People who follow Todd Bently are complete jackasses and deserve to have every penny they own taken from them by this fucking lunatic. First of all, his name is TODD!!! On top of that, he's Canadian! (At least he sounds like he's Canadian, which is just as bad.) Shouldn't that be enough? But no, you need more to keep you away?

The best line from this video: "People that need people raised from the dead are now tuning in to the meeting." It's like he's talking about people who need their drains unclogged. Who in hell wouldn't like to have someone raised from the dead?



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Imagine this...

A 6-year-old little girl is abducted by a serial pedophile. While her parents are tormented by visions of what may be happening to her, what the perpetrator may be doing to her, and crushed by the realization that they have thus far been powerless to save her, the man uses her sexually and tortures her without mercy or conscience. Finally, he squeezed her trachea shut until her little heart stops beating.

It isn't hard to believe that, during this horrific ordeal, parents and child prayed to the God they were taught to trust and serve. They must have begged, pleaded, through eyes filled with tears and hearts torn apart by anguish. As the man hurt the child, she must have cried for her mother and asked her God to save her.

But her pleas for her parents could not be answered, for they were only human and thus limited. They would easily have given their own lives to save her if they could, but saving her was beyond their power.

What about her pleas to God? He, according to Christian doctrine, could have saved her. He did not. They question that has been asked for centuries is, Why not? If he loves us and is omnipotent, why would he not save a little girl from her rapist and murderer?

Christians have answered this question in many ways. Here is the answer I used to give as a minister:

God has a much larger perspective and does not see death, or even pain, as we do. To his eternal eyes, these things are not the tragedies we see them as, because in just a short while, once we are transported to heaven, we will see that pain and death were but the pain of a moment. What's more, he is like the parent who knows that not getting that special dress is not the end of the world her daughter thinks it is. To the daughter, the suffering is enormous; to the parent, it is fleeting.

I now see a gaping hole in this explanation, and it is this: The pain of a child who doesn't get a desired dress is minimal and ends there. The pain of a child suffering torture and death does not end there. The lives of parents and extended family are twisted beyond recognition, marriages often end, and the pain goes on and on.

In my opinion, cruelty is only multiplied when people are led to put their trust in a deity who does nothing to help them because he can do nothing, because he is not real.


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From Epiphenom...

Every few years, a group based at Hertford College at Oxford puts together a statistical analysis of all the studies conducted to date that have looked at whether praying for sick people helps them get better (or at least stay alive).

The latest has just been published, and it contains something pretty radically new in their conclusions: the evidence is now so clear cut that they think that no more studies should be done. The book is shut. Praying for sick people simply doesn't work.

Now, the odd thing is that there haven't actually been any new studies on this since their last report, back in 2007. So why the change of heart? There are a couple of reasons.

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I had a minor brainwave yesterday. It occurred me, not for the first time, that Christians generally don't believe their own hype about prayer. Here's what I mean: Listen to any Christian organization asking for help and you'll notice how prayer is always thrown in as an afterthought. They need your money. They need you to join. They need you to write letters and emails. They need you to attend. And, oh yes, please pray for us, too.

Why don't they ask only for prayer? Pray for us to be able to pay our bills! No need to send actual money, because prayer will get us the money. Like that.

When I was a child, we used to play a game in my dad's car. We pretended that we were racing all the other cars on the road behind us. When another car seemed to be gaining on us, we pushed on the back window to get them to fall back. And damned if it didn't work some of the time. How exciting to push on the glass and see the competing vehicles respond to our efforts by slowing down! It was a feeling of such power and control. Oh sure, a lot of the time it didn't work, but that was OK, as long as our method was successful some of the time.

Need I say more? Obviously, pushing on the glass had nothing to do with the acceleration or deceleration of the other cars. But we quickly built a connection in our minds when it seemed to work. Just like prayer. We have a ready explanation for the gobs of times it has no effect, and we take great delight whenever it seems to be effective. Oh, to be a child again.

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