Finite prayers??

Dylan Smith, was a surf-boarder, who in NJ, helped rescue some people during hurricane Sandy. But, tragically, he recently passed away surfing off the coast of Florida. I'm on the People Magazine website (yeah I know, but I get it on my andriod) reading the article on his death, then I get to the comments section and guess what? One commenter said 'my prayers are with him'; another commenter wrote after that saying 'my prayers are with the peoplein Newton'!....wtf

Yingyangchang                            1 day ago

           my prayers are with the pepole in newtown

My  prayers are with the people of Newton...? Where did that come from? I know People Mag doesn't really call to the brightest of readerships, but still, I was flabbergasted.  Then it occurred to me that this person was being REAL and practical.... really he was being practical. You don't see it yet? ...I'm taking you back to George Carlin's pulpit, so to speak...

Think about it. How many prayers do we really have? Do you have enough prayers for all the tragedies that strike all the time? When you see a tragic news blurb or segment on CNN you send your prayers, but do you do that for every tragic story?....you probably do. And since you probably do, then you are probably a phony. Because you are not praying at all. That's right. YOU are not praying, only merely 'sending your prayers'.

Think about that.

So this whole process of sending our disaffected—from a distance—prayers that we telepathically send, or kineto-typologically send out to our vicarious destinations are only self-serving and don’t really help much. Do people use that kind of clichéd phrase b/c we can think of nothing to say? What would an atheist comment look like in that respect?... I can't think of it, nor can I insert funny-atheist-joke here, but I would think that an atheist’s comment might be more constructively structured than our default religio-pseudo-sacrosanctic-self-fulfilling comments (i.e. ‘I sent my prayers’, ‘I know god’s with them’, etc.)

And this all goes into a much larger dialectic on ethics—dogma vs. reality—that is another blog altogether. (And I won't comment on many other blogs that are just hypocritically using the Newton events to make bloggers pat themselves in the back for how morally upright they are compared to others).

But just something to think about next time you send your effete prayers.