Open letter to all Atheists.

Jesus was offended by such prayers. He called people that did this hypocrites. He said that their reward for their prayers was the esteem they get from other hypocrites, and that God would not reward such hypocrisy. He said you should pray in secret, and that God who can see secret things, will consequentially reward the prayer-giver.If Christians actually prayed in the ONLY way Jesus ever instructed Christians how to pray. This wouldn't be an issue.(Matt 6:5 and beyond)So if you want to pray in the open, please do. I'll laugh at how you are a fake Christian who doesn't really believe and just wants to persuade other people how righteous and holy you are, while being unrighteous and proud.If you want me to pay you to pray openly in front of captive audiences? No. No thanks. Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Matt 6It's not about giving God credit or thanks in public. It's about doing it when the attention is on you or in such a way as to bring attention to you. That is ' that they may be seen of men' or ' that they may have glory of men'. Mat 16:18 is not about buildings but gatherings of people (ekklēsia), and this is what I am betting you basing the 'build churches' part of this claim on.Mat 6 tells you there is only one way to pray: The Lord's Prayer in secret. Anything else is pointless because God knows what you want and what you need already and doesn't need you telling him.Mat 14 Jesus prays alone.Mat 26 Jesus leaves the group to prayMar 6 Jesus prays aloneMar 14 Jesus leaves the group to prayLuk 6 Jesus prays aloneLuke 9 Jesus goes off to prayLuke 11 Q: Teach us to pray, A: The Lord's PrayerThat's pretty much all I can find that's relevant and to do with Jesus' instructions.So no, he didn't order us to build churches. Indeed, the word 'church' isn't in the Bible. For fun, take your preferred translation and look how they translated Psalms 22:22 vs Hebrews 2:12I should point out that the Greek is the same as in the Septuagint, it just gets translated differently, basically because King James said so. Either Jesus was being a hypocrite, or actually what he did did not contravene his general instructions earlier. I prefer the latter, but feel free to argue either way. For praying for the glory bestowed upon them by other men (or in the case the Pharisee vs Publican in Luke 18, praying for self-glorification in general) is bad. That is what people who hold up government business while everybody's attention is upon them and they are more or less a captive audience in order to show how Christian and righteous they are by correctly giving thanks to Jesus and praying for whatever or whomever are doing. I'm pretty sure Jesus would see these people cynically using the sacred to bolster their political career in a negative light, wouldn't you? That's very true. I'm not fond of torturing and murdering and saying 'convert or die', but if you want to defend that, be my guest.If you want to suggest that making public declarations about how awesomely devout you are is the ONLY way to spread the gospel - then that's perfectly wrong. For instance you could go to a forum and say 'Jesus died for our sins {etc}', that wouldn't be against Jesus' instructions as far as I know. You could even do it with pathos and ethos and rhetoric and whatever other things the Greeks liked. I would have a problem if two men engaged in an erotic kiss for 2 minutes at the start of every government meeting. Maybe a few times as part of some political protest point I could tolerate, but as a long standing tradition that MUST NOT BE QUESTIONED? No.On the other hand, I'm perfectly fine with guys taking a 2 minute moment to sit on my garden wall and kiss just as I'm perfectly content if someone wants to take a 2 minute moment to quietly pray on my garden wall.What Jesus thinks of either of those groups of people is his business, but it seems to me that what these political opportunists are doing is exploiting the popularity of Jesus/God for votes, and I'm surprised more Christians aren't appalled by this sacrilegious self serving blasphemy. It appears you were wrong to do so.

Since you will likely look to these verses should you reply to my other post, I'll add what I think of their relevance here. You can amalgamate your response to stop our thread from forking awkwardly. Not Jesus speaking, nor is it about public prayer, nor is it about praying so as to be seen by men to be praying. There is no evidence that Jesus had access to a closet in this 'certain place' - why are you being so literal? The point is not hypocrisy or even public prayer, but about trying to prove your righteousness by public and obvious signs of religious adherence (charity, fasting and praying are the examples principally used). The point is that these people's reward is the esteem of the fools that think such things are important.Of course, the setting is important, because Jesus is speaking to Jews whose temple has been destroyed at the time of writing (or will be destroyed if we believe Jesus was magic), but the point is that one doesn't need to pray at the Temple, one doesn't need to prove how righteous you are to other people - God is everywhere so he already knows that stuff and so their reward is earthly not heavenly. I'm sure that being tied in a dungeon with other prisoners makes it difficult for your hymns and prayers to go unnoticed so they could escape the insinuation that they were doing it to be seen by men, they were doing it in the hope of plate tectonic movement that would be a sign for the guard to convert etc.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

