God Hates Spam
Prayer request sites… I’m sure this sort of thing has been around for a while. But I had no idea just how many sites there are out there that allow one to post to their prayer requests to the electronic world at large, for the purpose of having other people Retweet their petitions up at God.
(Let me make the disclaimer, of course, that I’m not going to rag on the good intentions of so many people that will take the time to try to help a complete stranger with their problems. The motivation for setting up a site to help people in need obviously comes from a good place. The problem, of course, is that petitionary prayer doesn’t actually do anything, beyond a placebo effect at best; and that if you want to help someone in need, they will quite obviously be better off if you actually take action of some kind.)
You’d think that if God was going to respond to a prayer, he’d just do it, without factoring in if there was a massive effort on the part of many people. If the person praying has great needs, the last thing he or she needs is to have to find others that will echo the prayer around. Is there some kind of threshold criteria God uses to determine how he answers, or if he answers? For example, suppose I want divine help in looking for a new job. Is twenty other co-supplicants twice as good as ten? Why would it matter?
These are the kinds of questions I asked myself as I perused a bunch of prayer sites. I found many to be dull, but a few were interesting or funny for one reason or another. What follows is my top ten list.
10. Requestprayers.com
Pretty vanilla site, this is run by the Baha’i organization. Seems odd that they’d give it a commercial rather than organizational extension, but that was true for most of these places. They have one page that purports to have the most powerful prayer ever devised. Testimonitals include:
The Baha’is have some of the most beautiful and powerful prayers in the world. Add that power to a million souls across the globe praying on your behalf from all the religions, and the Light is dumbfounding. Need immediate help? You were guided to this site, and nothing happens by accident!
9. Liveprayer.com
The extremely conservative minister behind this site claims to have started the entire business of online prayer requests, apparently. He also claims to have personally received and re-prayed 60 million prayer requests. Wow! If that was not impressive enough, the main page devotes much attention to President Obama, naming him “God’s Enemy”; plus, they feature a tasteful, if amateurishly photoshopped, portrait of him next to Hiter. There is also extensive advertising for something called The Jonah Project, an effort to better Christianize the U.S. (and the world).
8. CarmelTemple.org
Not just your typical prayer submission site where your request is simply posted to a page for others to dutifully recite. No, this is the Home of the Crystal Prayer Bowl! (Yes, they have pictures of it, too.) Here is what they do with it:
The Crystal Prayer Bowl is used to collect prayer requests sent to Carmel Temple. It is placed under the Blue-White Healing Light at the beginning of healing sessions in the Sanctuary. The prayer requests then receive the energy and prayers of those present. We encourage you to place into the bowl the name (even the initials will do) of the person, persons, or situations that need prayer or healing energy. This procedure has been very effective and that bowl has an excellent reputation!
7. Donjuddministries.org
You can send them your prayer requests, which they will compile with all the others that they receive. Then they will print the entire list out. Why? So that they can “lay hands on the list” as they pray over it. Why not just lay hands on the hard drive and save time, paper, and ink?
6. Prayerblaster.com
I had high expectations for this page, and I was disappointed. I was hoping it would be a bit like Pingmyblog.com. Instead it is just a pedestrian list of links. Not much of a blaster at all, as you’d have to manually go through the list and submit your prayer to each site individually. This page might have been made in 1992.
5. Prayer.la
The folks running this site seem proud to offer an exhausting 218 pages of prayer requests that are all less than one month old. Apparently they expire after that. No stale prayers! Would take hours to go through them all and pray for each one, I’d imagine.
4. Prayerrequestweb.com
Much like prayer.la, in terms of sheer volume, but at least you won’t have to click through 218 pages of prayers. They are all on one very long page that you can just scroll down.
Here is an excerpt that I found particularly pathetic and sad, yet somehow representative of what you’ll find posted. There is a compulsory tone to it at the end… as if the author meant to finish with “Or else!”
Please pray GOD gives me all the desires of my heart that are righteous in GODs eyes.Pray GOD sends me on the mission He has for me now,Pray GOD raises me a mile above those used by Satan to glorify GOD,Pray GOD Blesses me financially now and always.Pray GOD heals my body completely now.Pray GOD brings me my soulmate now,the loneliness is tormenting me. In JESUS Name Pray.
3. Holylandprayer.com
Now this is a “dot com” that truly deserve that extension. Also fitting is the image of the glowing gold Jesus hanging on a cross that adorns their home page.
Here is what they offer, for some nominal fees: If you send them a prayer, they’ll have it prayed in Jerusalem, “steps from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the spot where Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected.”
Or, they’ll light a candle for you there. Or do both together and get a discount!
Why would God care where the prayer originated from? Does it get more power coming from Jerusalem? Does that make it more bona fide, somehow? Or is God impressed that you are in dire enough straights that you’d send these people money? (Back in Dante’s time, accepting money for ecclessiastical favors was called Simony and earned one a very hot reward in the Eight Circle of Hell.)
Costs: $10 for a candle, $15 for a prayer. $20 for both.
2. Healinglifecoach.com Looking for something a little different from the same old prayer site? Then this is the place for you.
