Reply #38: The difference is (are you serious?) between calling upon an omnipotent deity that you believe in...

[Hekate]

... and making a casual, if crass, joke.

It is the difference between saying in disgust, "Oh, drop dead" or "Dammit!" and getting down on your knees and praying with all your might: "Lord God of Hosts, you know I am a righteous person and try to do Your Will. (Named Person) is evil and breaks Your Commandments by upholding the murder of countless babies in the name of a woman's so-called right to choose. End this holocaust, I beseech Thee! Cause (Named Person) to die a painful and horrible death! Allow some righteous man to rise up to stop him in his tracks! Let his widow and children weep! Send him to rot in the flames of Hell for all eternity! In most merciful Jesus' name we pray, Amen."

THAT is an imprecatory prayer, and there are some examples in Psalms, which are now being dusted off by RWers to recite from the pulpit and in prayer circles in homes. Nice, huh? Unlike DUers, they really mean it.

If you still don't see the difference -- well, I am tempted to say "Oh, drop dead," but I hope you understand that it's a moment's irritation and I don't mean it literally. For the real thing, read below.

Hekate

http://www.religionnews.com/index.php?/rnstext/does_god_answer_prayers_to_do_someone_ill1/

Does God answer prayers to do someone ill?

Ever since Pastor Wiley Drake declared not once, but three times, on national radio that he was praying for the death of President Obama, he has been trying to clarify. Yes, he really does want God to smite Obama. No, it’s not a partisan prayer. Yes, it’s in the Bible, he says, and no, he wasn’t kidding. He’s deadly serious. The former second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention said he’s merely practicing the age-old art of “imprecatory prayer”—a theological term for praying that bad things happen to bad people.

Imprecatory prayer can turn a verse into curse through reciting Scripture aimed at one’s foes. Rather than asking for, say, healing or a win in the big game, these prayers request that God smite one’s enemies with—among other things—plagues, death and eternal damnation. >snip<

Derided by some as a bad Judeo-Christian imitation of voodoo, the literal practice of imprecatory prayer has some newfound fans. Gordon Klingenschmitt, a former U.S. Navy chaplain, posted an online prayer on April 25 that targeted his old foes, the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State; and Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Klingenschmitt asked God “in Jesus’ name” to “cut off their descendents” and “replace them with Godly people.” The reason? Lynn and Weinstein had chided Klingenschmitt for not identifying himself as a former, not current, naval chaplain on his Web site. Klingenschmitt was discharged in 2007 for disobeying a superior and wearing his uniform at political demonstrations.

Weinstein, who is Jewish, sees imprecatory prayers as hate speech. >snip<

And while Lynn has been targeted before with prayers to do him ill, he nonetheless worries that religious figures who employ prayer as a weapon might inadvertently be condoning, or perhaps inciting, worse behavior. “With the climate in this country, these prayers are an invitation to violence,” said Lynn, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. “They provide moral legitimacy to extreme hatred.”

Yet God sometimes works in unusual ways, Drake and others say. His confession to praying against Obama came after Kansas abortionist George Tiller was gunned down in church. That killing, Drake said, was an answer to his prayers. <snip> “I never wish evil upon my enemies,” Klingenschmitt said, “but the justice of God is not evil.” >snip<

Weinstein has had graffiti sprayed on his house, dead animals left on his doorstep, and bullets shot through his windows. A little prayer, he said, doesn’t bother him. “They can keep doing it every hour of every day,” Weinstein said, “but it is hurtful, wrong, damaging, un-American, un-Jewish, un-Christian and, at the end of the day, un-human to be praying for harm and death.” >end<