Don't Pray for Ukraine

[kimberlysteele]

Prayer has been unfashionable among Davos wannabes and TED Talk hipsters until recently. Memes about the uselessness of prayer used to dominate Facebook along with legions of angry atheists always at the ready to chime in on comment sections of bereaved parents or videos of natural disasters, laughing at the faithful while likely crying inside. Something changed because Facebook/Twitter/Youtube (which will be referred to from now on as Twitboob) started including "Pray for Ukraine" with its buffet of multicolored virtue banners such as "Marked Safe from Whatever Hideous Tragedy Occurred This Week" and "I Got My Covid Vaccine".

Prayer isn't always good. Prayer is non-physical communication between a human and another entity. Usually this prayer is mental but there are some who choose to conjure up the entity they are praying to by force, which is kind of like when an obnoxious drunk friend wants to talk at 3 in the morning, but instead of just calling you, they parachute onto your lawn, break into your house, hog tie you, and drag you back to their basement in order to talk to you. Some prayer is good and some prayer is bad. Some entities are good and some entities are bad. When I was a kid, I confused praying to Santa Claus with praying to Jesus and once I prayed to both in the same night. Anyone can be prayed to. People can pray to Kimberly Steele -- I sincerely hope they don't, but they can. There are several Etsy vendors who make celebrity novena candles. In an episode of Orange is the New Black, two characters fervently pray to Beyoncé. It is my opinion that the MRNA vaccines of various stripe open a direct channel to certain demons of the Goetia, and that is why so many of the vaxxed end up with possession-like symptoms such as tremors and projectile vomiting. To make a long story short, not all prayer is good or consensual, and when prayer is directed at a non-human entity, it is very easy for it to become rude. It is also very easy to pray to a demon when you think you're praying to an angel, or to be praying to a minor spirit when you think you or praying to a god, or to be speaking with a nasty trickster spirit instead of your dead father through a medium or Ouija board.

Backward Christian Soldiers

Christians often pray as a form of war. Their God is often mistaken for a cosmic vending machine as well as a vengeful punisher who inflicts pain like a mafia boss. The sort of Christian who prays for the punishment of others (often in secret but sometimes right in the open) imagines himself and his team as Right and all others as Wrong. Bible literalists take a statement like "preach unto all nations" as a direct imperative to force-infect the rest of humanity with the Yahweh-virus at all costs.

Songwriter Happy Rhodes has a song called "Save Our Souls" that captures it perfectly:

We think that we're superior
To every living thing
It can be lonely at the top
So we look for higher praise to sing
Won't you just say hello
We'll give you a cable show
We have weapons to intimidate
You if you look afright
Come on down and see our
Zoos and refugee camps
Ain't it worth your time

Pity our emptiness

The Gentleman Preacher

A few weeks ago a Christian pastor from a church down the block showed up at our doorstep. I wasn't home. My agnostic/atheist husband was home and he got into a short conversation with the gentleman preacher, who actually asked permission to pray for my husband. My husband said "No thank you", however, he was very moved by the man asking for his consent instead of blanket presuming and steamrolling on through. If more Christians start acting like the Gentleman Preacher of Kimberly's Neighborhood, churches will start filling to the brim and doing the good works of Jesus. I am not holding my breath for that to happen.

Non-Christians and various stripes of Twitboobers have turned to prayer because it has been revealed as a blunt battle axe that can be swung around in the china shops of social media. That is to say prayer can be weaponized as nasty Christians realized long ago. Twitboob has only recently caught on, hence Pray for Ukraine. They espouse Praying for Ukraine because it is the Latest Thing. They want carte blanche to jam the Latest Thing down collective throats with constant reassurance from experts (kind of like a Girlfriend Experience) that they are strong and wonderful. They don't care if the reassurance is fake.

Europeans are in a real pickle right now as they face the prospect of mammoth utility bills this winter while having to get scrappy when it comes to food. I think middle class Americans are more used to scrounging and seeing red rectangles on our late and unpaid utility bills. We already were deplorable Walmart, GoodWill, and Aldi shoppers back in the Obama era. Being demi-poor like me isn't so bad but you do have to get used to it. Going demi-poor or straight up poor is hard to do overnight and the higher they sit, the harder they fall. I don't give a rat's behind about my gym membership, my cable subscription, my Adobe software suite, my hundred dollar restaurant meals, my underground parking, or my museum patronage because I don't have any of those things.

There is a teeming class of people who are not ready for what they gleefully signed up for in 2020. Neither can they handle the responsibility for what they've done to Western civilization in general nor can they cope with the physical demands of poverty after quaxxing themselves and their children. The shots are in the process of establishing an underclass of handicapped, dependent, and mostly infertile adults whose families face bankruptcy or homelessness because of repeated trips to ERs and medical clinics for the rest of their lives. When they land in those ERs and clinics, they will be gaslighted that it couldn't possibly be the MRNA vaccines. Throwing money at the Ukraine is yet another mask to hide the emerging truth of what they have done to themselves and everyone else. Feel-good, "We're All in This Together" rhetoric is a favorite shield for karma-avoiders.

Pray for Ukraine is a veiled ask to support the US's current proxy war with Russia. It took me way too long in my life to understand how leaders of countries quibble for resources and dress up their resource grabs with a thick frosting of ideology. Don't pray for Ukraine. Pray for yourself and for those whom you've asked their express permission to pray for. Pray to the spirit of the land where you are and give thanks compulsively. Pray to the real gods and don't broadcast your private conversations with them; we wouldn't understand anyway.

Comments

[kimberlysteele]

Totally what I was thinking! Methylethyl's reference to the Publican and the Pharisee is spot on as usual, though I have come to expect nothing less from her!