Frivolous Prayer

Watching the The Biggest Loser season premiere last night, I saw something illustrated that I have been taking notice of more and more lately.

The "Silver" team, composed of two best-friend girls, got through the first show and it came time for the first weigh-in (the first weigh-in that would affect who stays and goes home). They were, I'm assuming, randomly picked to be weighed first and came up with some fairly decent numbers. Nothing mind blowing, but genuinely impressive for their first week of hardcore exercise and diet change.

Cut to the little "interviews" they do with the people that NBC splices in between "real time" footage. Silver Team Girl #1 said she was actually praying, "Lord, please let those numbers be good enough to keep us here." A little context, only one "couple" was going to stay so there was only one slot above The Yellow Line. If you've seen the show, you'll know what I mean.

And here we come to my actual hangup. Prayer. What is it? Is it magical? Does it truly have efficacy, as so many people believe? Or is it overused and warped into a frivolous device for people to place their hopes in when they're not being effective human beings?

This first came up for me during the 2008 Election when I noticed (and was told) that prayer opens and closes many political events. Add to that the fact that many people were praying for one candidate to win over another - earnestly praying for their "team" to win, if you will. I'm quite certain this happens at the Superbowl and racetracks around the country, too, but I don't think people realize how much it's diluting the concept of prayer.

I may not be the biggest fan of prayer at the moment, but it is really starting to bug me that people are calling upon God for such petty things. If it were as simple as praying for some circumstance you wanted changed, then we would have had peace in the Middle East a long time ago, the entire world would be Christian by now, and the Theory of Evolution would never have been taught in schools.

That being said, I do think prayer holds some validity if the cause is local and personal. I've seen prayers both answered and not answered in this regard, and am currently convinced the prayer is more for the human than for the deity - regardless of whether it gets answered or not.

To put the exclamation on my point, the Silver Team came in last at the weigh in. I think a more proactive prayer for strength, endurance, willpower, and dogged determination at the beginning of the week would have gone a lot further. It's possible that they did pray for those things at that time, but, judging from their performance at the weigh-in, I highly doubt it.

I guess my point is that I view prayer like calling up your best friend at 3am to bail you out of jail. You don't call people at 3am to borrow a pen or a sweater, as those things don't require divine intervention and, frankly, just aren't important.

God may not answer, "This had better be important," but sometimes I think he should.

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The Circle, my interpretation of the Trinitarian ...interpretation

Here's a breakdown of how I think people view their Trinitarian belief.

Picture 1-A

With the picture's help, I don't have to say "imagine a circle," but do your best.
A circle actually has 3 parts; there's the circle itself, the inside and the outside.
If you think of the "inside" of the circle as God-the-Father, our goal should be to enter the circle much like entering "Heaven."
The circle, itself, is God-the-Jesus (God-the-Son, rather) which we must "pass through" to reach the inside, since no one comes to the Father but through him.
The outside, then, is God-the-Holy-Spirit, permeating the somewhat infinite space that all us mortal folk currently reside.

That's not to say I completely subscribe to this belief, but it is a less-complicated way for me to think of it. It's almost a parable, except it has no actual "lesson" to teach. Just another thing I thought of sitting in Latin mass at Holy Family the other morning.

Doing God's Work [for him]

Something has been bothering me since I last went to church at Pathways. The topic of the day was about suffering, and why God would allow it. The answers, I thought, were pretty generic and standard, but what really struck me was a story from a woman whose child had died at a young age and how it, eventually, changed her life for the better.

You can find the full session here, on the September 21st date, though I don't know if it includes the woman's "speech."

To paraphrase, and also get back to the point, the thing that's been gnawing at my brain ever since was how she interpreted the event of losing her child, attributing the loss as one more event in God's plan to bring her back to him and church. It got me wondering because this is a different way than most people would see the death of their son. Of course, she admitted in retrospect that at the time she'd been angry and upset and spiteful and all kinds of other protesting emotions (as anyone would), but now she sees it as a positive for her [if you'll allow me to phrase it that way] because it fulfilled God's purpose.

Now, again my focus here is on her interpretation. Aside from the fact that I phrase it to sound rather selfish, what she had to say is a little disconcerting. If suffering is just that, a "pathway" to see the hand of God in action to bring us back to him, and those of us that see it otherwise are truly wrong in believing that hardship is arbitrary and cannot be explained away so easily, does that mean by altering the way we see tragedy we are, in fact, doing God's work for him?

Rather than using more obvious or, some might say, positive methods to turn us back to God, the possibility that he would choose to inflict hardship on us seems a bit strange to me. Then again, when life is going well for a lot of people they tend to take it for granted and ignore God altogether, some would say.

