Okay, I was surprised by the study showing that prayer provided no benefit to a group of coronary bypass patients. (In fact, the prayed-for group had more post-op complications.) But I was surprised for reasons you may not expect.
Previous studies showed that there was some benefit to prayer, results breathlessly trumpeted in the news media and the blogosphere. Skeptics with doubts about shady methodologies used in the studies (such as cherry-picking favorable data) were pooh-poohed as cranky naysayers and cold reductionists in Albert Einstein frightwigs.
But now that there's a study suggesting that prayer doesn't work, the anti-naysayers have shapeshifted into naysayers. The best argument they've advanced is that God's smart enough not to be teased into action just because people were told by scientists to pray.
That's what surprised me. This supports what I've argued for many years: if God really existed He'd be the meanest bastard on the block. Think about it: God hears the prayers and says, "Fuck'em. I'm busy." And, just for shits and giggles, he gives the prayed-for bum ticker group more complications.
And then He gets up from his armchair, turns off "American Idol," and walks down the hall to chair an Avian Flu planning committee meeting. Dude sounds like a good candidate for regime change to me.