My Controversial Thought of the Day – Prayer

Please don't get your prayer on me

I’m not religious; in fact I have a rather strange personal belief system that I won’t really get into here.  But I do want to chat about something that bothers the heck out of me, prayer.  I’m not complaining about those who like to pray and believe in it.  I think it’s good to believe in something and I strongly believe you have a right to think what you want, as long as you don’t push it in other people’s faces.

That’s where prayer comes in.  When someone asks you to pray for so and so, I feel like that is rather presumptuous.  After all, what if I don’t believe in your God?  What if I don’t believe in prayer?  It’s awfully rude to ask me to pray if you don’t know what my belief system is.  Did you know that only 30% of the world is Christian?  So, when you ask someone to pray for so and so there is a 70% chance that they have a belief system that does not have prayer in this form.  

Now, let’s say I am a Christian and I do say my prayer’s every night.  What right do you have to ask me to pray for someone?  Aren’t prayers supposed to be personal?  I can’t see God being okay with you praying for random people that you’ve never met or are only acquaintances.

Finally when someone that I care about is not well or something goes wrong and they are Christian we always have these awkward pauses.  As if they are expecting me to say I’ll pray for them.  I will not.  I’ll wish you luck, I’ll be rooting for you, you’ll be in my thoughts and if there is something tangible I can do for you I certainly will.

I can already see that this is going to be taken the wrong way.  There are going to be people who complain at me for daring to say all this.  But I’m not saying that you can’t pray, I would never take that right away from you.  Since I’m nice enough not to take your right away then you should be nice enough to be okay with me not wanting too.

Please don’t pray at me.