Answered prayer

[Drich]

Firstly Drichy, glad you're ok > despite what some people may occasionally post in jest, I very much doubt that anyone would wish death or injury upon you. I can't say as i've ever heard of an atheist murdering a theist on the grounds of intolerance towards the theist's theism. I understand that in your world of literal prayer and sin cycles, you are convinced that there is some deeper meaning to your terrifying experience (and indeed most things that happen in your life). But, seeing as this IS an atheist forum, and that you've decided to SHARE your experience with us, it is nevertheless our duty to scrutinise your response to even this most earthly of earthbound events.

Ok, i'll duck the patronising undertones to this paragraph and address your straight up hopes and desires. Firstly i've gotta say it would be deeply naive of you to assume that negative things haven't already happened to atheists on this forum. Any randomly selected sample group from the population at large will contain a huge number of people who have experienced loss, ill-health, torment etc. Clearly, challenging circumstances haven't clouded our ability to reason. I recently had bad medical news, ironically concerning the very field of work that I am involved in (albeit at a low level); pathology/genetics. However, because of my understanding of the way the world works, I don't attempt to read meaning in to things that just don't contain meaning. Surely it is painfully obvious even to you that good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people. Clearly, there is no correlation between prayer/good deeds and rewards/punishments in the real world. Robert Mugabe leads a lavish lifestyle whilst many thousands of good christians live in abject poverty. Again, you're convinced that god has decided to make a relatively mediocre life in to something really great (as with you), whilst he refuses to make intolerable lives at least barely endurable. Every time an honest, decent christian dies after months and even years of miserable suffering, a nail is banged in to the coffin of prayer-reward deception. How on earth can you explain why god makes your life better, when tens of thousands of decent people who did exactly as you did (prayed and followed scripture to the T) appear to be rewarded with cholera, diptheria, rape, torture and mutilation? We're talking women and children here too, the victims of war crimes etc. Even if you believe it was worth it to receive reward in an afterlife, why in the here and now are you prioritised whilst people live in relatively worse conditions than those you experienced even at the hardest times in your life? Not to take anything away from your strife, trust me i've been there, but with the benefit of hindsight my worst times still couldn't have compared to being gang-raped and battered on a daily basis, enduring mental and physical anguish on an insurmountable level. How could you be so naive as to believe that god's selection criteria make any sense at all? Clearly, god does not answer prayers with any rational consistency, and indeed, probably doesn't exist at all.

What have I said here or any place else that makes you believe that I believe that any of this is true? I have NEVER EVER Said living for God affords you onlly the good things in life or an easy life of any kind. Like wise I never said living without God places a curse on your life.

As I have already admitted a couple of different times now that you guys praying for my death was a joke. Do you seriously believe God would kill me to sell you a misplaced faith?

Ironically, the poorest part of the planet - Africa, is experiencing the worst AIDS epidemic conceivable, worse than on any other continent. Why on earth would you wish a progressive and terminal illness on someone in the hope that it would help them find god?

Because sometimes that what it takes

Do I even need to point out the glaringly obvious fact that many christians, who endure the most impoverished conditions imaginable, already suffer from AIDS, and Cholera, and Diptheria, and Nodding fever, and any number of miserable illnesses that kill people in their millions. Many of these ailments are easily treatable in the developed world, but such is the misery of the third world that something as straight forward as a stomach bug or the flu can be fatal. How can you wish such awful awful things on people, when there are already christians (that's right, people who already found god) afflicted with such dire misery who aren't being elevated to even a barely tolerable standard of living, HERE, IN THE REAL WORLD?

If they have those diseases then why would you think I'd pray that they get them? I was offering to pray for anyone looking to find God the same prayer i prayed, in that may God afflict or give you what ever it took for you to find him. Most of you want to focous on AIDS because that was my path. But yours maybe a winning lottery ticket, who knows. What I was illustrating was one has to be open and willing to follow the path God may lead you down, no matter what it takes.

I was simply offering my prayer on your behalf to do whatever it took for you to Find God.

