Tuesday, August 09, 2011

The Big Out Loud National Prayer She-bang

People don’t understand that prayer works. If they realized how often they make it backfire, maybe they’d understand that prayer does indeed work.

Saturday I had the truck radio on as I wandered these drought-dried roads looking for hay. It was live reporting from one of those Christian prayer shebangs, hosted by Texas Governor Rick Perry. Perry was himself once fingered as a "one-world government" agent by a genuine and actual Christian conservative I know.

A fella on the scene kept declaiming into the microphone how much peace and serenity he felt, oh the peace, oh the serenity, oh the Lord. He sounded like a man in a pill-trance.

He sounded just like that weird goose-eyed fat guy in “What the Bleep does JZ Knight Know?” who kept repeating how he created his own reality, oh the creation, oh the reality, oh my ass. His eyes spoke the same glazed monotony his mouth was mouthing. That isn't peace. That isn't serenity. That isn't creating reality. The portly buzzphrase-o-phage was boring his brain into a quasi-permanent stupor. That is a time-tested technique for hiding from reality, used by New Age imbeciles and religious barkers alike. Such was the zombified voice coming out of the radio from the National Prayer Shebang.

When you pray on things you believe in, you're hypnotizing yourself into believing them even more. You’ll see more of what you believe as you go about your day, good or ill. You'll react to your own post-hypnotic suggestions, from kissing a happy baby to spraying a crowd with your AK47.

For one of many variations on this experiment in personal responsibility, try this: pray on something you only think you’re supposed to believe, on pain of being shunned by people you're afraid of: family, community, co-workers, etc. To do that, you’ll have to drown out the protests of your own soul, which knows you don’t believe in what you're supposed to make a show of. To drown out the protests of your soul, you'll have to turn up the stupor-noise, like the New Agers and the politically zombified religious do.

It’s nigh impossible to pray for things you don't believe in when you’re alone and there's nobody around to kid. That's why, to at least go through the motions, you need a crowd of uneasy people who are also afraid of each other and also trying to fake it. That's what the stupor-noise coming out of the radio from the Big Out Loud National Prayer Shebang sounded like under these blue, dry skies this Saturday.

One hears the crowd chanting like “Oh Lawd, steer us out of this mess and bless this nation with goodness and rightness.”

Intended subliminal translation: "Rick Perry for President."

But heed: with minimum effort, one can make out whispers hissing amongst the stupor-noise, somewhere among the oddly limp spots in the hearty-sounding politically correct pleadings. I hear this toneless whisper. It goes: “Lord, you know I hate you and it's your fault. I’ve got guns. I’ve got ammo. Don't create peace and rightness, you bastard. If you exist at all, make somebody else shoot at me first so it will be their fault. Amen.”

But let us not single out the frustrated Christians for this understandable hypocrisy. Amen I say unto you: This applies to those "liberals" cheering on Obama who's expanded the wars and the murderings. It applies to any of many gatherings in the world, right now, around the globe.

One will note, from the recent rash of insanity called "militant atheism," they too are in on the deal. Why should self-hypnosis named anything else work differently? Bad religion is where you find it.

Oh Lord, help us work up the nerve to admit out loud that we'd rather believe something better than lip-servicing this goody two-shoes fairy tale stuff. Otherwise we'll keep shooting, raping, torturing and pillaging."

I’m not saying it’s what’s going on behind every set of eyes in the crowd. Keep up with your us-versus them ballgame-style bashing, though, and the prayers of weapons manufacturers will be answered in continuing abundance, as usual.

3 Comments:

Blogger KathyB said...

I guess that would be a big old Amen if I were so inclined.

12:52 PM  
Blogger Tom Dark said...

Fun fact to know and tell: "Amen," used by Christians to affirm what they've just said, is an invocation of the Egyptian god "Ammon," "Amon," "Amen," etc., best known as Mammon.

8:25 AM  
Blogger manisz said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

4:16 PM  

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