Prayer doesn't do anything, exhibit #472 (updated)

Update: My friend's son is okay, and who got the credit? Three guesses....

Yeah, because praying for "no complications" worked so well the first time. Seriously, how do people not think that this is God just fucking with them, or simply wake up and realize there are no deities involved here? Did God just need to get a sick kick from the child's esophageal burns before he decided to intervene? 


Original post-------------------------------------------------------

A friend of mine is having a rough night – her son swallowed a battery, which got stuck in his esophagus. Now, just to be clear, that's a serious situation and I hope he's okay. I'm not out to make light of his pain. I am out, however, to ridicule his mom's appeals to God. Notice anything here? (You have to read the bottom one first...)

Prayer for "no complications"... shortly followed by news of a serious complication. The solution? MOAR PRAYER.

You know what praying does? Nothing, that's what. People pray for what they want. They think the answer is "yes", "no", or "wait", which simply means they already decided that God answers prayers before they even asked it. Whatever the "answer", subsequent events will always be interpreted as God intervening in some way. If they don't get what they want, it's just "God's will". This essentially means that the actions of God are indistinguishable from random events.

I think this kind of delusional behavior was best summarized by the late, great George Carlin:

Pray for anything you want. Pray for anything, but what about the Divine Plan?

 

Remember that? The Divine Plan. Long time ago, God made a Divine Plan. Gave it a lot of thought, decided it was a good plan, put it into practice. And for billions and billions of years, the Divine Plan has been doing just fine. Now, you come along, and pray for something. Well suppose the thing you want isn't in God's Divine Plan? What do you want Him to do? Change His plan? Just for you? Doesn't it seem a little arrogant? It's a Divine Plan. What's the use of being God if every run-down shmuck with a two-dollar prayerbook can come along and fuck up Your Plan?

 

And here's something else, another problem you might have: Suppose your prayers aren't answered. What do you say? "Well, it's God's will." "Thy Will Be Done." Fine, but if it's God's will, and He's going to do what He wants to anyway, why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me! Couldn't you just skip the praying part and go right to His Will? It's all very confusing.

 

So to get around a lot of this, I decided to worship the sun.

Unlike my friend, at least George Carlin came to his senses.