As you read this post, take a guess at how many christian women are being gang-raped and murdered,

1,000,000

take a guess at how many new young men are contracting HIV without even realising it?

945,467.

Good people, who never did anything wrong?

0

This isn't so much the folly of christianity, it's why we find views like yours utterly disgusting.

Actually you find views like mine disgusting because of a false sence of pop/culturally based morality affords you. Your judgement is no different than of those who followed a hitler, a moa, stallin, or KKK or anyone else who bases his 'morality' on what the soceity of the time says is acceptiable... I guess me and people like me should be thankful it is not permissiable for pop morality people to hunt christians down again.

Clearly yours is a troubled soul, it has caused you to espouse some morally reprehensible shit, and you should be deeply ashamed of yourself for wishing such horrors on good, decent people (especially when your fellow christians are afflicted with the very same horrors).

what is better to live an undetermined amount of years in affliction and an eternity in bliss? or to live 100 years comfortably and spend eternity in Hell?

I chose the potential for affliction, and I am offering to you what i asked for myself, in order to find God. I prayed whatever it to Oh, Lord, and He took me through Hell and back. If I pray that for you again you may not have to go through hell and back you may wind up going through heaven and back who knows it all depends on how hard your heart is.

I don't pray but I hope that one day you realise that you have dedicated your life to a complete delusion.

and you know this how? Because God is illusive in your life? Did you maybe consider God in your current state wants nothing to do with you, therefore your experiences are really the standard of the universe you think them to be.

Maybe be if you were humble enough to pray or rather Cry out to God oh, Lord do whatever it takes so that I may see you and talk to you, your experience might be a little different than the nothing your use to getting.
Maybe be even have someone pray this prayer for you as well.

Grow up, and realise that car accidents are a mere fact of life and have nothing to do with prayer or sin, and understand this, even at our lowest of lows, we aren't nearly so purile as to wish incurable diseases on gullible buffoons such as you. I left that shite behind on the playground, I suggest you do too.

wow your hate for Christianity and appeal to sterotypes inorder to create this strawman is scarry. I can only imagine how anxious and willing to manipulate/change a story, inorder to justify hunting down those who did not believe as you did if it were acceptiable.

The self righteous (Meaning those who find righteousness or morality apart from God) can literally justify ANYthing. Because ultimatly man's morality is always a search to find the lessor of two evils. All one need do is place a greater evil in the room with the evil he is wanting to justify.

[The Reality Salesman01]

Drich, why would anyone pray for anything? Remember:

All is divine provenance. Meaning He set all things in motion and nothing Happens outside of His will.

So...Your death will ultimately come whenever God decided it would. My praying would be futile, and so would yours. Did you forget this? Still surprised you think this praying concept is an intellectually coherent concept with regards to requests. If credit is all that God wants for his accomplishments, do what everyone else does, and give him some mental masturbation before dinner. When unusually horrendous things occur, and you notice them, quitely stroke God's ego at home. When human beings accomplish amazing things through technology and science, publically give all Glory to God. Asking for stuff is sooooo mainstream Christian. I thought you were better than that.

In all honesty, because that is the pop Christian thing to do. (For most people)
They simply do not know any better and they are just being faithful to what they understand. So rather than give this to luck they take the time to bring God into the mix.

Tsk Tsk...

[truthBtold]

Prayer does work!! I prayed to become an atheist and it worked! Yahoo. ...

[The Reality Salesman01]

God made me an Atheist. Who are you to judge His will? Puny humans...

[WesOlsen]

As I have already admitted a couple of different times now that you guys praying for my death was a joke. Do you seriously believe God would kill me to sell you a misplaced faith?

You seem to think that god would kill others, or at least force incurable illnesses upon them thus hastening their departure from this world. It really is difficult to suss what exactly you do believe to be honest, given the calibre of the psychopathic shit that flows from your cakehole.

Because sometimes that what it takes

You've missed the point entirely. The point was, that many thousands of christians have already submitted entirely to god, as you did, and have invested vast amounts of time and money (what little they have) in honouring and spreading the message. Yet despite this, they are still struck down with awful medical conditions, or burdened with torture and endless misery. If that's 'what it takes' to spread the word of god, then that's a funny sort of reward for hardcore belief.