These folks offer special stones imbued with power because they are not merely prayed over, but “programmed.” Specifically, they tell us:
Programmed Stones can be effective and powerful tools for anything from Prayer, Freedom from Worry and Creative Visualization to Healing, Forgiveness, Gratitude and much more!
How are the stones programmed? They are cleaned and set in the Healing Sanctuary with your individualized and special requests with daily prayers being said over them for a minimum of 30 days. Then they are sent to you!
1. Ipraytoday.com
This was my favorite site because, beneath the name and prayer entry fields, it has a “capcha” device, so that you can prove you are a human being! To be fair, I suppose this is more to save the devout from being asked to repeat bogus prayers, but it struck me as hilarious to think of it as a spam filter for The Lord God Himself. I can only imagine Jehovah’s fury at realizing he was tricked into granting the request of a bot.
-S.A. Alenthony
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Wow, it's amazing that as a proclaimed atheist you have such a big interest in prayer! You must have spent hours researching this. I can't imagine why an atheist would do such a thing. Maybe deep down in you are hoping for some other answers than the one you have come up with so far for yourself……… May you find what you are looking for.
Good post and quite a contrast with Jesus' own teaching on prayer don't you think?
"But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you." – Matthew 6:6
Hi rainy day:
Thanks for the response. Based on your unsuccessful attempt to analyze my motives, I feel compelled to help you understand a few things. First, it isn't exactly uncommon for an individual to spend a bit of time perusing the information offered up by his interlocutors in a debate. I've had a lifelong debate with certain types of religious people, simply because of their inability to leave people like me alone. But to view it through your narrow lens momentarily, one might wonder why a theist such as yourself (correct me if I am wrong), might be visiting an atheist blog? Are you looking for something? Second, as I consider religion to be an enormous, tragic waste of human energy and good intentions, my sense of compassion will sometimes spur me to spend some time boning up on the latest nonsense spouted by the superstitious, much in the same way that a doctor would spend time studying books on disease – I hope you realize that a doctor does not do that in the hopes of becoming diseased himself. If my writing about religion can help even just one person in the world move one iota away from a backwards and primitive worldview, then that would be more than worth the time spent. Third and finally, there is high comedy value to be found in a number of these prayer sites, and far from it being the tedious hours of research you have imagined it to be, it was more like reading a series of Onion articles.
All that said, I do appreciate your wishes that I find what I am looking for, because I am looking for a world less enamored with myth and pointless rituals like prayer. In case you wonder why I feel strongly about this, I suggest you read my blog post here at this site from last week. It details how I literally almost died as a child because of superstitious nonsense, and how other children continue to die because of the absurd notion that prayer can heal.
Kind Regards,
S.A.
Requestprayers.com is not run by the Baha'i organization. My guess is that some individual Baha'i set it up, hence the com extension. Also, the Medusa Code which is advertised prominently, is not an official Baha'i publication.
All of those sites sound pretty much ridiculous. You know what I hate even more? In several churches I've gone to over the years, they have a section of a sermon where they take prayer requests from the congregation. It can range from harmless to mildly embarrassing, and sometimes just amounts to people airing their friends' and family members' dirty laundry for everyone to see.
I agree with Jesus (via 3FINKA's comment) that prayer should be done in your own room, behind closed doors.
Hi Raisin Girl:
Thanks for the reply. I'm happy to read the comments that you and 3FINKA posted. Every time I hear about one of these school prayer cases, for example, I just want to ask the one side "what part of Matthew 6:6 don't you understand?"
And while I obviously think petitionary prayer is risible, and don't believe in any gods myself, I certainly don't have any problem with what the devout want to do in private. To the degree that one's prayers are a form of meditation, or a manner of organizing one's thoughts, it's probably a good thing.
Number 3 sounds like the biggest scam of them all. And on the fifth day, god created the con artist. Atleast they offer a deal for buying both the candle and the prayer.
Hey Aja,
I'm anti-religion and a huge cynic but I'm also a historian-buff and was actually in Israel recently where all the religions listed above have homes. I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where I saw this Monk leaving prayers printed out on letterhead on the Stone of the Anointing. After he took photos of them and left I checked out the prayers and they were on the holylandprayer.com letterhead. I then saw the same Monk lighting candles next to Jesus' tomb and taking photos. So apparently it isn't a scam after all. I can't vouch for any of the others, but it sounds like the people listed above are just trying to help people feel better and even as atheists we can't hate on that! Whatever makes this world a better place.
If the minister at liveprayer.com personally re-prayed 60 million prayers, and he spent only 10 seconds per prayer, he would have been praying non stop for 19 years. I think we can safely assume he didn't get those prayers from his website then, since it could not have existed 19 years ago. So he must have gotten a lot of mail back in the day.
One question: How do you know he wasn't a believer before he was an Atheist?
I find the Jonah project particularly worrying as this is a form impositioning a people by forcing your beliefs upon them. Much like the Crusades, and missionaries and a lot like it's fanatical Islamic counterpart Jihad. Implementation of programs like this are backward and terribly disconcerting as they have much wider implications than just some nutty priest indoctrinating a couple of gullible sheeple. It really gets on my nerves that people think they have a right to impose beliefs on others simply because in their mind they are Superior. To me the minister at liveprayer has the biggest inferiority complex because in addition to his crusade he is trying to pass of 60 million prayers.