Believing in divine intervention of any kind takes incredible cognitive dissonance. God is supposedly all-powerful, yet is not powerful enough to prevent mass homicides... but he will selectively save certain individuals during or after those homicides... based on no criteria that can be discerned by mere mortals. It seems to be a contest between the devil and god, in which the devil tempts us to go around killing people, and god apparently can't talk us into not killing people.

I feel truly sorry for believers who pray and worship yet nevertheless see a friend or loved one die tragically. There must be a sense of wondering why their loved one wasn't worthy of a miracle, while others were.

It's a difficult balancing act to get the right balance of sympathy and rejection of the BS. On the whole it is probably best to say as little as possible. You are right in your feelings, but it's sometimes best to say as little as possible.

I get it perfectly, why can't they (the believers)? Seems like either it's them or us. But we have logic on our side and they have god.

I agree it's a logical failing

My brother-in-law was a marine, one of the sixteen killed in the C-130 accident over Mississippi. Out of the blue my sister started getting mail from people she didn't even know telling her about Jesus and how she needed to pray and giver her life over to him so that she could live forever. It was disgusting and gut-wrenching, and it pissed me off to now end.

And when we let our friends know, mostly through social media, many of our Christian friends responded by saying, without any sense of irony at all, "We're praying for your protection..." My sister and I both talked about it wondering how they didn't get that the reason all this happened was that we "weren't" protected in the first place. How could they no know that?

If we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a prudent balance takes wisdom. -Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Thousands of years of prayer, yet all the "bad" things continue to happen. Either god does not care or she has a bad case of selective listening. Well, in her defense, she did waste a miracle on me and helped me find my keys the other day.