If they have those diseases then why would you think I'd pray that they get them? I was offering to pray for anyone looking to find God the same prayer i prayed, in that may God afflict or give you what ever it took for you to find him. Most of you want to focous on AIDS because that was my path. But yours maybe a winning lottery ticket, who knows. What I was illustrating was one has to be open and willing to follow the path God may lead you down, no matter what it takes.

I was simply offering my prayer on your behalf to do whatever it took for you to Find God.

Again you've missed the point, you seem to want to pray for people to experience a multitude of life events (up to and including negative ones, such as aids and cancer) in order for them to somehow make an irrational connection between that event occuring and some sort of divine cause. People win the lottery every day, they don't automatically assume that god caused it to happen, we've got statistics for that. Likewise people are struck down with horrid illnesses every day, and again many of them (particularly those familiar with the medical literature) know that it is a statistical likelihood and nothing supernatural. Some people win the lottery and get cancer, and think that Krishna or Allah was gracious, how are they to make the connection with your particular sub-denomination of a sub-denomination of the christian faith? And again the whole point was, what about people who find god first, give up so much, and are then stricken with aids and cancer and mutilation? Statistically there is clearly no correlation between praying/believing and the occurence of virtually any real world event, positive or negative. Placebo trials aside, the most we can say is that things happen in spite of religious observance.

Good people, who never did anything wrong?

0

Woah so let me get this straight, shit tons of people every day get aids, cancer and raped arseholes, but they are all bad people? Even the observant christians who do nothing but good deeds? 6 year old children who get recruited in to millitias and have their arms cut off? 10 year old girls who get kidnapped and raped? They have all done something wrong?

Actually you find views like mine disgusting because of a false sence of pop/culturally based morality affords you. Your judgement is no different than of those who followed a hitler, a moa, stallin, or KKK or anyone else who bases his 'morality' on what the soceity of the time says is acceptiable... I guess me and people like me should be thankful it is not permissiable for pop morality people to hunt christians down again.

You derive your morals from some ignorant buffoons who wandered the desert centuries ago, assuming that the earth was still flat and that it was at the center of the cosmos. Ironically your morals are far more epoch relative than mine, because yours are unadaptable and espouse barbaric garbage. My morals are markedly different from those of Stalin and Hitler, because every ethical code I hold dear (democracy, freedom of speech, cooperation and fair play, to name a few) are essentially the polar opposite of those held by the dictators you mention, which blows your inane argument out of the water completely. It is also interesting to note that my ethical framework takes in to consideration the democratic process and weighing up the cost/benefit of different ideas so that it accurately reflects the impact of decisions on others as well as myself (it's called altruism). Your moral code on the other hand, which derives from a particularly fundamentalist interpretation of some ridiculously ignorant tribal literature, thinks it ok to wish cancer, aids and torture on people in order that they obey a certain viewpoint, rather than trying to tempt them in with good reasoning and kindess. No need to point out the parallels with your recruitment tactics and those of Stalin, Hitler (and all the other enemies of freedom) who used coercion and brutality to force people to adhere to a particular way of life. It's worth noting at this point that you, in your infinite capacity for self-delusion and gullibility, believe that your morals actually come straight from god, but think on this brain food: if morals are only moral because god created them, then what you call morals are essentially the commands of one lifeform, i.e they are nothing more than the edicts and orders of one entity alone, making the comparisons with earth-based dictators a perfect and complete one. If on the other hand god dictates morals because he believes to have interpreted them the most accurately, then morality exists independently of god and many brains together can suss them without the help of a fictional bloke in the sky. According to your logic, god is either an intergalactic dictator who despises the democratic process, or he's an intergalactic self-righteous crap head who is rendered unecessary in the search for moral purity. Unbeknown to you, your morals, like mine, derive from human thought processes and decision making.........the only difference is that yours are two thousand years old (and it shows) whilst mine take in to consideration a far greater degree of equality, fairness, empathy and democracy. The fact that non-religious morality has changed over the centuries is the STRENGTH of secular morality, not the weakness of it. Yours are fascist and undemocratic commands, mine actually take the democratic process in to consideration by valuing a range of opinions and sensitivities.

what is better to live an undetermined amount of years in affliction and an eternity in bliss? or to live 100 years comfortably and spend eternity in Hell?