People who post single sentence OPs that spawn discussion for more than 30 posts will find this happens to them So you lurked 6-18 months before registering? I think I only lasted a month! There are many atheists, and many ways to think. Are robot responses different from kneejerk ones? The metaphor seems to imply a kind of automatic response, though yours carries repetitive or monotonous along with it which is maybe intentional?Are you saying you don't understand those kinds of comparison, or you do and that it is not logical?To be an effective comparison it would need to be an entity that shares as many attributes with (for example) God as possible within the context of the comparison while not actually being considered itself a deity. It also helps if belief in the entity used as a comparison is rare among adults.Can you think of better ones? Did you mean 'eg' rather than 'ie' in your previous response? Are you saying that the divorce comment is another example of a 'robot response' or is this another type of thing you want to add to your letter to atheists? Indeed, and given Jesus in the gospels is pretty clear on divorce, and in general he's not in favour. You'd think if Christians were following their own religion this might motivate them to stick with the marriage as no man can tear it asunder. The overall statistic is based on the observation that there are twice as many marriages per year as there are divorces, but it is confounded by the effect that many people are getting married later in recent years which has historically shown to reduce divorce rates as well as population and other cultural effects. In short - it's a rough estimated projection.The debunking doesn't really debunk anything. As it implies, it is about spinning the numbers to look good, it's called 'The Good News About Marriage' and the author states 'It started pretty casually, but it became a drive for me and Tally Whitehead, my senior researcher, to understand and dig out any good news that was there... it ended up taking eight years!'It took eight years to complete a single study looking at five claims and write a book about it? It must have taken a lot of looking and considerable spinning! Anyway, the point was to look and publish stuff that was 'good news', rather than just 'the truth'.The article mentions two.1) 72% of the population is currently married to their first spouse. this section includes what appears to be the pertinent table - Table 6.I estimate about 78 million people over 15 have ever married.
49 million people are still married for the first time.49/78 := 63%The number she seems to have picked is from Table 10

quote:

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While both spouses were in
their first marriage in 72 percent
of all currently married couples in
2009, this situation occurred for
just 65 percent of the couples who
had married within the previous
year

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Instead of honestly saying that '72% of currently married people are composed of two people in their first marriage', she said '72% of people are still married to their first spouse., which is wrong.The biggest issue here is that her statistic seems to ignore people who have been divorced or widowed and have not subsequently remarried. According to Table 6, 9% are currently divorced and 3% are currently widowed. 8 years of research didn't catch that? Maybe I'm wrong, can you correct me?2) {An claim based on a study or meta-analysis the article does not reference, nor does her website}
So I can't say. I believe religiosity has been shown to have an affect on divorce (and I believe it), but it's not as significant as one might expect considering the stakes at play. If you play hunt a stat you might find a few that seem to show divorce rate is much lower when religion is in the mix, but I'd sooner see the numbers after the issue in point 1) above. I took a look at her website, spent a little time assessing what I could of the evidence, and it seems to me, she's full of it. I don't give credibility to a Harvard graduated financial analyst making these kinds of errors during an eight year long study when it is one of the 5 key pieces of data the study is highlighting, with at least one peer (does a degree in Practical Theology count?) reviewing the material. Indeed. But don't worry - she's just released a book that explains everything - buy now, pay later! Daily experiences can only give you so much information - you should be careful of extending your local circumstances generally. Maybe your church teaches things so well that people marry the right people and stay with them forever because they love them. Or maybe they fear divorcing because of the community backlash. Or maybe, maybe after they get quietly divorced they don't say anything to you and keep up appearances in public, or maybe they just both change to a church you don't attend.Too many maybes to be able to be sure.