, you add everything. It is your thoughts that literally take the energy data, and transpose it into your reality. What you consider 'real' is nothing more than agreement that you have made with yourself.

his is how your reality has been shaped. This is how we have learned what is possible and impossible. We have learned it from other resources like relatives, parents, friends, books, movies, news papers etc.

But the problem is these other people have their own limiting belief systems which they also consider real.

So human limitations spread like virus."


Now many of us are waking up. We are all being shaken out of our intellectal trance. We are being taught to 'unlearn' those safety dogmas in which we have entrapped ourselves for so long.

Ok, if you feel I should not generalise, please replace 'we' into 'I' in the above sentense.