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CompuPrayer

Highspeed, electronic prayer, from your microchip to God's ear
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If prayer has any power, does it arise from the mind of the supplicant or from the prayer itself? Since some would have us believe that getting complete strangers to pray on our behalf has merit, that suggests to me that it's the prayer that counts.

If that's the case, then a computer program could whip up millions of prayers each day. Imagine, your own personal million monkeys beseeching the almighty to give you better abs, or a shot with the office receptionist. Take out ads in all the religious magazines. (We'd be non-demoninational, of course.) For $20 per month, the client could have time share on a speedy Intel server, getting upwards of 100,000 new prayers composed on their behalf, each and every minute.

At the end of the month, they'd receive a tasteful card, showing their prayer totals and a sample or two of the prayers uttered.

But you don't have to stop at prayers for yourself. It would make a novel gift for any newlywed couple, a grandmother confronting surgery or a cousin up for appeal.

The wealthier clients would even be able to buy their very own, dedicated server, channeling all the prayer power your 20GHz silicon can muster on their behalf.

The only problem I see with it is that, if I build it, I'll end up going straight to hell.

Jefficus, Jan 24 2006

Buddhist prayer wheels http://www.dharma-h...-prayer-wheels.html
Automating cosmic goodness, eh? eh? [luxlucet, Jan 24 2006]

Fax or email - now that's what I call a modern deity. http://www.aish.com...ote_in_the_Wall.asp
All praise to Google. [AbsintheWithoutLeave, Jan 24 2006]

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       Except that computers can't pray. You can make a computer send thousands of emails to god@heaven.com, or you could make it play a sound file of a prayer thousands of times, but computers cannot think (except for the HB computers, which have been so filled with random musings that they have developed minds and you can talk to them) so you could not harness computers to pray for you. But you could pay people to pray for you (which is, I think what used to/still happen in the Catholic Church - you would pay penance for the priest to pray for your soul.   

       So fishbone.
dbmag9, Jan 24 2006
  

       Here's another implementation: deliver the praying software as a screen saver so it kicks in whenever your machine is idle. Implement a prayer community using distributed/grid computing, like SETI or folding@home. Tally up VPUs (virtual prayer units). Create prayer teams & compete with one another.   

       While some do not accept the validity of an automatically-generated prayer, there are many who do: the buddhists. See the already-baked "Fu Lu Shou Xi Cai He Ai Mei Ji De Staples".
luxlucet, Jan 24 2006
  

       So, it's not true, as seen in _Bruce Almighty_, that God receives prayers as emails?
half, Jan 24 2006
  

       It used to be possible to fax prayers to God. The faxes would be folded and inserted into the Western Wall in Jerusalem. I'll try to find a link.
AbsintheWithoutLeave, Jan 24 2006
  
      
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