Sunday, November 11, 2012

God, the lottery machine

Requests for prayers are something quite universal in and ubiquitous to Christianity. It's a very common custom in the vast majority of Christian denominations, and you see these requests all the time everywhere (especially nowadays in the internet era.) People request prayers for tons of things.

(Curiously, there's little support in the Bible for this. This kind of practice is not found in the Bible, nor is it suggested there. There might be one or two passages that could be loosely interpreted to somewhat support this notion, but even those are quite far-fetched. This prayer requesting ideology is mostly extra-biblical theology.)

The vast majority of Christians never think about what the prayer requesting custom implies. It implies that the more people pray, the higher the probability that God will answer. These requests always seek for as many people as possible to pray for the topic in question, as if that somehow increased the chances of success.

In other words, they seem to think that God works exactly like the lottery: The more lottery numbers you buy, the higher the chances of winning something. If there's a pool where many people submit money in order to buy lottery numbers, the chances of winning something gets the higher the more people participate.

Thus to them God is a lottery machine, even though they don't even realize that.

If I were God, I would be really appalled and offended by this kind of mentality. But maybe that's just me.

No comments:

Post a Comment