"Well, we'll pray that all your adoption paperwork goes quickly." Please don't. That's what I want to say. Don't. Because that is the same prayer that my friends and family have been praying since last December and it ISN'T WORKING. At all. In fact, if anything...things have gone slower. There is absolutely no correlation between these people's prayers and the speed at which our adoption paperwork is being processed. None. I know it is really just an empty Christianeeze way of saying, "I'll be thinking about you," yet when their prayers are obviously flacid, you just want to scream. Isn't it obvious your prayers aren't working? Even before I began my deconversion process, I had quit praying years before. Sure, there were the occasional prayers thrown out in the heat of the moment, but "real" intercessory prayer with prayer requests and such had gone by the wayside long before. It wasn't because I was a bad Christian, but rather because I looked at the evidence of answered prayers vs unanswered prayers, and determined that God did as he pleased. God clearly did not care about our petty problems and was clearly more concerned about other things, what I couldn't be sure. It wasn't the big things either, like people dying of cancer. It was the small prayers too. My mother prayed for and over everything, yet her prayers seemed grossly ineffective. She prayed for colds that went away on their own at the normal time. She prayed against the "spirit of poverty", but continued to live in a poverty mentality her whole life. When I started to look at the world around me, I saw no sign of prayer actually working. In fact, it seemed that if prayer was a real thing to a real deity, the only purpose was to make the prayee feel better. Surely an all-knowing all-seeing God would be neither moved or swayed by a prayer. Add to this all the myth-like stories that Christians like to spread around about blind people seeing again (in a rural Kenyan village where it is unverifiable) and folks being cured of AIDS (even though there is no evidence they had AIDS in the first place), and I had my doubts as to whether it did any good. Not even the Bible seemed clear on this. Although it suggested that human beings could change God's mind (like in Sodom & Gomorrah), other verses seemed to suggest that prayer was more meditative and rarely changed the mind of God. Unless you are a bald prophet getting bullied by the neighborhood kids. Then God sends bears to murder them. Here's my favorite part about prayer though. There is this idea out there that if a prayer is ineffective that it is either because of sin or unbelief. It places the burden of effectiveness on something that people can't control. There are a number of Christian writers who have written about such things. As if God only answers the prayers of the devout and only helps those who are devout. If he doesn't answer your prayer then it is because you or the person you are praying for didn't believe enough or had sin in their life. It's basically a weird version of the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy. So if our adoption paperwork doesn't go through then it is our fault, not a gods. However, if it does magically start moving at a decent pace, then all the praise and glory goes to a god. It's crazy.
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AuthorThis is a personal, but secret, blog archiving my deconversion from a Christian to a non-believer. Archives
December 2020
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