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I'm annoyed when someone tells me that they will be "praying for me" for some reason or another. The thing is, these are people being nice to me, so I'm not about to turn on them and tell them that I don't think that their prayers are anything more than a waste of their time. Consequently, I thank them.
It always gets under my skin when I hear - or read- someone proclaim
" Everything happens for a reason, through God".
Events have causes, for sure, but everything does NOT happen for some purposeful, deity-directed reason.
What expression annoys you when you hear it and why? Do you ever respond to the contrary?
I also find that one incredibly frustrating. I'm usually pretty live-let-live about this stuff, but given that my mother died of an untimely illness, I get personally offended when I hear people say it. This goes beyond generic, well-intentioned sayings like "God bless you" and "God be with you" to mindless drivel that makes light of personal tragedies by trying to place them in some grand, benevolent creationist scheme, and if you dare question it, you're some combination of selfish, short-sighted, and stupid.
It's been a looooong time since I attended a church service where someone from the evangelical side of things officiated, so last night as I was watching the memorial service broadcast from Newtown, CT, I was particularly struck by this prayer phrase which is not only particularly hackneyed but also both meaningless and redundant: "we ask you [god] to please be with them in a special way". If god were with you in a special way, would it somehow be different from him just plain being with you? I guess the thought is, "be with them more than usual" which is particularly dispiriting to me ... in other words god is normally only with us in a half-hearted, slap-dash manner such that twenty kids can get blown to bits with assault rifles along with dedicated school personnel, and then we have to ask god to really focus and do his job to somehow comfort all these shattered survivors and at least pretend that he's present and caring. At best it evokes a senile, highly distractible god; at worst; it evokes an indifferent, uninterested god who can't even do a good job of pretending to care.
the blessings, the praying for things, the god will take care of things, thanking the god for everything at every chance, blaming devils for bad things people do, praising the lord, thanking Jesus,...the list goes on... it's only irking me when it's constant and around this time of year it seems to be worse with thanksgiving and Christmas..and the end of the world coming, that may have something to do with it!
I was watching the news the other day and some lowlife drug dealer with a rap sheet probably forty-five pages long was shot to death in some drug-deal gone bad. The news was interviewing the mother who kept saying "He's in Jesus' hands now! The Lord came and took my son away and now he's with Jesus."
Ummm... Sure he is...
The other thing that drives me nuts is when people assign the most trivial, statistically probable events to the "grace of God" but ignore the tragic events as "God's will."
For example:
"I saw this tornado coming straight through the trailer park destroying everything in sight and killing everyone it came near. Then, by the grace of God, the tornado just vanished right before it got to my trailer."
So, nevermind that the entire population of your trailer park just died by some highly probable natural disaster, it was absolutely the "Grace of God" that folded this perfectly explainable phenomena back into the clouds and saved your meth-riddled body from being killed.
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