Prayer and God

There was a study done that concluded prayer not only isn't helpful, but is harmful.

I think I'm going to call being 'on deck' for the week after this week because I want to research about prayer. For example, why do we think that God listens to us at all? Is prayer in the Bible (I haven't read it)? The overall question is how are prayer and God are related?

I think that we can't look at the research on prayer and make statements about God based on it. We can only make statements about prayer itself and its effects. We cannot deduce based on this research, for example, that God doesn't exist. In fact, it seems to suggest that he does exist. He's just a jerk.