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Goodbye Jesus

Praying For Gays


Castiel233

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How come Believers say "to pray away the gay" and expect results, yet they never say "pray away the Ebola" with any degree of confidence.

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I'm guessing some of them do say "pray away the Ebola", as long as it stays in Africa.  When an infected person is in their local ER, I'm sure it's a different story.

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I'm guessing some of them do say "pray away the Ebola", as long as it stays in Africa.  When an infected person is in their local ER, I'm sure it's a different story.

 

 
When real results are required they don't want to know. This is why when a medical emergency breaks out (such as Ebola) the clergy don't rush to man the front lines and hold it back with prayer. If prayer really worked then fair enough, but it doesn't and this is why we have medics instead.
 
On a side note, Mother Theresa and her nuns would use the very basic medicine (such as aspirin) to treat cancer sufferers. No doubt the aspirin was supplemented with prayer. Yet when she needed treatment she was flown first class and given the very best care in a private Swizz hospital.  
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becoz it is his will or covenient or easier to put the blame on someone else??????

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When Mother Theresa was given heart problems by God, that was also His will, yet she had an unnatural pace maker fitted without a hint of shame 

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Christianity has an entire mental process for dealing with undesirable events.  You start off praying it won't happen to you.  Then if it does happen to you then you call it a trial or test and you pray all through it for deliverance.  If skilled humans work hard and save your hide you thank Jesus.  If you don't pull through you accept it as God's answer as you die.  Then your Christian family say you were called home and it was God's will.    Then they pray it won't happen to them.

 

 

I don't have stats so I can't quote any numbers but it seems to me that many gay people born and raised Christian go through the first stage and then deconvert when they realize Christianity can't take away sexual orientation.  There seem to be a few who stick with Christianity and seek acceptance from the religion anyway.  I've seen a few vids of them expressing disappointment.

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HA! good point, tho I bet as others said, xtians as usual will make up some apologetic bullshit to weasel out of the question like the slimy scumbags usually do. From my observations, the homophobic sacks of crap usually find some self loathing bisexual, or a str8 guy to lie, and say "prayer and gawd took my gay away!!" (the former usually getting caught fucking a dude in the bathroom, or hiring a rent boy)

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Because in the end, everything is either "the lord's will" (when someone dies of ebola or cancer) or "was caused by human sin" (when someone dies of aids or is shot).  So if someone is trying to pray away the gay (wow, that is so offensive!) and they stay gay, it's just because they're clinging to their sin rather than the lord.  I've never heard that one blamed on "the lord's will" because they won't admit that being gay is either genetic or somehow just hard-wired in people, like any other sexuality.

 

I still can't figure out how someone being gay at all affects the huge majority people around them, or how two men or two women getting married could possibly ruin my own marriage.  Years ago when I worked in the arts, I was surrounded by gay men, right at the same time I got married and had my babies.  I loved my job and my co-workers, and in no way did they affect me wanting to get married and have those babies.  At show times, my husband helped me at the theater, and he enjoyed talking to my co-workers, too.  It was a really pleasant time of my life.

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It's a phrase I've never actually heard before.  However, I have seen supposed accounts of people who suddenly become heterosexual, who miraculously cease to be addicted to drugs or to alcohol, all as a result of being "saved".

 

So, it appears that homosexuality is in the same generic category as substance abuse in the Christian consciousness.  Apparently the Holy Ghost needs a "clean" place to indwell.

 

Illness, however, is not necessarily seen as such a moral issue; by and large I find Christian attitudes to illness incomprehensible and inconsistent (God can heal -v- God doesn't interfere in something as trivial as mere physical illness).  Nothing new there then.

 

I have to say, however, I find the "pray away the gay" phrase disturbingly offensive.  It seems to betray a level of hatred that is breathtaking.

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A really long post ahead, just read the first and last paragraph, if it's a TLDR moment. What can I say, I love history and science, and this is BOTH!! Whoo hoo!!

 

I'd say it's because Christian attitudes toward illness and death have had to change, to keep pace with advances in medicine since about 1900. Medicine has simply become so much better at dealing with most illnesses.

