Atheist prayer?

Last Saturday I commented on Praying in Pennsylvania – which was primarily about a Christian lawmaker’s prayer in the Pennsylvania State House. Atheists want to pray too! Who knew?

The Pennsylvania State Senate, operating under their own rules, which are different from the House, invited Deana Weaver, a member of the Dillsburg Area Free Thinkers,[i] to offer a “prayer” at the opening of the Pennsylvania Senate on March 20, 2019. It included:

“We pray that the one principle that this great experiment of American democracy has taught us is that we are so much better when we work together in a spirit of inclusion. And so we pray. We pray for this democracy of the people, by the people and for the people. We pray for our government to serve all people equally.”

Commenting on the “aggressive” prayer by Christian Stephanie Borowicz, Weaver said, “We live in strange times.” You got that right! What in the world is a “prayer” by an atheist? There is no such a thing! There is no God to pray to, no expectation of answered prayer, merely a hypocritical formality and a desire to be “included.” Prayer is the act of invoking or calling upon a deity, spirit, etc., for aid, protection, inspiration, or the like; supplication. Our society keeps redefining things into oblivion, so that an atheist may invoke a deity “for aid, protection, inspiration, or the like.” Ha! If the Pennsylvania Senate wants to give an atheist a forum to address its opening, so be it. However, let us be honest and not pretend it is prayer.

Weaver delivered her first invocation at the Pennsylvania Senate in April 2015. Mike Argento atrociously announced, “since the world did not come to an end and the Senate wasn’t swarmed by locusts or pelted with a shower of frogs or hurled into a lake of fire, she was able to make a return trip.” By that standard, I’m sure we will see Argento in the forefront of encouraging Borowicz’s return trip to pray at the Pennsylvania House. The way they cried and hollered, you would think they were worried about the world coming to an end because of Borowicz’s prayer. Maybe it was just the case of the “hit dog” instead.

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[i] This DAFT group has a strange way of educating people to the dangers of belief in a supernatural being. Their watchwords are supposed to be reason and science, yet a little fake prayer evidently doesn’t hurt either.