I chose the potential for affliction, and I am offering to you what i asked for myself, in order to find God. I prayed whatever it to Oh, Lord, and He took me through Hell and back. If I pray that for you again you may not have to go through hell and back you may wind up going through heaven and back who knows it all depends on how hard your heart is.

Since there is no evidence for an afterlife (good or bad) the discussion is a worthless one, but given that good, kindly christians who have found god are still struck down with cancer and aids, clearly there is no correlation between religious observance in this life and negative life experiences. Also, as already mentioned, a great many have found god and still do not feel at ease with their life situations, especially those being tortured and raped. It could be worse I suppose, they could have to listen to you bleat on about how god chose to intervene in your life but not theres, that really would be the icing on the cake wouldn't it?

and you know this how? Because God is illusive in your life? Did you maybe consider God in your current state wants nothing to do with you, therefore your experiences are really the standard of the universe you think them to be.
Maybe be if you were humble enough to pray or rather Cry out to God oh, Lord do whatever it takes so that I may see you and talk to you, your experience might be a little different than the nothing your use to getting.
Maybe be even have someone pray this prayer for you as well.

You know I used to be a christian right? I shook it off after my teens because the evidence against the dumb claims made by the idiotic desert authors of the good book were torn to shreds by modern scientific investigation. Even a basic level of enquiry demonstrates that the bible isn't particularly unique, makes no accurate predictions and offers nothing exclusive to help set it apart from any number of other creation-prophet-god myths. In my teenage years I used to read bible stories and pray to god, I never expected to hear a crisp voice in my head replying (although some quacks claim that such things happen) but I at least thought I might see something unexplainable by natural processes. As it stood, nothing miraculous happened that didn't already have a better explanation; exam results, quality of health, family life etc........how on earth am I to be expected to believe that a man in the sky sometimes intervenes in the real world but sometimes doesn't, when there is clearly no correlation between prayer and 'things happening'? Incidentally my life is going pretty ok at the moment, so at the very least we can say that god is completely unecessary to achieve anything in this world, and considering I don't believe in another life (due to lack of evidence) I see no rational reason to change the way I think, especially when the other side has lunatics like your as their cheerleaders, praying for people to get aids and cancer etc. Moron.

The self righteous (Meaning those who find righteousness or morality apart from God) can literally justify ANYthing. Because ultimatly man's morality is always a search to find the lessor of two evils. All one need do is place a greater evil in the room with the evil he is wanting to justify.

Any individual can attempt to justify anything using any sort of reference or argument. What's that got to do with anything? You justify wishing cancer and aids and car accidents on people because apparently a centuries old book from the desert that you hold dear somehow sanctions such wishful thinking. By acknowledging degrees of morality you trap yourself by admitting that god's decrees simply lie on a scale of morality, just like everyone else's opinions. At any given time someone is the tallest person on the planet, but more abstract concepts such as ' most moral' and 'most merciful' are abitrary in a certain sense. The bible is just a written reference like any other document or scribbling. I already touched on the morality paradox above, but it's worth reiterating that the best way to decide right and wrong is to weigh up everyone's opinions so that nobody is left out or persecuted (as regularly happens within and between religious circles). Democray and reasoned debate is the only way to ensure that the sorts of stupid crusades and genocides that have been created by christians and non-christians alike never happen again. I struggle to think of a single 100% democratically sanctioned war crime that ever took place, particularly when considering that by its definition, a war crime omits the views and opinions of those on the receiving end of the crime (whether it be a pro-christian crusade, an anti-jew holocaust or otherwise). Please don't try and use examples of Hitler and Stalin as 'atheist morals gone wrong', as they are quite the opposite. There was virtually no democratic processes involved in the rise to power of the afore mentioned regime leaders. The terrible things that took place under these regimes were the personal will of a minority of a minority, often ultimately leading back to the orders of one man at the very top. It is this dogmatic and unadaptable slavery that links fascism, nazism, stalinism with religious rulings. Whenever you take democracy out of the equation, people suffer. My conclusion is that you hate freedom and democracy, an accusation which I know riles up knee-jerk, right-wing American morons (such as yourself) something terrible.