 

100 years ago, the expected result of getting sick was either to get better on your own, or, you know... not. This bred a very fatalistic attitude towards illness and death. The concern of Christians in times of illness and death was not "praying hard enough for God to heal you" it was rather a matter of resignation to God's will, and dying well, when you did die. Reading period sources from before the early 1900s reflects this. It's why most "sentimental literature" from the 1800s really doesn't sit well with a modern audience. The centrepiece of a Victorian novel is usually the appropriately submissive, refined, and pious death of a saintly main character (almost always female, frequently something like tuberculosis). Nobody dies of, say, cholera in novels, because it's not as pretty a death. Here's a bibliography. In miniature form, there's Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl - this passive, fatalistic dynamic towards death and suffering is exactly why it was so popular, back then, and why modern people who read it seem to hate it. That fatalistic attitude is not completely gone, it's the fallback position for Christians, when someone they're praying for doesn't get better. That's where you get awful comments like "they're in a better place, now."

 

We've become so adept at controlling mass outbreaks that we forget historical perspective, when it comes to Ebola. For a reminder, check out the 1918 Flu Pandemic. That's what a real pandemic looks like. I'm not going to worry just yet about Ebola: call me when the corpse wagon comes around on Tuesdays. Bring out your dead! In 1918, medical science was just on the knife-edge of being able to deal with an outbreak like that, but not quite. They understood somewhat what the disease was, and how it was spread, but the health measures and mechanisms of modern quarantine and informing the public were in their infancy. They could almost, but not quite, treat people who had the flu. Researching it, you read harrowing letters from doctors and nurses who feel that they should be able to help, somehow, but nothing is working. For the first time, you get the impression that people feel it might be possible to control an outbreak of disease, but are nonetheless helpless in the face of it.

 

Later on, by the 1930s, early antibiotics changed the game entirely. Suddenly, it became possible to outright cure diseases that had claimed many lives, before. Medical professionals could do something, and it worked. Here's an article on the Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy of the 1930s. The physician whose letter opens the article is heartbroken, because the miracle drugs he was prescribing were mixed with diethylene glycol (basically, antifreeze). And this is where God comes in:

 

"Nobody but Almighty God and I can know what I have been through these past few days. I have been familiar with death in the years since I received my M.D. from Tulane University School of Medicine with the rest of my class of 1911. Covington County has been my home. I have practiced here for years. Any doctor who has practiced more than a quarter of a century has seen his share of death.

But to realize that six human beings, all of them my patients, one of them my best friend, are dead because they took medicine that I prescribed for them innocently, and to realize that that medicine which I had used for years in such cases suddenly had become a deadly poison in its newest and most modern form, as recommended by a great and reputable pharmaceutical firm in Tennessee: well, that realization has given me such days and nights of mental and spiritual agony as I did not believe a human being could undergo and survive. I have known hours when death for me would be a welcome relief from this agony.
" (Letter by Dr. A.S. Calhoun, October 22, 1937)

 

In a mere 30 years, due to medical advances, Christian thinking had changed to keep pace with our ability to cure. Suddenly, it was expected that medicine could cure people. Suddenly, a physician failing to cure people becomes a cause for "spiritual agony." God, suddenly, has become responsible for making people come through sickness alive.

 

Ebola scares us, in the modern world, because it's 70% lethal, even with treatment. It breaks our modern template of easy cures. It's behaving like a medieval plague. This is normal behaviour for a novel illness, however. The virus won't make it, killing its host so fast. The strains that are most virulent will fail to be transmitted to new hosts before the current one dies. The ones that can persist, and make a host sick, but not kill them, and spread to more people will survive. Over time, viruses become less lethal. Oh, wait... that's natural selection. Waiting for a virus to change by natural selection, however, can take a while, and inevitably cost a lot of lives. Too bad for Ebola, it's up against us. Humans don't like to see other humans die. We chuck rocks at lions. You're not ever fighting one human, you're up against us all. That's our thing. We solve problems, and have the capacity to transmit such knowledge culturally, and so, can change faster than anything else has a hope of competing against. When we come up with drugs or vaccinations, or slap down a quarantine, we're using the theory of natural selection against other organisms. It works. We even exterminate diseases of completely different species that we've found improve our lives so much, that we've used artificial selection to improve them. If a virus had the capacity to be scared, Ebola should be terrified.

