A new Meetup group called Praying for Startups sent me the following email: Are you involved in a startup? Are you a Christian? Meet fellow Christians from all walks of the entrepreneurial eco-sphere, as we share and pray for our teams and the startup community, both locally and abroad. I’d be interested to see some numbers on the correlation between prayer and startup success. I suspect there isn’t any. Also the relative efficacy of prayers to a Christian God vs. Allah, Buddha, Satan, Zeus and all other supernatural beings. Read more →
EppsNet Archive: God
A Picture of God
A little girl was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, “What are you drawing?” And the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” And the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will, in a minute.” — Ken Robinson Read more →
See You in Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Along with pleas for money, almost 100 percent of the cardboard signs I see being held by people on freeway off-ramps and the like include the phrase “God Bless You.” There seems to be a correlation between belief in God and begging for money on off-ramps. Notice that you never see Satanists begging for money. Why don’t they pray for the money? Maybe they did pray and God told them to make a cardboard sign? I tell my acolytes if they need money, learn to code. See you in Hell . . . Read more →
A Wing and a Prayer
I noticed walking to Starbucks this morning that my right knee was making a snapping noise every time I took a step. No pain, just a snapping noise. So I prayed to God to make the snapping noise stop — and it did! But then it started up again a few minutes later. 🙁 It turns out that the noise wasn’t coming from my right knee, it was coming from the right pocket of my sweatpants, where my house key was bouncing against my phone. Read more →
Mysterious Ways
And it came to pass after these things, that God tested Abraham and said unto him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Behold, here I am.” And He said, “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” — Genesis 22:1-2 ‘Schizophrenic’ nanny SMILES in Russian court after claiming ‘Allah ordered her’ to decapitate four-year-old girl and walk Moscow streets brandishing the child’s severed head – Daily Mail Online India: 400 men cut off their testicles to ‘get closer to God’ following advice from ‘guru’ – International Business Times God seems to enjoy the occasional game of Supernatural Simon Says: Cut off your testicles. Cut off your own fookin testicles, mate. God says cut off your testicles. Oh . . . Read more →
A New Use for Churches
Granting the existence of God, a house dedicated to Him naturally follows. He is all-important; it is fit that man should take some notice of Him. But why praise and flatter Him for His unspeakable cruelties? Why forget so supinely His failures to remedy the easily remediable? Why, indeed, devote the churches entirely to worship? Why not give them over, now and then, to justifiable indignation meetings? — H.L. Mencken Read more →
See You in Hell: San Bernardino Edition
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] It’s hard to believe in a God who meddles in people’s lives . . . "We are a city full of hopeful optimists, who are still here and who will stay here because we believe God has something… Posted by Los Angeles Times on Friday, December 4, 2015 God has something great planned for San Bernardino! Unfortunately his plan included murdering 14 people, but with that being said, he’s got something great up his sleeve for everyone who’s still alive! Oh the inhumanity! God works in mysterious ways and so do I. See you in Hell . . . Read more →
God: “I Gave Him a Sign”
I hope I don’t die some cartoonish death like skiing into a tree or being launched out of my car and flattened against a freeway sign. It’s funny when it happens to other people though. The only thing funnier would be if he’d left a spread-eagle person-shaped hole in the sign and then died when he hit a second sign. When reached for comment, God said, “I gave him a sign.” Read more →
The Tweet of God
I’m your dope-ass divinity Trollin’ with My trinity Droppin’ top tweets in your immediate vicinity Flingin’ fly phrases from the fringes of infinity. — God Read more →
Mysterious Ways
Whenever I see headlines like this I wonder why God couldn’t find an atheist family to drop a concrete slab on. The infant, whose shirt appears to say KING JESUS, was also killed. Read more →
I Don’t Much Care for Coincidences
I don’t much care for coincidences. There’s something spooky about them: you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan. I prefer to feel that things are chaotic, free-wheeling, permanently as well as temporarily crazy — to feel the certainty of human ignorance, brutality and folly. — Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot Read more →
See You in Hell, O Ye of Little Faith
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings from the underworld! I was catching up on Facebook this morning and saw that a woman is going in for brain surgery and her family and friends are asking for prayers for her recovery. Isn’t that overkill — prayer and brain surgery? Why not just pray for her recovery and if she doesn’t make it, you chalk it up to God’s will? Some “true believer” religions, e.g., the Christian Science church, do that. They believe more in prayer than in medicine. They decline medical care because they believe that God can heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons, etc. as he did in the Bible. These are the folks you hear about when they come up on criminal charges after refusing medical care for their seriously ill children and the… Read more →
It’s All Part of God’s Plan
Not Enough Information?
