Rodney

I was watching a documentary on human mating habits, and scientists had set up a big party with specially-chosen participants, some of who were wearing heart monitors and transmitters. When two people really started to hit it off, their hearbeats synched up!

What I'm saying is that two people in an intensely emotion experience can interact physically on many levels, in ways that aren't understood. Prayer, when combined with touch, might be as powerful in this way as physical attraction. Is the effect electromagnetic? Sometime else? Can't say.

But I don't think it's spiritual. Case in point: I once had an Episcopal priest touch me on the forehead in a blessing as part of a service and was profoundly affected. The feel of that touch lingered for an hour. Now I later came to know, at first hand, that this particular priest was emotionally abusive, actually mentally ill, and had a take on religious that was actively narcissistic (she was God's chosen; the rest of us should shut up and follow orders, or leave). She, uh, was definitely not a messenger of God, though she thought she was. So why did that touch have such an effect on me? Perhaps a combo of the ceremony, my state of mind, and two interacting electromagnetic fields.

All that said, I do believe in things like prayer, because I have seen it work. The thing is, I think that the power of prayer is independent of God, and in some cases even the belief in God. Knew a woman in her 70s who needed a serious operation. She got all her friends to pray for her and keep praying, and they got friends to pray. By the time she went into the hospital, she had hundreds praying for her. The operation went well, and she was completely without post-operative pain. Was off painkillers almost immediately, healed fully in record time. Was it God? Or do certain kinds of thoughts, properly focused, affect our reality by reaching down into some murky quantum sub-basement of reality and tweaking the equipment there in small but meaningful ways? The more that scientists learn about the universe, the weirder the picture looks. So I would not be surprised.