My daughter came home from church and said she would pray for me to find god, which is absolutely offensive so i will run with prayers being “wrong” to offer to a non believer
My uncle died a month ago. We were very close; he was like a father to me. I was feeling down at work, and someone said to me, “Sorry for your loss. I will pray for you.”
I’m not religious. But I couldn’t imagine being bothered by what he said. Why should I feel offended for something he is going to do in private? It doesn’t tax or burden me in any way.
It depends. I’m an atheist, too. Is a religious person offers to pay for me, as an expression of their concern and care for me and my condition, I’m usually appreciative. When people told me my mother was “in a better place” i just found it weird and a little uncomfortable, but i didn’t take offense.
But i think those kinds of comments should come from personal friends, and should come from the same kind of relationship where you might offer someone a hug. And like a hug, it can be unpleasant in the wrong context.
I think the DEI guidelines are meant to tell HR people not to tell employees that they’ll pray for them, not to stop one employee to another. I don’t have a working or personal relationship with my HR rep (in fact, I don’t even know who my HR rep is right now), and it would seem inappropriate for them to say that to me if I went to them with some problem.
Also, the relationship between HR and regular employees really has to stay completely professional – HR is there to deliver good news and bad, have good conversations and really terrible, awkward conversations. Praying for someone breaches that professional tone. It would be like my doctor telling me she would pray for me.
You know, if a tornado destroyed my home and I went to HR and asked for time off to get my life together, it would be really weird if the HR person said, “no, we can’t give you time off, but I’ll pray for you.”
This is all different from the relationship I have with non-HR employees, especially the ones I work with every day.
At least, that’s the impression I got from:
(I also think it’s funny that DEI is a form of the word God in Latin)
“I’ll pray for you” is just the same as wishing someone good luck. Shrug
Religious coworkers can continue to be religious, and need not hide the fact that they are religious from others. What they are instructed to do here is to avoid bringing their coworkers into their personal religious rituals. “I’ll pray for you” involves two people, “I” and “you”. You don’t need their permission to say a prayer, you don’t need to inform your coworker that a prayer will be made, just say your prayer and go.
I actually work with more Muslims than I ever expected to, and none of them have offered to pray for me, probably because personal disasters rarely come up in conversation.
If the “I’ll pray for you” and “Have a blessed day” cohort weren’t a superset of the same people who become viscerally ill hearing “Happy Holidays,” I might be unmoved by the topic.
But I maintain that secular America has been on defense for years/decades/generations, and that what we have essentially normalized with time and ubiquity … isn’t inherently normal and shouldn’t have been normalized to begin with.
I tend to love this line from Deepak Chopra:
God’s on everybody’s side. I think in many ways religion and nationalism are the two scourges of humanity.
And find many of the superficially benign niceties to be, in aggregate, corrosive.
When “we” talk of a Texas HS football coach requiring a prayer circle, we often ask how the community would react if the prayers were from the Quran.
I’ll address the OP by asking how “May the Flying Spaghetti Monster grant you peace during this difficult time” would be received.
Yes, it’s very low on the list of things about which I care, but there are more than a few items on that hypothetical list that properly belong in a single category.
The little things … add up.
I’d always rather be excluded for being inclusive than to be included for being exclusive. There are too many places where the superficially benign shibboleths have deeper meaning and deleterious consequences for the out-group.
Here are some points I’ve thought of (some of which may have already been made):
- Praying for someone and saying you’ll pray for someone are two different things. It’s entirely possible to do one without the other. The admonition here isn’t against praying but against saying so.
- Many “things of a religious nature” that people say are matters of belief rather than knowledge, and are thus problematic when proclaimed to people who don’t share those beliefs. But this does not apply to “I’ll pray for you” or “You’ll be in my prayers”: presumably, the person saying so knows for a fact whether this is true.
- This thread provides evidence, if any is needed, that different people have different responses to “I’ll pray for you”: that it annoys some people (for whatever reason), is welcomed by others, and for still others, it depends. That’s a good argument against saying something like that to someone, especially someone in distress, unless you have a pretty good idea how they’ll feel about it.
- Saying “You’ll be in my prayers” may feel like an invasion of privacy. You’re saying “I’ll be discussing your situation with a third party” (i.e. God—and maybe also fellow human beings if one is in the habit of sharing prayers with others).
I want to amend my post a little. It really doesn’t bother me when people politely say “you’re in my prayers” or the like. It is usually intended as a nice thing to say and in terms of losing someone, it is hard to find something to say quite often. Especially if you only casually know them.
I am actually more annoyed when someone tells me “God bless you!” after I sneeze. It’s so irrational. And it puts me in a damned-if-I-do, damned-if-I-don’t situation: if I don’t respond with “Thank you,” they will think I’m rude, but if I respond with “Thank you,” I am being disingenuous.
“Oh, believe me, He does.”
That doesn’t improve my understanding at all. I get how it can be annoying when someone who knows the two of you have disparate values and purposely disregards your feelings on the subject, but in ordinary human discourse the presumption should be that it’s a polite gesture without any subtext. The times that someone will say such things are not the times to argue over who has the best approach to religion.
I’d be happy to hear either of those things if offered sincerely during a time of hardship or loss for me.
There’s also the issue of lazily expecting everyone to share your personal spiritual beliefs. There’s an underlying assumption that of course you’re a Christian in our society, which would offend a whole lot of people who aren’t Christian.
How would Christians feel about someone saying, “I’ll sacrifice to Baal for you” in such a situation?
I agree and I’m really not religious, not at all, I can be harshly non-religious at times.
But it’s part of who they are, and if they want to ask their favorite invisible friend to make my life better, good for them. As long as they don’t ask me to pray with them.
BTW, this happened to me about a week ago and I just thanked the woman. And I don’t even think she’s incredibly religious, for some people it’s just a response to hearing someone else’s bad news.
I feel phrases like that are best avoided. There are plenty of ways to show empathy with out bringing religion into it.
My Christian grandmother once told me: “polite Christians don’t announce that they’re going to pray for someone. They do that at church or in the privacy of their own homes”.
Granted she was referring to her circle of friends who were always talking about their Church or God when she wants to talk about something else apparently.
LOL
I’m not much of a Christian these days but I’d feel the same as if someone said “I’ll sacrifice a dove at Temple for you”. I’d rather they didn’t. But if they want to offer prayers to whoever/whatever without killing some critters, that’d be nice.
Now, if their prayers actually did help, then please keep going!
Well, that’s another problem with it, in the context of modern America. Far too many self-identified “Christians” have weaponized their faith, such that a lot of expressions like this aren’t “ordinary human discourse”.
When you’ve heard “I’ll pray for you!” shouted over a megaphone at an abortion clinic or a Drag Queen Story Time, it’s a bit harder to hear it as an honest expression of concern at other times.