Things I vaguely remember from education
Apart from the smattering of French that would help me to order in a restaurant which, let's face it, is really all I would want to be able to do on a holiday to France, I can remember smatterings of my education that are really quite interesting.
Something I learned from my psychology lessons at college is about prayer. This will not be in depth or tell you anything specifically with links sources, hence the title of this blog. However, you can look up the studies if you can really be bothered.
This week it was reported that Professor Richard Dawkins, the scientist and most famous of the atheists, suffered a minor stroke which forced him to cancel his tour. The Church of England sent a tweet about this saying they were going to send prayers for him. Now, either they are trying to be compassionate or this is one of the biggest pieces of internet trolling in years.
It got me thinking about my past experiences in education and I realised that there had been a study once in to the power of prayer. There was a group of sick patients in hospital who were split in to three groups. One group had prayers said for them and were told they were having prayers said for them, one group were told they were going to be prayed for and another were not told anything and were the control group or something. The groups who knew they were being prayed for or thought they were either took a turn for the worse or they died while the group who were oblivious to the study were fairly normal in rates of recovery and how positive they felt about recovery.
Other studies say that prayer has been helpful and when people know they are being prayed for this gives them hope.
Of course this is down to personal belief as much as anything. If you are religious you would be comforted by the thought that people are praying for your recovery and, if like me, you are an atheist you would be mortified to think that people are praying for you.
That said, illness or something bad happening to one person can have a knock on effect to lots of other people too and it might be that other people find comfort in praying for you. There could be an argument that if you are a non-believer then you would think the prayer isn't going anywhere anyway so you would just let them pray away and get on with life yourself. Can't hurt, can it?
Interesting to think about but also interesting that this should pop into my head after about 12 years.
Something I learned from my psychology lessons at college is about prayer. This will not be in depth or tell you anything specifically with links sources, hence the title of this blog. However, you can look up the studies if you can really be bothered.
This week it was reported that Professor Richard Dawkins, the scientist and most famous of the atheists, suffered a minor stroke which forced him to cancel his tour. The Church of England sent a tweet about this saying they were going to send prayers for him. Now, either they are trying to be compassionate or this is one of the biggest pieces of internet trolling in years.
It got me thinking about my past experiences in education and I realised that there had been a study once in to the power of prayer. There was a group of sick patients in hospital who were split in to three groups. One group had prayers said for them and were told they were having prayers said for them, one group were told they were going to be prayed for and another were not told anything and were the control group or something. The groups who knew they were being prayed for or thought they were either took a turn for the worse or they died while the group who were oblivious to the study were fairly normal in rates of recovery and how positive they felt about recovery.
Other studies say that prayer has been helpful and when people know they are being prayed for this gives them hope.
Of course this is down to personal belief as much as anything. If you are religious you would be comforted by the thought that people are praying for your recovery and, if like me, you are an atheist you would be mortified to think that people are praying for you.
That said, illness or something bad happening to one person can have a knock on effect to lots of other people too and it might be that other people find comfort in praying for you. There could be an argument that if you are a non-believer then you would think the prayer isn't going anywhere anyway so you would just let them pray away and get on with life yourself. Can't hurt, can it?
Interesting to think about but also interesting that this should pop into my head after about 12 years.
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