I've been on hiatus for quite a while now. We've secured an apartment, but I've spent the last six weeks homeless. I didn't get nothing out of it, though; I definitely got a bird's eye view into the religious life and how much the homeless rely on God to get through the day. I will explain later why I felt utterly offended hearing just how much they did.
So for those of you who don't know, I live near the Detroit area. I live in Warren about a golf ball's whack from the ghetto. Being homeless in this area was quite an experience, after my fiance lost his job and we lost our home, it took us a while to recover again. In the meantime, we spent four weeks in an emergency rotating shelter program where we stayed at respective churches for a week at a time. The MCREST program (Macomb County Rotating Emergency Shelter Team) allows those in need to get three square meals a day and a warm place to sleep for thirty days while they search for work and housing. It's a wonderful program, as long as you can keep your mouth shut about being an Atheist.
So at the second to last church, I sat at a 'prayer circle' every day to support a friend of mine who believes in God, who is going through a hard time in her life. I wasn't opposed to it because I can't be brainwashed, so it was just silly to me to hear the things I was hearing. Every evening at 9 PM, they would light a candle and take out sheets of paper with prayers and sermon excerpts and music on them and play the same song every day at the beginning. It wasn't even a moving song. The themes were sometimes practical like 'hope', but rarely, for they usually had nothing to do with being homeless, rather than being religious-- usually the theme was something like 'preparing for the coming of God and his Kingdom', et cetera, et cetera, the same old dull horse crap.
So everyone that shared stories there talked about how God had helped them get through the day that day. The only thought in my head was 'How are you so sure it was God? Why can't you just credit yourself with having made it through the day because you're capable of doing it, without divine help?' Why is God SO infallible? Of course I understand that if he did exist, it would be beyond my comprehension, that he would allow people to be homeless and suffer for a greater purpose that humans wouldn't understand. I never use 'Well suffering exists,' as a justification as to why God does not exist. That may be my Taoist view that evil and suffering are as necessary as 'good' and pleasure.
But they constantly asked me about who I wanted pray for, and then would interject they'd pray for me and my daughter, and babble about how 'prayer always helps', how it obviously works. The head of the prayer circle offered her story: how she 'prayed vigorously for three months for something to happen that she wanted to happen, and then it did, so the prayer obviously worked'. This follows the rule that if God's answers are only 'Yes, No, and Wait', and you never know which until you get or don't get what you want, then God is always right because there's no way that prayer can be proven to not work if 'wait' is an option.
Except that they pretty much did disprove prayer by testing it on sick patients, for which it had NO affect on any of them.
Anyway, I realized during those six weeks how absolutely different organizations like the Alano club (I'm not an alcoholic, but it was a warm place to stay while I was homeless), or homeless agencies and churches (if you're there for a secular, non-religious reason like shelter) assume that you believe in God without a blink toward the idea you may not. I was never swamped by more religious babble in my life.
The ultimate reason I was bothered by the message of the prayer circle was the repetition of the idea that 'We must rely completely on God. He will always be there for us, he will always get us out of the darkness. We must put ourselves in his hands and let him make our choices. . .' like we're sickly disabled people who can't rely on themselves, and yet all of the people sitting there were homeless.
I get utterly offended at this sort of helpless mentality.
What do you think about those in extremely impoverished or sickly states relying on God so wholly?
