Prayer Requests Don't Make Sense

Being from Kentucky and especially the most religious part of the state, the Appalachians, my daily Facebook Friends feed is almost never void of someone from back home posting a status contained with a prayer request for them, a family member(s), or a friend.  I am going to run down why this confuses me to no end.

Many of the prayer requests on Facebook are for someone’s family member that is in seriously ill health or someone who is going through an illness or injury which can be solved usually by medical intervention.  I have honestly read statuses from people on Facebook that read something like these examples:

Example 1: “Everyone I want you to pray for me because I’m still coughing and blowing my nose and the Dayquil can only help me so much.”

Example 2: “I am asking for prayers for my great-aunt to get better, she is 83, and her health has been getting worse the past year and the doctors are saying she has maybe 3-6 months left.”

Now, I will say that I can understand the emotional state that would put someone into the mindset of wanting God to intervene to help someone in poor health especially someone that is close and dear to you. Yet, these two examples bring up a few questions:

Question 1:  If the person in example 1 gets better the next day, was it because the prayers worked or because the medicine plus the body’s own natural defense mechanisms made them better?

Question 2:   Which one can we actually verify from an outsider’s perspective worked the prayer or the medicine?  Does anyone remember this study that tried to research such a thing?
http://www.templeton.org/pdfs/articles/060331Houston_Chronicle_AP.pdf

Question 3:  When in human history has God intervened and let someone live beyond what medical science predicts (other than the bible)?

Question 4:  In example 2, the great-aunt is 83.  If her health has been in decline for a year, and she has already seen a physician and/or a specialist, what else can be done?

Question 5:  Let’s say that her health improves tremendously over the next month and she lives another ten years.  Does that mean the prayers worked and were the doctors wrong in their initial prediction?  Or were they just making an educated guess based on what they’ve seen and other patients with a similar affliction?

Question 6:  I have seen statuses in example 2, and then it ends up where the great-aunt dies within the 3-6 months predicted by the doctors.  If God answered the prayer for the great-aunt to live longer, why would God intervene for some people’s prayer requests and not others? It seems sort of like God is picking which requests to grant and which ones to ignore.  If all else is equal, then why make some suffer the pain of losing their relative in less than 6 months while the others get that relative alive for another ten years?  Seems unfair to me.

Question 7: Why did these people seek real medical attention in the first place if prayer supposedly works?  If you are taking medicine or seeing a doctor first, then you ask for prayers on Facebook then aren’t you really telling us that you trusted medicine (based on scientific knowledge) instead of having faith you’d get better to begin with?  What does that say about the majority of people who are religious but use modern medicine to get better when they are sick or hurt?  Jesus supposedly cured worse things during his lifetime and modern medicine didn’t exist then.  So, if you are exalting the power of Jesus every week, then why do Christians go to modern medicine first? 



Now that’s the first type of prayer request(s) that I see on Facebook.  The second type is similar, but it brings up another different set of questions.  This type of prayer request is the “silent” prayer request.

The silent prayer request is one that I remember hearing in different churches when I was a kid.  The pastor would collect prayer requests either throughout the week in a notebook or at the beginning or end of the service on index cards or verbally.  Some of them would be specific to certain people and their loved ones and others would be a “silent request”.  A request where we, as the parishioners, who had heard this, were to pray for something by someone in the congregation.  As you are probably noticing now, this brings up some very interesting paradoxes, which I will go into in the next couple of paragraphs.

First, why are we being told that there is a silent prayer request from someone in the congregation?  If it’s a “silent” prayer request, shouldn’t it be just that, silent?  I know it’s a bit nitpicky, but it is sort of relevant because it plays into the next thing.

Second, if we don’t know what the request is for but we know whom wants the prayers, then most Christians are going to pray something along these lines, “Lord, it’s me, Frank.  Please grant Kelly her silent request, Lord. I don’t know what it is, but she seems really upset and she is really sincere in her faith, Lord, and I want you to give her what she needs at this time, Lord. In Jesus name, Amen.” 
Now, let’s propose that what Kelly wants is for Frank to die in a car accident after the service or that her gay teenage son gets  beat up viciously by bullies at school show him that being gay is sinful because she can‘t convince her son otherwise.  I know these are silent prayer requests that people rarely ever have but I’m sure in all the history of silent prayer requests there have been a few horrific ones requested. Why would anyone, Christian or not, pray for someone to have someone else’s silent prayer request fulfilled then?  The request could be for someone to be harmed.  You’re best bet is not praying at all in that situation.

