1000 prayers

Everything is going to be O.K. President Bush is praying for the victims of the Virginia tech massacre. I just can’t say this enough. How much more productive would our society be if people stopped praying and started doing. Who is to say that if someone was paying attention instead of talking to God that this whole situation could have been averted? O.K. to be fair it doesn’t appear that religion was in any way a causal factor in this incident but the aftermath sure brings out the religions wackos!!!

When I was young I was beat by my father. Some people knew about it and they prayed for me. Guess what, it never helped. I remember riding in a car on the freeway with a Christian friend and a car went speeding down the freeway past us at about 150 mph. My friend pulled over to the side of the road to pray over the situation. Um…… how about using that cell phone to call the police? When a drunk driver nearly took my life it wasn’t prayer that facilitated my rehabilitation but hard work and determination to get better. If God is in control of everything and God has ordained everything then our prayers are pointless anyways. This would explain why prayer doesn’t work. If things are happening a certain way in your life or in the world, do you really think that you asking God to make them change is going to be effective. Like God is going to hear your prayer and be like “oh I didn’t realize how this string of events was effecting him/her, I suppose I will stop.

The notion that God exist is much scarier than the notion of their being no God. If God exist then we are all pawns that are subject to his often violent and masochistic tendencies. If he doesn’t exist then we are forced to take responsibility to repair the needless chaos in the world ourselves. We must take responsibility to our fellow man and accept the consequences of any actions that we make that cause our lives or the lives of those around us to be impaired.

One of my only regrets in life, one of the only things that I can’t seem to get a handle on is religion. I wish that I wasn’t so heavily indoctrinated in religion as a child. I wish that there was never a point in my life where I accepted this stuff, believed it and followed it. I was so serious that I even created my own very successful ministry. To this day I find myself exhibiting behavior that is indicative of my religious upbringing. It absolutely drives me nuts that I can’t get a handle on this. The things that you are fed as a child are things that you will have to deal with for the rest of you life. I understand that many parents believe that church is a good place to raise children because it teaches them good moral values but they simply don’t realize that even if the child absorbs the good moral values out of the biblical lessons, that they will be practicing them for the wrong reason. Fear is the wrong reason and to please God is the wrong reason. Both of these reasons take away from the beauty of simply doing good because it benefits your family, fellow man or society. Doing good to please God is a process the strips the humanity out of the action.

There is a lot of brilliant apologist out there. I have found that debating them, even with the upper hand, is a lost cause. I have also discovered that any need to debate them stems, once again, from my religious upbringing. It stems from a need to win converts, even if that means to convert them into a deconversion. This has left me with a feeling of despair and contempt for religion and for America as a whole. I am not one to give up, but I simply don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, so here I hide, tucking my ideas into my blog. Here I hide because if I utilize my right to free speech, in this country, I will be ostracized or possibly even killed if someone feels that God has commanded them to do so.