But my point here is that it doesn't matter whether God actually planned for that tragedy to inspire you back to faith. This goes back to my perception-is-reality theory; that we create our own reality through our perception, mandating that if we act like there is a God then it doesn't truly matter if he exists or not. The correlary to that is that if faith turns you into a better neighbor to your fellow man, it's all fine and good, but if it makes you a bigot then I take a little offense at God being your "excuse" to treat others poorly.

So, the question in my brain still stands. Is altering our perception of certain events to be in God's "favor" actually a conflict of interest? And, if so, is it acceptable to attribute arbitrary hardship to the "natural" ebb and flow of the universe?

America the Theocracy

Recently, I reflected aloud upon my astonishment that people in this day and age still believe so fervently in things like Armageddon and The Rapture that they would actually accuse a presidential candidate of being the Antichrist. I believe my exact words were, "It's the 21-century, folks. We have computers! We've been to the Moon! Wake up!"

This all came about from a brief political "discussion" with someone close to me wherein they expressed that they were afraid of Barack Obama. The man himself frightens me is what they said. At the time I didn't have the inkling to ask exactly why, nor did I want to spend an hour trying to convince the person of the contrary, but it's been gnawing at me since.

Yesterday, with this still fresh in my mind, I did a Google search to see why Barack Obama would "frighten" anyone. What I found were a couple of articles actually comparing verses in Revelation to "qualities" that Obama seemed to match up to. Now, if you've been paying attention to things I've been writing lately then you know I'm voting Democrat this year. Obama doesn't scare me, McCain actually does a little bit.

What I was getting at in my original statement is that it is appalling to me that people might believe something so ridiculous, as far as the Antichrist is concerned. I'm absolutely shocked that people aren't completely jaded to this line of thinking after leaders like Hitler, Stalin, Musselini, and Mao Tse Tung (sorry if the spelling is off) have left the global stage. I believe America was much more conservative 60+ years ago and had closer ties to their religious beliefs. Since the nuclear bomb had just been invented, I would theorize that "antichrist" speculation and sentiment would be flying around like, well, flies around dog poop.

But yet, here we are, many years later accusing someone who is in high standing in America, has led people of varying demographics to change and better lives and assisted with the formulation and passing of laws in this country, of being some kind of evil creature poised to enslave us all. The fact that people still believe in prophecy in general is so strange to me, particularly because the major groups within Christianity can't even agree on which flavor of the Bible they should collectively use.

Now, America's political atmosphere has always been a volatile one. I'll admit that. Honestly, I am putting so much effort into research and voting this year because with this election I really do feel like my fate is on the line. There are things important enough to me now to stand up with a voice and speak against them or for them where in the past 8 years I have seen the President as more of an office that affects America as a whole rather than us as individuals.

I believe that President Bush, even with his Christian values/principles, has forced this country off course in a very big way. Therefore, I don't attribute any value to the religious beliefs of any political leaders. Frankly, America has worked as well as it has because we don't allow religion/faith into political and financial decisions.

Imagine if the President believed that the Rapture was coming in the next few years and mandated that we all begin stockpiling food and bottled water and required all Amerians to "get saved" before the end came. Complete pandemonium, right? And the reason we don't let religion get involved with politics is not because Christianity is "wrong" but because it's not for anyone to tell a free person what religion is "right." We don't force religion on people here in America, therefore I don't believe any political decision, Presidential or not, should be religion-driven.

Now, that's not to say a person can't be guided by their faith. We make ethical and moral choices every day, but by and large these choices don't impact 250,000,000 other people and countless others worldwide. It may not be worth bringing up, but the "terrorists" that our radical Christians hate so much are guided by their faith too, and they're actually willing to die for it even though Americans don't (and will never) understand exactly why. Something about virgins? No, that's just a joke they tell you so you can make fun of Islam. Wake up and smell the propaganda.

In closing, I just want to remind Fox News and the entire Christian Right that all Islamist countries are theocracies; that is, the government is run entirely on the policy of their religion. If America were run like Christianity is, we wouldn't be one country anymore, we'd have a bunch of dotted lines separating our brand of policy from someone else's because of pointless arguments like seven-days-vs-seven-time-periods. We'd have no concept of relativism to work with which means there would be no such thing as competition anymore - there would be a mandated "right way to do things" that we would all have to follow. In short, we'd be one nice big Socialist package with a nice figurehead like George Bush or John McCain to reinforce this "knowledge."

We'd only be missing the red armbands and swasticas.