Casting Off Our Fishing Rods

Tuesday, April 4, 2006
by Scot H. Laney

Because there’s none to be found here, although it is tempting to take a crack at the VanDam/Jones DQs last week. Both were very instructive in the “how to handle controversy while retaining professionalism” category, both on the angler and the BASS side of the equation.

Instead, let’s wander through the latest Harvard study to grace us mere commoners with the latest and greatest thinking from America’s preeminent ivory tower of higher learning.

The study that led to the conclusion that prayer doesn’t work.

Now I’m no religious expert. Far from it. I’m also not a doctor, and I've never even been to Harvard (although my alma mater, the University of Nevada, is sometimes referred to as "Harvard on the Truckee," primarily by others who have never been to Harvard either). I never actually earned my degree from there, but they gave it to me anyway.

Heck, I’m not even a completely baked Christian yet. More of a work in progress. If God has different classifications for all of us poor mortals, I think I’m in the “Keep an eye on him, he may turn out okay” category.

But even a half-baked guy like me knows that they got this study all wrong.

Eighteen hundred heart bypass patients were split into three groups of 600 each: those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren’t prayed for but were told it was a possibility. The results were that 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.

In the medical world, this is what suffices as a reasonable conclusion. Keep that in mind the next time you get prescribed the newest and best wonder drug.

The problem here is pretty simple: First, how can someone not be prayed for? Prayers go out all the time for all people who are sick and in need of help or comfort. Second, the prayer that was offered was for a “successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications."

What the heck kind of prayer is that? I didn’t know that we could influence God’s will at that level. What about something along the lines of these people finding comfort in God’s embrace, strength to face what they must face, that if it is the will of God they find peace ever after, released from the shackles of this world and in a place without pain and suffering?

Is Harvard suggesting that this prayer doesn’t work? How would they know that? Even in the prayer that was developed for the study, what do they mean by complications? Obviously a medical complication is simple enough to diagnose.

But were the people who developed complications more at peace than the others? Did they bother to ask? And since they all were prayed for, some just more directly than others, what would be the result of this surgery if, indeed, the world was without prayer at all?

Would the technology to do a heart surgery even exist? Nature may provide the wonder bone in man, but God clearly put in the backbone to strive for these kinds of knowledge. Just my opinion.

In any event, I know for a fact that at least one prayer has been answered, and it gives me hope that all prayers are heard.

You know the one, the prayer that kept mankind from being wiped from the face of the earth that terrible day so long ago.

“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”