An Air France flight from Toronto to Paris has skidded off the runway and burst into flames. Sounds pretty dire.

Holy shit.

If you say they cover all prayer, I have no evidence to offer that they do not.

I would not make this claim. These studies were done in the same way that all studies of new treatments are done. As Madrigal noted some people (conservative Christians) claimed that prayer would result in medical improvements. Scientists set up the prayer intervention in the way that the proponents claimed it would work and used an appropriate study to see if it did work. It didn't.

We can always say that a different kind of prayer might work for a different problem, just as we can say that a debunked herbal remedy still might work in a different form for a different problem. But as the studies accumulate the argument gets weaker and weaker. That is the lovely thing about science.

An Air France flight from Toronto to Paris has skidded off the runway and burst into flames.

Yikes. An A340, which is almost as big as a 747 (comparable to a 777).

An A340, which is almost as big as a 747 (comparable to a 777).

Yep. Big trans-oceanic planes.

So lovely it hurts.

I would not make this claim.

I extrapolated from your dismissal of prayer to the dismissal of all prayer. If this is not what you intended, I apologise and retract my objections.

One of my English teachers in HS offered Bible as lit, a few years before I got there, but he discontinued it because scary parents would buttonhole him during class and try to debate him doctrinally. Which was sad to me to think about as I considered him to be quite brilliant as well as committed.

I extrapolated from your dismissal of prayer to the dismissal of all prayer. If this is not what you intended, I apologise and retract my objections.

No, I'm sure my original wording was too expansive. It would have been more appropriate to say that, despite repeated attempts under favorable condtions, effects of prayer of the sort predicted by conservative Christians have not been found. Most scientists would agree that there are more promising candidates as interventions to improve human welfare at this point, and we should stop spending money on these studies.

Believing that you are being prayed for? There is an effect there, but it probably is unrelated to whether you are prayed for or not.

And there is no doubt at all that prayer has positive effects for the person doing the praying. It's a powerful effect.

And there is no doubt at all that prayer has positive effects for the person doing the praying. It's a powerful effect.

I actually envy the people who find such deep comfort in prayer. The cynic in me says they're only self-hypnotizing themselves into believing that Someone hears them, but the other parts remember when I believed that.

She either does not understand exactly how rude her communications are, or she doesn't care.

This isn't always an indicator of general assholishness though. My immediate boss has a brusque e-mail manner that can rub people the wrong way, but he's very personable face-to-face or over the phone.

I could have checked the shards. We were travelling with carry on only in an effort to save time and minimize human interaction. Which I think we still achieved, on balance, as the helpful USPS kiosk for mailing things that can't be carried on had no line nor attendant, and the ticket counter for checking baggage had both.

I find the baptism in absentia thing as disturbing as the idea of a bunch of Zoroastrians digging up bodies from church graveyards and properly exposing them in the center of a maze so the spirits can be properly released to heaven.