From: "Josh"
Subject: A concerned reader...

I have read some of your articles on the internet. I wanted you to know that I am praying that God will take you to whatever means necessary to convict you of your lost condition without Him. I am praying that you will repent of your sin of unbelief and trust Jesus Christ as your savior.

Why would Josh want me to know this? I won’t dispute that within Josh’s religion praying for me might be the appropriate response to seeing material that bothers him and calls hisbeliefsinto question, but what scriptural basis is there for needing to inform me about this?

Is there some assumption that I might care? It would be an unwarranted one, that’s for sure. Is there some assumption that the prayers will be more effective when I know about them? Prayers can’t be all that effective, if this is the case. Presumably God is able to act regardless of whether we know about it or are paying any attention. What kind of deity needs an audience?

Of course, I don’t believe in any gods, much less gods that might want an audience. I do, however, know that quite often people need an audience. There are many situations where a people seem to have a need to be watched and applauded by others. I wonder if this might be just such a situation.

Perhaps believers like Josh implicitly realize that there isn’t much merit in praying because they have seen the failure of prayer alone to accomplish much of anything. Prayer with an audience, however, will work wonders — even if it doesn’t accomplish the prayed-for goal, it does manage to bring praise to the person doing the praying. It’s a simply feedback loop: no positive feedback with private prayer, but lots of positive feedback with public prayer.

I am not writing to condemn you, because that is impossible for myself to do seeing that I am a sinner as well. I do not by any means deserve forgiveness or Salvation, but Romans 5:8 tells us that "God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." This means that Christ died for us to provide forgiveness for sin. I am not worthy, however, I wanted to take a moment of my time to tell you what a wonderful savior Jesus is and what He can do for you.

It is sad, sometimes, to witness the kinds of psychological damage Christianity can inflict on a person. A health adult should be relatively happy and comfortable with themselves and their lives. Self-loathing is a sign of mental problems that require treatment, but that’s just what this sort of Christianity does to people. Look at Josh, he doesn’t believe that he “deserves” forgiveness and he doesn’t believe that he is “worthy.”

If a person told her child over and over that he didn’t “deserve” her forgiveness and wasn’t “worthy” of her love, but that she was just oh-so-loving that she would go ahead and forgive and love him anyway, we’d rightly accuse that parent of inflicting emotional and psychological abuse on the child. What a horrible, disgusting thing to do. When it’s done in the name of religion, however, it’s treated as if it were the natural way to go about life.

Well, it’s not natural. It’s demeaning, it’s depressing, and it’s not conducive to an emotionally or psychologically healthy life. People need to extract themselves from the constant cycle of abuse — but as we know, it’s very difficult to extricate oneself from an abusive relationship. That’s just as true when the relationship is with a religion.

If you need anything, please feel free to write back. I will be praying for you.

Here we go again with the need to publicly declare that he is praying for me. Twice in one message! I received this email quite a while ago, to be honest, so I wonder whether Josh is still praying for me. I doubt it. Indeed, I doubt whether his prayers for me lasted more than week at the outside. After all, it’s unlikely that actual prayers were ever the real point. It’s far more likely that the actual point was simply to be able to say, publicly, that he was praying for a desperate, nonbelieving sinner. Once that mission was accomplished, he could move on to find other people to proclaim his prayers for.

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