(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Yet more crazies think prayer is more useful to a diabetic than insulin, murder their child.

The best part?

The girl has three siblings, ranging in age from 13 to 16, the police chief said.

"They are still in the home," he said. "There is no reason to remove them. There is no abuse or signs of abuse that we can see."

Uh, yeah, apart from the BLATANT MENTAL INCOMPETENCE that lead to the SLOW, TORTUROUS MURDER of their ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD SIBLING.

Comments

[kadath.livejournal.com]

They might make it out alive, as long as they can manage to avoid coming down with anything more serious than a cold.

[chaosrah.livejournal.com]

man. wtf.

[heraldofchaos.livejournal.com]

from the user comments:

"Show me one quality, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial that shows prayer works."

i guess the placebo control in that test would be atheists praying for you but you dont know that they dont believe?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The placebo control would be telling people they're being prayed for, when they're not.

You'd have four groups:

25% no prayer, not told of prayer.
25% no prayer, told they're being prayed for.
25% prayer, not told of prayer.
25% prayer, told they're being prayed for.

The Voodoo that you do

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

Someone should totally do this test if they haven't already.

I would be willing to bet Groups 2 and 4 would show improvement, while 1 and 3 do not, but then I'm a blasphemous agnostical type, so.

Re: The Voodoo that you do

[elffin.livejournal.com]

They have. No-one really talks about the results because - {Gomer Pyle Voice} surprise surprise surprise {/GPV} - they demonstrate prayer does not work better than placebo. Meanwhile, in about five years from now, Howard Ahmanson is going to get tired of trying to prybar evolution out of public schools and is going to switch to funding trial after trial after trial until he finds the one trial with unusual results skewed in his favour, and publicise that one.

Re: The Voodoo that you do

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Of course they've done it.

In every *legitimate* test, "being told you're prayed for" is the deciding factor, not the prayer.

In the one test people keep citing, despite it having flawed methodology, a small sample, AND not being repeatable, the people who were prayed for got better - because the guys running the trial manually separated the groups, after knowing their diagnoses, and the "control" group had a significantly worse prospects to begin with.

Re: The Voodoo that you do

[sivi-volk.livejournal.com]

One of the studies we looked, in Health Psychology, used three groups:

Not prayed for;
Prayed for, told;
Prayed for, not told;

Groups 1 and 3 had essentially the same recovery rates; group two had slightly worse. I always assumed it was because they were worrying that their illness was bad enough that people were praying for them.

Re: The Voodoo that you do

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yeah, see, that misses the control group versus the effect of simply being told you're being prayed for.

Which, in this case, appears to have been a negative effect, not a standard placebo effect, but how they phrased it really doesmake a difference.

Re: The Voodoo that you do

[disorder190.livejournal.com]

Could it not be that group 2 fared slightly worse as a result of putting their faith in imagination rather than feeling like something of substance was being done to heal what ailed them?

I guess that could be more rhetorical than anything at this point, unless you have the actual numbers kicking around somewhere.

[hadesflower.livejournal.com]

people like that scare me

[autobotsrollout.livejournal.com]

The fact that the mother believes her daughter might be resurrected is pretty much proof of mental incapability to form the necessary mens rea for criminal negligence manslaughter (much less "murder" - come on now, murder is causing death with intent to cause death, don't misuse the word). I mean, holy shit, that is crazy.

Of course, that also means those parents shouldn't be allowed to continue raising their kids, not for one fucking second.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Hey, if religion isn't crazy when Stephen Harper does it, the same religion doesn't get to be crazy when this woman does it.

[sivi-volk.livejournal.com]

And really, that's crazy even for her religion.

[mrianti.livejournal.com]

maybe some people should not reproduce ?