Bertrand Russell declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, “Sir, you did not give us enough information.” I would add to that, “All the same, Sir, I’m not persuaded that we did the best we could with the information we had. Toward the end there, anyway, we had tons of information.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage Read more →
Killed by Prayer
A woman on Facebook a couple of days ago asked everyone to pray for her seriously ill father. Today, he died. Go figure. Had he made a miraculous recovery, we would have said that prayer “worked” . . . but what does it mean when you pray for someone to live and he dies? I had a college professor . . . his exams were graded by a graduate assistant, but students had the option of appealing grades to the professor. That’s not unusual, but most professors will either raise the grade or leave it as is. This guy, however, would either raise the grade, leave it as is or lower it. Risky! Maybe God operates on the same principle. When you put someone’s fate in his hands, he retains the option of saying “toodle-oo.” Read more →
I have only ever made one prayer to God, a very short one: “Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it. — Voltaire
He Moves in Mysterious Ways
There’s a story on the TV news about a fire that burned down a local preschool, owned by the same family for 44 years. Fire investigators suspect arson. The owner is being interviewed. “The Lord will get us through,” she says. “I’m surprised the Lord let someone burn the place down to begin with,” I say to my wife. “You can’t look at it that way.” “I can’t?” “It’s just something that happened and the Lord will get them through it.” “I don’t see how the Lord can be given credit for anything that happens as long as it’s good, but when something bad happens, well, it’s just a random incident that he couldn’t do anything about. Where’s the accountability? Is the Lord making things happen in your life or isn’t he? Well, the preschool burned down, that was regrettable. The Lord must have looked away for a moment. But… Read more →
We’re Supporting Tolerance and Inclusion by Telling People to Shut the Hell Up
“Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson has been put on an indefinite hiatus from filming the smash hit A&E reality series following inflammatory remarks about gay people he made in an interview with GQ magazine. . . . In the interview, which appears in the January issue of GQ, Robertson, founder of the Duck Commander family business of duck calls, referred to gay people as “homosexual offenders” who would not “inherit the Kingdom of God.” He also said a woman’s vagina was “more desirable” than a man’s anus. — GLAAD slams ‘Duck Dynasty’ star Phil Robertson for ‘vile’ remarks – latimes.com LET’S ENCOURAGE TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY BY MAKING THIS GUY SHUT THE HELL UP! Here’s Robertson’s full quote on “homosexual offenders”: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God.… Read more →
James Gandolfini Will See You in Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] James Gandolfini is in Hell now. He says hi, and thanks for all the kind words. I’ve been at this gig a long time now but it still amazes me the hyperbole that surrounds the death of actors. Every one of them who dies is one of the great thespians of all time, if you buy into the post-mortem hype. Most lines of work have objective standards. When Joe Shlabotnik bites the dust, you can’t eulogize him as one of the great ballplayers of all time. But acting is something anyone can do well. You learn the script, say your lines and pick up your check. “He died too soon,” people say. When was he supposed to die? Like we can’t find another fat Italian guy to learn a script, say his lines and pick up… Read more →
How Effective is Prayer as a Tornado Survival Tactic?
Take that, liberal heathen! She’s not “supposed” to pray in a school but she did it anyway! And that’s why she’s alive today! It would be useful to know for the purpose of assessing the value of prayer as a tornado survival tactic, how many of the 24 people who didn’t survive the Oklahoma tornado were praying at the moment of their death. Of the 10 children who were killed, were any of them praying? Maybe God said to himself, “Okay, change of plans. I was going to hit Rhonda Crosswhite with this tornado, but since she’s praying out loud in a school, I’ll redirect it into those 10 kids.” Read more →