A lot of Christians would respond that God wouldn’t intervene to make such a horrible request happen.  Well, if you take the bible as God’s word and actions, then the story of Jepthah sacrificing his daughter to God in order to win the war against the enemy seems to contradict this.  The Wikipedia article on Jepthah is here: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jephthah

After having read apologetics on this story, even if he didn’t actually sacrifice his daughter and actually put her in solitary confinement or made her stay a virgin her entire life, then tell me how that is still moral.

So, whenever someone asks me to pray for them (especially on Facebook), I usually read through the resulting comments of responders saying they are praying for that person.  Which are really just a bunch of people humblebragging, when in reality the prayers won’t work and want to get their pat on the back for doing nothing of demonstrable worth.  I usually offer something tangible.  So, I leave it to the words of comedian Hannibal Burress, who encompasses this whole post much better than I could:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feXnZZ2o5ys

What happened to you?

Ask any atheist out there, whether they were raised religious or not, if they’ve been asked this question, or something like it, from a religious person:  “What happened to you?” 
I have read enough atheist bloggers and read enough atheist themed books to know that almost every atheist gets asked this question from the religious.  As if there was some sort of traumatic thing that happened that made that person not believe in God, or as the believer phrases it more often, “What happened that made you so angry at God?”

If this post is read by a religious person, I can tell you that for almost every atheist I have met they will tell you there wasn’t something bad or traumatic that happened to make them stop believing.  There isn’t one single event that leads a believer to doubt.  In a lot of the atheists’ experiences I’ve met, it was usually a conglomeration of many, many smaller events (most of them pretty uneventful on their own) and many conversations that lead atheists to conclude that the scientific contradictions and the ethics of the god(s) and the characters presented in many holy books aren’t the best cases for morality that can be made in society.  It’s not a decision that is taken lightly.  There are many doubts that lead a person to stop believing in nonsense.

Yet, the main impetus for this post is that I was recently in a conversation with two very religious Christians.  One of them said he found Jesus after he was arrested and put in jail for a little while and another after the death of a spouse.  So, is that in essence, “what happened” to them for them become as devoutly religious as they are?  I find that there is a certain pattern like this for a sizable portion of the very religious out there.  I am excluding those who were raised in faith and are still in it.  They find solace in religion after something bad happens to them: a drug addiction, an arrest, a death of someone close to them, their own impending death either through a serious illness or accident or being sentenced to death.  Side note: Christians love to throw around the conversion stories of demented criminals who were saved right before being executed.  I still don’t understand that one, by the way.  Ted Bundy apparently converted to Christianity on his death bed when he was executed.   What if Hinduism is the correct religion?  He threw his support behind the wrong god! He’s doubly screwed!  Even celebrities who get arrested for very serious crimes and sentenced to jail terms somehow find Jesus and then they are suddenly given all this undeserved outpouring of support.  Converting to Christianity in the USA is somehow equated with being given a new lease on life, when more often than not it’s a smoke screen to hide what never really went away, ask the Catholic Church, Ted Haggard, or any others on this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_leaders_convicted_of_crimes

I think a few reasons for this phenomenon exist and I may not have all of them in mind right now, but here are a couple that stand out.

1.    Religion (especially evangelical Christianity) seeks out those who are in bad spots in life. I bet that most current Christians that I am speaking of didn’t become religious after a happy time in their lives either by accident or by choice and attempts to bridge the gap between what happened to that person and how Jesus can fix them, by telling them that they are sinners that need salvation (in the case of criminals that become religious), Or….

2.    By giving them the comfort that someone close to them who died will be in heaven waiting for the reunion (with the caveat of accepting the faith and just assuming that person is in heaven and not hell)

3.    Providing easy answers when the answers to very bad things that happen aren’t so easy.

So, I ask this to a lot of devoutly religious people (especially the ones who didn’t grow up in the church), “What happened that was so bad that made you religious?” 

See how demeaning that sounds when I ask it to the religious person?  It’s sounds just as offensive coming from me as it does coming from every religious person who asks it of atheists.  So, please religious people, stop asking this one.