Well, some people have opinions, and others have facts.
After the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, some media celebrities decided to proclaim their foolishness, rather than keep their silence and let people doubt it.
DOUBLE-BLIND STUDIES ON INTERCESSORY PRAYER
Many double-blind studies have shown that intercessory prayer DOES work. The one recent study, just one, that got some publicity, claimed that the results were not conclusive. Even so, they admit that there were even negative results.
There was no mention in those reports about the several studies that did show that it does work.
I propose, though, that it is very hard to get a good handle on this phenomenon statistically. My first question for any such study is to ask whether they accounted for the praying people’s faith or lack of it, and how did they measure that? Barna Research has some good guidelines on such matters, because their people are committed Christians and regard it as a ministry to help other ministries and pastorates allocate resources wisely.
A lot of unbelievers reproached the calls for prayers for the survivors and families of the people killed in the massacre. A few more claimed they wanted more action to prevent such incidents, by which they really meant they wanted to make it more difficult for people like Stephen Willeford to acquire effective arms. Willeford was the neighbor who stopped the killing when he exchanged gunfire with the killer outside the church. The killer fled after that exchange, and ended up rolling off the road into a ditch about 12 miles up the road.
By the way, the Good Samaritan neighbor, Willeford, had the same type of weapon the killer had used, an AR-15. He said he would have a lesser chance of aiming properly with a lesser weapon like a pistol.
If you want to do more, you might do like some bigger churches do, who have good guys with guns ready to protect the flock in case of some wolf wanting to do damage.
Smaller churches, like the one in Sutherland Springs, often have members who do have firearms and can legally carry them. There have been previous incidents in which a killer was stopped by someone with a gun inside the church. One of them involved a terrorist attack against a mixed-race church in South Africa during Apartheid days, where one guy in the Security forces was packing and chased off all five, who had not expected anyone to shoot back.
For those who think it was all over before the hero got there, keep in mind that the killer had more weapons and lots of ammunition in his vehicle. There was another church two miles up the same road he fled on. If not chased, he might have otherwise to continue the spree.
Another relevant fact. This guy had made two posts on Facebook where he had good things to say about the violent nihilist (“neo-Brownshirt”) Antifa. He had illegally bought the guns because he was a convicted wife-beater and baby-basher (cracking his stepchild’s skull) which got him expelled from the Air Force.
The government is just too big and too slow to react quick enough or properly so with people like this guy, especially surrounded by a government-compliant media complex that soaks its audience with faint praise for street marauders as in antifa.
As the slogan goes: Remember, when seconds count, the police are just minutes away.
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