 

TLDR? Pick up here.

 

The Christian strains of thought that blame diseases on what they perceive as "social ills" generally don't accept this body of knowledge. What they say and do is all about social control - that's why Christianity has persisted so long. Humanity gets so much from being part of a social network, that we invest huge amounts of resources into establishing ones that get us that social power. They're working on a different framework, altogether. And, I might add, it's not the framework that wiped out smallpox and rinderpest.

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I grew up in the "black" church, and I can tell ya, if it wasn't for gay men, there would have been no choir.sing_99.gif

 

I'm just waiting for a christian to come out of their mouth with "ebola is a sign that jesus is coming back real soon," because I may not be able to stop myself from slapping the spit out of them.vtffani.gif

 

The Earth has a way of "thinning the herd." 

 

My sister, cousin and a family friend are all going to Johannesburg next month to "bring the gospel."   I asked her if she was bringing jesus with them or if he was going to meet them there, and why are they not going to west Africa?  Apparently, they don't trust the lord quite that much.  Then I sent her this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RANdXzbUN3w, and told her to watch her "biscuit."GONZ9729CustomImage1539775.gif

 

When you say a prayer you've wasted the time you could have spent doing something productive.

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I'm just waiting for a christian to come out of their mouth with "ebola is a sign that jesus is coming back real soon," because I may not be able to stop myself from slapping the spit out of them.vtffani.gif

 

Ask and ye shall receive...

 

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How come Believers say "to pray away the gay" and expect results, yet they never say "pray away the Ebola" with any degree of confidence.

in that sense believers pray is downgraded to asking asking and asking

i don't want this make it away

i want this, make it happen

god/slave?

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When Mother Theresa was given heart problems by God, that was also His will, yet she had an unnatural pace maker fitted without a hint of shame 

 

Or she just drank and smoked like everyone else and hid it...

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A really long post ahead, just read the first and last paragraph, if it's a TLDR moment. What can I say, I love history and science, and this is BOTH!! Whoo hoo!!

 

 

Thank you for this!  I found it really fascinating and makes so much sense.  I also now know why I have always hated the Little Match Girl story!

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How come Believers say "to pray away the gay" and expect results, yet they never say "pray away the Ebola" with any degree of confidence.

 

Funny thing is you never hear believers saying "pray away the hate" or "pray away the bigotry"...

 

Personally I would like to say "pray for the gays" they deserver to get treated like the rest of us because frankly they are just like the rest of us, they are human and will live and die.

 

other than that it is zero of our business what they do with their sexual organs. None. no ones business but their own. Why do bigots actually think that sex happening in someone elses bedroom is their problem?

 

I say we should all "pray to end belief in god".

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I'm just waiting for a christian to come out of their mouth with "ebola is a sign that jesus is coming back real soon," because I may not be able to stop myself from slapping the spit out of them.vtffani.gif

 

Ask and ye shall receive...

 

 

just like his jabba the hut dad, hagee is a psychotic, moron.

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its easier.

they know that Ebola is too difficult to pray away in terms of the amount of faith they have plus they likely think its the wrath of god so wouldn't touch it with a prayer barge pole.

Also gays are an easy target close at hand and it makes them feel good to campaign against them without actually having to do the hard work of intercession.Nor are the results easily seen.If they did pray against Ebola but it rages on then they have to admit prayer has not worked.Praying against gays ( for those that actually do commit to hard concentrated but ultimately meaningless prayer and very few of them actually will) they can claim results based on a word from the lord but there is no visible proof to themselves or others that their prayer has not been effective.Thus they can remain confident in their self deceit and deceit of their fellow Christians.

They can come up with a slogan to make it look holy and its very catchy in churchianese while chatting after church or on Facebook.

It also white washes their projected personal hatred of themselves onto a minority group which they can't do with a disease as its only a virus.

Finally it psychologically allows them an excuse to exercise the basest and on the surface most un christian emotion they have; that of hatred.

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