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Some people pray in the direction of Mecca. Others look inward or cast their eyes toward Heaven. But now through the miracle of modern technology, you need look no further than your computer screen. Yes, God's on the Internet and in His house there are many IP addresses. In an earlier article, I covered computerized prayer-for-pay services where the computer-literate among the devout needn't spend their valuable time composing or even saying prayers for themselves. Twitter, a world (and now Heaven) spanning network of online communities, is free and anyone can use it to broadcast their deepest, heart-felt petitions to God as long as they do it in 140 characters or less. That's the maximum allowable size of a "tweet", which is what messages posted on Twitter are called.One of the most popular ways to pray online is through prayer teams. This is based on the theory that, if one person praying for something is good, a lot of people praying for it is better. So if grandpa is sinking into Alzheimer's or Aunt Minnie's losing her hearing, all a person needs to do is tweet a prayer for them into their computer and hundreds or even thousands of other people will start praying for them too. These holy tag teams are formed the same way other Twitter communities are formed; by people agreeing to follow the tweets of individuals with similar interests. Here are some sample prayers that were broadcast today by Twitter prayer teams:
"for all of the victims of the typhoons pummeling Asia"
"yey deo gratias my wife's contract has been renewed for another year"
"For my cats..that they will be protected from any harm"
"For all those with anger mood disorders and the issues that go with them. May they find success with Mindfulness and prayer"
"For our dog Holly, and expenses being incurred to determine problem. Me to get a ministry position to provide for my family. Thank you."
"for the defeat of the national Hate Crimes Bill"
Something else that's popular on Twitter is the "prayer-feed." These are people or organizations that will happily send you prayers on demand. Since there are thousands of these in the marketplace, you can get prayers made to order: meditational, instructional, even imprecatory (ie: prayers that curse); and you can have them tweeted to you hourly, daily, weekly or whatever. It's similar to ordering a car from the manufacturer (2-door, 4-door, red, blue, air-conditioning, tape deck) only holier!
In case you think that tweeting prayers doesn't offer the kind of gravity you feel communique's to the divine deserve, you might be interested to know that there are high church officials who disagree. The Primate of All Ireland (leader of all Ireland's Catholics) is one such official. “Make someone the gift of a prayer through text, twitter or e-mail every day,” Cardinal Sean Brady said. “Such a sea of prayer is sure to strengthen our sense of solidarity with one another and remind those who receive them that others really do care.”
Others are embracing Twitter even more strongly. There's a group of Protestant bishops in Germany, who are working on a scheme to tweet the entire Bible in 140-letter segments!
Photo Credit:
1) First Church of Twitter (image from Inquisitr.com)
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Comments
Don't forget, TheAlmightyGod is on twitter and is one of my friends.
@THE_LORD I'm sorry, Forgive me, I didn't mean to do it. #sheep
@JHWH: OMG! :)
You can tweet your prayers to @almightygod
As I understand it (as an atheist), the feeling of "prayer" is to get in touch with the feelings from the God-spot in one's brain, i.e. awareness of the "spiritual sense organ." It's not clear how Twitter does this. That's going into sheer magical thinking. Oh, wait.
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