Lewis Black on Prayer

ME OF LITTLE FAITH by Lewis Black from Riverhead Books

You May as well Pray to Aliens

This video looks at the way humans try to communicate with higher powers from Religious Prayer to Seti.

Is there any evidence for either?









Original Soundtrack Recorded by Alan Jinx http://www.youtube.com/user/ALANJINX

All clips/images used in this video are either copyright-free or covered under "fair use" for nonprofit educational purposes (Title 17 § 107 of the USC).

Maxine Stone - PR Manager
Lee Harvey - Creative Director
Alan Jinx - Sound/Music Director

Dear God - The Atheists Prayer

Atheists are coming out of the proverbial closet in droves, thanks in part to online communities such as Youtube and many others.

It's time we make our voices and opinions heard, we can no longer afford to be the silent minority. If we hope to carry this species onward towards an amicable future which we have fought so hard to achieve, then action must be taken now!

Song: XTC - Dear God

I Built A Prayer Amplifier - Edward Current

Praying to God will be effective and reliable, finally.

Theory vs. Faith

Christians: Pray For Richard Dawkins & Matt Dillahunty! - The Atheist Experience #557

Christians: Pray For Richard Dawkins & Matt Dillahunty! (The Atheist Experience #557 with Matt Dillahunty & Don Baker).

Does prayer show a lack of faith?

by Jim Gardner

For example, the belief that God is omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent means that He is always going to do whatever He feels is in your benefit and that, as a person of faith in Him, despite that these ways might not immediately seem to be stacked in your favour, you should accept that He knows what is best and accept whatever is thrown at you, safe in the knowledge that the big guy is taking care of it.

Praying that He change these meticulously planned events in your life, just at the moment your puny brain realises you’re being screwed, seems like an awful lack of faith to me. It’s tantamount to politely reminding God that He’s been standing on your foot for the last 20 years, without wanting to sound ungrateful for the reinforced shoes.

Prayer also seems to assume that God is absentminded, with regard to events in your life which are important to you. The idea that He will somehow forget what you want in your life, during that important job interview, flat out contradicts the idea that He, “knows every hair on your head”.

Of course, a good test of prayer would be for the believer to try not praying at all, previous to an important event and then see if it turns out exactly as they would have hoped it would, regardless. Of course this too would be interpreted as His guiding influence, no matter what the outcome, such is the hermetically sealed faith in faith which we’ve talked about at length elsewhere on this blog–but I struggle to think of a better way to demonstrate to someone who is caught within this kind of non-thinking, just how close minded they have become, while believing they are acting in the complete opposite.

There’s no polite way to say this, but the objectivity which would be necessary for the believer to truly view their own spirituality as the misnomer for intuitive superstition that it is, is asking a little too much of the average Christian, but only in the same way it would be difficult to be confident of your results were you to ask for the same separation between influence and inspiration of an artist, or the difference between drive and passion in an athlete, for example.

These are merely labels we give to emotions; facets of our personality where the line of demarcation is our ego and our protective self interest. Prayer seems to float above these projections of our inner cinema, like a conduit between the projectionist and the actors in the movie. Prayer is the illusion of being in control of something for which there is, in reality, no control whatsoever, despite a wish so strong that this were not the case, that this very disconnectedness between our ego and the outside world, becomes an article of faith by which the believer reinforces their biases towards what is, in fact, a completely unrealistic set of expectations.

Are you a true Christian?

10 Signs of a true Christian:

1.) You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of your god.

2.) You feel insulted and 'dehumanized' when scientists say that people evolved from lesser life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt.

3.) You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Trinity God.

4.) Your face turns purple when you hear the 'atrocities' attributed to Allah, but you don't even finch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the first-born babies of Egypt in 'Exodus' and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in 'Joshua' -- including women, children, and animals.

5.) You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life, and then ascended into the sky.

6.) You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of the Earth (a few billion years old), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by pre-historic tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that the Earth is a couple of generations old.

7.) You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs -- though excluding those in all rival sects -- will spend eternity in an infinite hell of suffering. Yet, you consider your religion the most 'tolerant' and 'loving'.

8.) While modern science, history, geology, biology and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor 'speaking in tongues' may be all the evidence you need.

9.) You define 0.01% as a 'high success rate' when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% failure was simply the will of God.

10.) You actually know a lot less than many Atheists and Agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history -- but still call yourself a "Christian".

Confessions of a Former Christian

A former Christian looks back at what he used to believe and wonders how he could have been so naive.