Information Age Prayer

Poe’s Law in action? You decide:

You know how God only listens to your prayers at certain times of the day?

In case you have a habit of waking up late, you can pay this website to deliver your prayer to God at the correct time of day.

He’ll also take care of you if you forget to pray. (Which I doubt anyone would if they care enough to give money to this site.)

Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.

We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.

At Information Age Prayer we think our service should be used like a prayer supplement…

They have prayers for all the major religions.

For example, the Lord’s Prayer only costs you $3.95/month!

And if you’re Muslim, there’s no better substitution in case you miss one of your five daily prayers.

My favorite is the prayer for children. You can see how important children are for people on this site:

If your children don’t pray anymore sign them up for one of the many daily prayers available for each religion…You may also want to have a prayer said for them directly. The prayer for children is the cheapest Information Age Prayer service at only $1.99 a Month.

And Hail Marys are only $0.07 each if you buy them in bulk! (How can you *not* afford to pray?)

Love the terms of service, too:

Your privacy is protected, all prayers are not audible outside of the Information Age Prayer location. While it is certain that God hears the prayers, we cannot guarantee that other supernatural beings do not overhear or otherwise obtain knowledge of them.

But don’t think this is a scam. They’re giving 10% of the money to charity! See? They must be good people.

Obviously, whether real or not, this is just designed to take advantage of (or expose) people who think prayer has some real effect on their lives. I’d love to know who’s behind it…

Miko

They may have teched it up, but this idea has been around since at least the Middle Ages.
Brian Westley

The web domain was registered March 3. The true owner is behind an anonymous proxy.
jen

It’s getting really hard to tell apart real religious websites from fake ones…

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/2009/march/christianspringbreak.html
schism

It’d be funny if the site was owned by Scientologists or Raelians or some such.
Richard Wade

Automated prayer is not new. The Tibetan Buddhists put written prayers into prayer wheels and spin them. Each rotation counts the same as saying the whole prayer verbally.
Indigo

Various religious people I know have hotly insisted, when prayer is criticised, that it’s not about treating God as a cosmic ATM or legalistically reciting a ritual – it’s about spiritual grounding, communion and oneness with God, and all that wonderful horseshit. And *everybody* knows that, and I must be some kind of freak to possibly think it could be otherwise.
Whether this is for real or not, at least it shows I’m not the only one.
Epistaxis

You know how God only listens to your prayers at certain times of the day?

This reminds me of Pascal Boyer’s “There is a God, but He exists only on Wednesdays.”
Richard Wade

So, God listens to prayers only at certain times of the day? I didn’t know that. What are his hours? Is he on Eastern Daylight Time, Pacific Daylight Time, or maybe Roman Time? I know he used to work six days a week, but lately he seems to have been on an extended vacation for the last two thousand years. Does he listen just once a day or maybe morning and afternoon sessions? Does he work after 5PM? That’s time-and-a-half for many unions, but he’s a Republican I’ve heard, so he probably doesn’t like unions.
MikeG

The Electric Monk is almost here!

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Douglas Adams Disk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Grimalkin

In the middle ages, rich people did something similar. When they died, they left money to a particular church with the idea that candles would be lighted in their name and prayers said for them by the monks (the idea being that it would get them out of purgatory all that much quicker).

I guess it just goes to show what time period these people’s minds are living in!
dwasifar

This seems like a good time to launch a service I thought of years ago.

Listen up, atheists! Are you tired of people praying for you? Yeah, I know, me too, isn’t it annoying? Well, here’s how the new service will work. Every day I’ll pray to God for all the atheists… EXCEPT YOU, if you pay me $12.95 a month, or a one-time payment of $500.00. Don’t delay, sign up now, and remove the annoyance of prayer (well, these prayers, anyway) from your life!

The great thing is that it doesn’t matter that I’m an atheist too; the prayers would be just as sincere as those computer generated ones. 🙂
JTorch

I wish I had thought of this.
Mike Caton

No dumber than a Tibetan prayer wheel, an earlier prosthetic prayer device. Hey, if God(s) don’t care that you supplement your worship with angular momentum, what are a few integrated circuits?

Let’s not lose site of the fact that discussing people talking to an invisible man, and the part we find strange is that they’re using a computer.
Shae

Now all you need is a robot to do your hail marys for you and confessions and whatever all those other rituals are, and you can go on your merry way sinning!
chatterbox

Man, that’s a brilliant business plan! Just set up a website with form submission and payment options and sit back. I wish I’d thought of it.
Ed

Your privacy is protected, all prayers are not audible outside of the Information Age Prayer location. While it is certain that God hears the prayers, we cannot guarantee that other supernatural beings do not overhear or otherwise obtain knowledge of them.

Hell no! I don’t want Allah to ovearhear my prayers to the FSM.

Seriously now, what a waste of time, effort, money, and technology *sigh*.
Brendan

Doesn’t automated prayer (and this in particular) assume that God is really dumb? If God values prayer for the value of the connection it offers, wouldn’t this be the same as getting a call from a rich executive?

[Brrinnng, God’s phone rings] Hello?

Please hold for Mr. Johnson
Vic

MikeG beat me to it. The Electric Monk was exactly what I was thinking. It will believe things they wouldn’t believe in Salt Lake City!
Lex Fear

No one’s calling Poe on this? Or is that passe now?