While I believe prayer itself is simply another form of wishing and hoping, and do not intend to discourage its use, I do want to make clear that it has no practical application, at least within a religious sense.

For example, as Richard Dawkins notes in his book, "The God Delusion," a well-known (and rather religious) scientist, Russell Stannard spent $2.4 million testing "the efficacy of intercessory prayer in medicinal settings was mounting" (if prayer does anything).

The results, reported in the American Heart Journal of April 2006, were clear-cut. There was no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not. There was, however, a difference between those who knew they were being prayed for and those who did not; but it went counter to all hypotheses. Those who knew they had been prayed for suffered significantly more complications than those who did not. The experimenters described the cause as ‘performance anxiety’, attributing the increase in complications to the fact that the patients experienced severe stress wondering why they were being prayed for, and subsequently "freaked out" if you will.

While this is slightly off topic, the reactions to this study seem to somewhat mirror this debate. Once published, these results were hotly contested by religious scientists, just as those in this debate assure us of the necessity and effectiveness of prayer. Let us entertain the idea, then, that these results had instead PROVEN the efficacy of prayer. Do you think they would have been contested for one second? Of course not! But when shown that prayer has no true bearing on reality, those entangled in religion have no choice but to rely upon their own experiences, easily explained by the theory of intermittent reinforcement within behavioral psychology; the thought that an action, such as wearing your lucky underwear (or praying, in this instance), when reinforced intermittently (getting a good grade on a test every other week that you wear them), creates a conditioned belief in the effectiveness of that action.

While prayer is a natural part of Christianity, and may be effective in "communicating with God", there is no reason to suggest that it can or does have any bearing upon reality. Indeed, rather than providing a scientific explanation, believers resort to "faith". And this is true of all facets of Christianity, or any religion. While scientific studies can disprove many of their claims, these studies are shunned unless they provide results that support the Church (as they seldom do). Indeed, this is precisely the reason that many theories, such as those of Freud, have faded into the background; they made assumptions and based theories upon untestable hypotheses, thereby blocking any sort of empirical test, and subsequently isolating themselves. It's the equivalent of the church plugging its ears and going "LA LA LA LA LA".

There you go, I stayed up until 2:09 just for you guys. Good night.

I live near Daytona Beach, so obviously I'll recommend that, but for more of a "middle of the road", classic beach town, you can't do much better than Stone Harbor, NJ in my opinion.