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MEALTIME PRAYERS. Nothing irks me more than the traditional mealtime prayer. In my area you find Evangelical Baptists and Pentecostals that pray ridiculous nonsense before they can eat their food. There is no thanking a farmer and it goes something like this:

"Father we thank you for this food and ask that you use it for the nourishment of our bodies," etc., etc. Put in all the other flowery stuff they say, but we need to think rationally. God does not use the food you eat for the nourishment of your body. Your body uses the food you eat for nourishment. That's it, plain and simple. Now let's put this prayer in perspective.

Refrigeration as we know it is fairly new to mankind. I used to work in HVAC and many parts of the world even today do not have refrigeration. In some areas you might keep food for 3 days if you keep a lid on it and keep it in a cool place. It gets worse if you imagine that you are going backward in time 2000 years and you are hungry and find some food you could eat. Imagine as well that you are religious and thankful so you might pray over this food. Only now does that ridiculous prayer of god using the food for the nourishment of your body make sense.

The many variants of the common mealtime prayer are a carryover from earlier times.

DenoPenno 9 Aug 12
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8 comments

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2

What bothers me is that it is people thanking their god for providing them with food while ignoring all the millions of people this god didn't provide with food.

This god has it made, if they have enough food "thank you god." If they don't it's due to human failings.

And, this holds true with thanking this god for anything.

Absolute rubbish!

5

In grad school, an evangelical, for reasons unknown, set his sights on converting me. About every other day in the dining hall he would bring up some religious topic and want to debate it (which would have been fine if his idea of debate wasn't "I'm right and let me explain how" ).

One evening, sitting down to dinner, he bowed his head over his plate. I did the same. He was delighted. "You're saying Grace?!" he asked.
"I'm thanking the chicken," I explained. "It gave its life, so that I may live."

Needless to say, the converting attempts screeched to a halt.

1

Agreed.

P.S.
Whenever the subject of "the greatest invention of modern humanity" comes around, I always answer "refrigeration".

5

Prayer of any kind, for any reason, to any deity, is just wishful thinking.

0

I like the dinner prayer that Jimmy Stewart said in the movie Shenandoah.

The prayer went like this: Lord, we cleared this land. We plowed it, sowed it, and harvest it. We cook the harvest. It wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be eating it if we hadn't done it all ourselves.

0

Here is Seth Andrews on YouTube -- 'Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot'.
At the 4:50 point he talks about the meal blessing. Ha, ha, sob.

1

I like to say, "Pray into your right hand, and shit into your left hand. Which one fills up the fastest?"

1

Some things will never change.

But unfortunately they are almost always bad.

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