Also, given the vagueness of the stupid stories in the bible, history shows us that various groups of christians quite literally can JUSTIFY ANYTHING, from slavery, racism, genocide, homicide, rape etc....................so your moral guide isn't as rigid and 'moral' as you might like to think. Again, you're just a moron, sorry mate.

[The Reality Salesman01]

Stand by for a post filled with denial and mental gymnastics indicating that Drich literally didn't understand a single word you just wrote. I enjoyed it, but this guy is insane. A for effort though!

[WesOlsen]

I suspect you're probably right

[downbeatplumb]

Well a few of you have apparently been praying to God even though you claim to be atheists. How do I know? God almost answered one of your prayers yesterday. My wife and I were coming onto the interstate, and there was a car carrier I front of me so I went around him. My truck kicked down into third gear at 60mph and the back tires broke loose. Meaning they started to spin, just the same as if I were trying to do a burn out. Idk if you all have done this at speed before but the car/truck acts quite differently at 60 verse coming off a complete stand still.

Well anyway the truck began to fish tale into the semi next to me and I corrected by turning into the power slide. And let off the gas. Then the truck caught and took us off into the center median, where the grass was very wet which made things like the steering wheel and brakes just something to help you occupy your time with while you wait for death as you slide into on coming traffic at speed. Thankfully there was a sloping embankment we had to bridge before we got to the on coming lane, when we hit it I thought the truck was going to flip, but it didn't. When we started up the other side I floored it spraying mud and rocks on the cars going the other way, then finally the rear tires caught and shot us back towards our orginal lane.

Thankfully the only damage out of the whole mess was to the tightywhities I was wearing (they were totaled) and I think my wife lost two or three years off the end of her life, but the truck was undamaged. So to whom ever has been praying for proof of God in the way of my death or my absence from this forum, I have received a message for you and you can stop now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVVZaZ8yO6o

[Cyberman]

First of all, like everyone else I'm glad everyone involved was okay and there was no serious damage or hurt. I hate for anyone to go through something like this, godless heathen that I am, so kudos on your fast reactions in what must have been a terrifying episode.

Now that's out of the way:

My wife and I were coming onto the interstate, and there was a car carrier I front of me so I went around him. My truck kicked down into third gear at 60mph and the back tires broke loose. Meaning they started to spin, just the same as if I were trying to do a burn out. Idk if you all have done this at speed before but the car/truck acts quite differently at 60 verse coming off a complete stand still.

Well anyway the truck began to fish tale into the semi next to me and I corrected by turning into the power slide. And let off the gas. Then the truck caught and took us off into the center median, where the grass was very wet which made things like the steering wheel and brakes just something to help you occupy your time with while you wait for death as you slide into on coming traffic at speed. Thankfully there was a sloping embankment we had to bridge before we got to the on coming lane, when we hit it I thought the truck was going to flip, but it didn't. When we started up the other side I floored it spraying mud and rocks on the cars going the other way, then finally the rear tires caught and shot us back towards our orginal lane.

Thankfully the only damage out of the whole mess was to the tightywhities I was wearing (they were totaled) and I think my wife lost two or three years off the end of her life, but the truck was undamaged.

And all this, including the black ice, engineered just for you. Special little you.

[Cinjin]

Raise your hand or speak up if you've ever prayed for anything to happen to Drich ...









I can't say I'm really surprised that you would worry about someone wishing you harm. I mean, you are kind of a major douche bag. You're actually probably really lucky your wife wasn't killed. After all, that god of yours has been known to allow the most horrific things to happen to his most loyal followers. Between that narcissistic deity you serve and your completely abrasive personality, you should probably be terrified to leave your house.