The Arrogance of Prayer
Ricky Gervais has often been attacked for his overt atheism. People have called him arrogant over his certainty that there is no God. His response to this is one for the Hall of Fame:
“If you believe in a God that stood by and allowed the Holocaust to occur but pray to him to help you find your car keys, who is the arrogant one?”
I am not an atheist. I am also not a believer. Like most people, I find myself somewhere in the middle. I do not discount that there may be some supreme creator that ties us all together but is this “being” the God that we hear about in all the various religious factions on our little blue planet? Certainly not.
What I do wholly believe is that we have total and complete Free Will during our time on this earth. Nothing is predetermined and having a one-sided conversation with a disconnected phone line is not going to change the events in your life.
How can one look at war, famine, disease, and mass shootings and believe that God does not feel the need to intervene but He happened to stick your future wife in the produce section of the supermarket on the same day you ran out of cucumbers? The argument just doesn’t hold water. As humans, we want to believe we have control, and when we don’t have that control it’s comforting to believe there is an angel on our shoulder who takes over steering the ship. When things work out, we praise this angel but when they don’t we say it “wasn’t meant to be.”
Therein lays the arrogance that Ricky Gervais is referring. Thanks to the prayers of so many, your relative’s cancer went into remission. Unfortunately, the guy across the hall died from the very same cancer. Did he not have enough (or any) people praying for him so God decided he wasn’t worth saving? Is there a type of “Prayer Point System?” God doesn’t tune in until the hundredth prayer because those are the people who are truly loved? If no one prays for someone with a disease are they less likely to be saved? The logic of prayer is just a house of cards. It collapses on itself so easily it’s very hard to find the value.
I guess there is a human impulse to ask for intervention when things are spinning out of control. When tragedy has struck someone in my life I, like most others, find myself repeating a mantra of…
PLEASE PLEASE LET HIM/HER BE ALRIGHT.
I suppose in its truest definition that is prayer. Am I really expecting a man in the clouds to save my loved one? I guess not. The sadness, anger, and confusion just get to be so much that it’s like a kettle boiling. You start pleading to release the pressure.
To those who do pray, please know I get it. It can be a very cathartic and meditative experience. I just ask you to consider what you’re hoping to get out of it. As my boy Ricky says, if God did not stop the greatest tragedy in human history, is he going to use his power to get your car to the gas station before the engine dies?
