Or, uh, Pro Nobis?

In case your teletype machine is on the fritz, this just in: prayer doesn't accomplish anything when it comes to sick people.

You see, those good folks with working knowledge of the scientific method - deduction, experiment, empiricism, repeatable results, test tubes and shit - have expended time, control groups, and $2.4 million dollars(!) demonstrating what you already knew: asking God to stop afflicting somebody with heart disease doesn't actually do anything except, it turns out, decrease the sufferer's chances at recovery.

So, to be fair, praying for sick people does do something: it makes them worse. To be even more fair, however, prayer only decreases their chances of recovery if they know you're praying for them. Yes, you'll be pleasd to know that ignorance is doubly helpful in these situations.

Longtime readers of the Swill are unsurprised to find their politico-theological suspicions confirmed by scientific experiment. What we find most interesting about the study, though, is the way that various media outlets chose to announce the fact.

For example, the sturdy, no-nonsense London Times forthrightly states that "Prayer Does Not Help the Sick." Turns out it's not just Tory papers, however, that tell it like it is (in this case, anyway): even the wackily irreverent and reliably Labour Guardian says "If You Want to Get Better, Don't Say a Little Prayer." Hell, even the Boston Globe weighed in with "No Benefit of Prayer Found After Surgery." The Aussies hit paydirt with "Secret to a Speedy Recovery: No Prayers, Please."

Over there at Reuters, however (no Knight-Ridder, they) we're told that "Study Fails to Show Healing Power of Prayer." That's right, attentive grammarians and rhetoricians, bask in it: the healing power of prayer exists, it's the study that has failed. The unrelentingly crappy New York Times / International Herald Tribune hedges its bets - remember, they've been burned before - with the open question "Can Science Measure Faith?" Missouri reliably chimes in with "After Large Study, Power of Prayer Still Up in the Air." You know, like up in the air in a pervasive kind of way...

Now that we know that the chances of complications are slightly increased by praying for a sick person, however, we have a rare chance to use the enemies' weapon against them. Following our pal JST's suggestion on the matter, we hereby call for a Swill Prayer Circle. We're taking nominations for the first target, ahem, beneficiary of our religious devotions.