Wiley S. Drake, a Buena Park pastor and a former national leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, called on his followers to pray for the deaths of two leaders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The request was in response to the liberal group’s urging the IRS on Tuesday to investigate Drake’s church’s nonprofit status because Drake endorsed former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for president on church letterhead and during a church-affiliated Internet radio show.
Drake said Wednesday he was "simply doing what God told me to do" by targeting Americans United officials Joe Conn and Jeremy Leaming, whom he calls the "enemies of God."
"God says to pray imprecatory prayer against people who attack God’s church," he said. "The Bible says that if anybody attacks God’s people, David said this is what will happen to them. . . . Children will become orphans and wives will become widows."
Imprecatory prayers are alternately defined as praying for someone’s misfortune, or an appeal to God for justice.
"Let his days be few; and let another take his office," the prayer reads. "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."
This does not bother me (provided nobody does anything physical to hasten the demise of these critics) but a lot of secularists are getting hysterical about it.
Why should any rational person care that people pray for their demise?
I suspect that most of my readers don’t believe prayer works.
As for me, I believe God answers prayer. It’s just that his answer is always no.
I couldn’t care less if people prayed for me (or others) to die. Many Christians believe that non-Christians such as myself are headed for Hell. Big deal.
I would like all enemies of the United States and Israel to die. I would like all people who are doing more harm than good with their lives to die. I pray that happens.
Luke forgets to mention the fact that this guy isn’t really a Christian at all. Jesus never called upon God to kill his enemies – just the opposite.
This Knott-siland preacher is actually more of a Jew like Luke – hence the similarity in outlook. It is in the Old Testament that you find Biblical characters asking God to strike their enemies dead.
Most right-wing Christians are a cross between Old Testament passive-aggressiveness and Roman imperialism, a magical leap-frog over Jesus himself.
True, one critic that moderate maintream christiams always make to right wing evangelicals is that in many ways they put more atention in the Old Testament, Paul’s letters and in the Book of Revelations that in the Gospels and what Jesus actually said. If you go to their cults as I have done for antrophological reasons, Jesus is like a magic wish giver, but the Sermon of the mountain and His teachings will never be discussed at all. They mostly preach on Old Testament and Paulian stuff.
I’m not a christian of any kind but if I ever got the Jesus bug in my mind I never will be a right wing evangelical for those reasons.
I know many people who after being opposed to this stuff, becomen so turned of Christianty that convert to Judaism (oh the irony), or become buddists or militant atheists.