Paul Harvey's "On Air Prayer"

[spirithorse21]

My mom sent this to me the other day. I think it has a good point, even if we shouldn't live under a theocracy. We have scewed our values quite a bit ...

"Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to
seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, 'Woe to those who
call evil good,' but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our
spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor
and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.
We have killed our unborn and called it choice.

"We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to
discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused
power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor's possessions
and called it ambition. We have polluted the air with profanity and
pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the
time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search
us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set
us free Amen!"

Commentator Paul Harvey aired this prayer on his radio program, "The Rest
of the Story," and received a larger response to this program than any
other he has ever aired. With the Lord's help, may this prayer sweep over
our nation and wholeheartedly become our desire so that we again can be
called "one nation under God." If possible, please pass this prayer on to
your friends.

"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for everything."

Comments

[hythlae.livejournal.com]

What horrifies me are a few parts of that prayer like the parts about welfare and abortion. Only a few people on Welfare abuse it: most are not lazy, most are uneducated and without any power in the world to improve their lives. Some definitely need to be on mandatory birth control, it's true, but only people who have always had money could call those on Welfare "laziness". That's horrific to me, this clinging to the false belief that pure hard work can improve your class condition. There are so many other factors. There are so many hard workers out there who are on welfare or should be but don't quite qualify. Did you know that the poverty level for a 4 member family was only $17,000 four years ago? That's almost poverty level for a single adult!

Most of the women who choose abortion do it BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO CHOICE. They have no education, no money, no family or spouse to support them. They live in a society where poor people are neglected as 'lazy', where the government offers so little support to working mothers that they earn more by being on Welfare than they do by working jobs that their high school education (or less) can earn them.

I could write a ten page essay poking holes every which way in that prayer. It's full of fear and judgement. The world needs less of those, not more. Christians should not cling to defining the world in terms of "sin" or "good", the idea that we serve anyone but each other is appalling. It's like forever being in school to fear, to god, and never graduating to live by our own responsibilities and ideas. Christians live in fear of what it says in the Bible when they should assess their decisions by how they affect each other, not some abstract moralizing deity who so conveniently remains completely invisible. They want to believe that the Bible is God's word because they're in desperate need of guidance that they don't know how to find for themselves.

Let's all live in guilt like that preacher would have us do, and never accomplish anything out of worship to the past. We haven't screwed up our values: they're always improving. The concept that our society is much worse than ever before is propogated by those who know nothing about history. Just 150 years ago, it was legal to beat a woman with a rod the size of a man's thumb. Just 50 years ago, black people couldn't sit in the front of a bus. It's people who listen to those preachers, who go to church, who want to regress us out of an ignorant and romanticized fantasy that the past was better. They should watch some old movies and see how EVERYONE in every age has looked back on 'the good old days'.

One nation under God? God bless America?
What about God bless the world? What about one nation under Peace?
They are so incredibly selfish.

[misslynn.livejournal.com]

well said, amy.

[snugimp.livejournal.com]

yes, the prayer is judgemental, but so really is your response. You have an idea that you are right, and that this prayer is wrong. The prayer did not make me think that those things mentioned were wrong, but made me thing about those institutions values and shortcomings. Abortion, welfare, politics, everything mentioned has its flaws as well as its value. To me, the prayer made me think about that, not the particular values mentioned being wrong.

[hythlae.livejournal.com]

that's the sly and dangerous thing about religion: politics embedded in thousands of years of ritual and liturgy, subtly power plays and insinuations hidden in innocuous-sounding prayers and texts.

[snugimp.livejournal.com]

literture is just as guilty, poetry, even the oral stuff that was likely lost to the world is guilty of power plays and insinuation. given enough time and effort, subtle powers can be embedded even in nursery rhymes......