Originally posted by whodey
I got news for ya, the IRS is there for the exact purpose of letting corporations like Apple and Google get out of paying taxes.
It works like this, the IRS creates infinite loop holes so that the richest of the rich don't pay taxes so long as they have a team of lawyers and accountants to figure out the thousands of pages of loop holes. Then they, in tur ...[text shortened]... then, God forbid, if they go bankrupt we bail them all out. It's called corporate socialism.
Meanwhile, about praying, here is the result of one scientific study of prayer using 1800 patients with heart problems, they split the 1800 into 3 groups of 600 each and did a comparison check on those told to pray for one group, not pray for another and so forth. The results: The ones prayed for had a 20% worse result rate for their affliction. I would put that up to just statistical error and the conclusion: Prayer does not work.
http://www.examiner.com/article/prayer-the-part-of-christianity-that-never-works
I do know that proper breathing exercises can bring down your own blood pressure, I have done it dozens of times so INTERNALLY your brain can direct your own healing to a certain extent.
I would start out with a BP reading of 90/140 for instance, do deep breathing, breathe in through the nose, as deep as you can get air in, then out your mouth slowly, doing that for about 15 minutes or so, my BP goes down to 75/115 sometimes. I think it is a matter of forcing relaxation which also relaxes blood vessels. But that is not exactly prayer but it does show internal mental processes can effect your health, both positive and negative. If you are stressed out, your blood cortical levels go way up which is VERY bad for your system so a good relaxation technique can definitely help you in many ways.
That is self help. The prayer thing, at least in this study, didn't work.