An Actual Prayer Calculator February 13, 2010

An Actual Prayer Calculator

By Guest Contributor
February 13, 2010

I asked and Brielle delivered!

Here’s an actual prayer calculator:

Type in the number of hours per day you prayed and how many years you were religious, and it’ll let you know how many hours were spent on your unheard thoughts 🙂

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What Are Your Thoughts?leave a comment
  • Stan

    1686.3…oh my…

  • Zaz

    10,220? I’m so glad to call myself reformed..

  • Irony is the Google Ad for OurPrayer.org right above this article. 😀

  • I’m a lifelong atheist, so I can’t vouch for this personally, but I think I read somewhere that prayer is actually beneficial. It helps you relax and makes it easier for you to go from “pissed-off” to “at peace” a lot quicker reducing stress levels which is generally good for you.

    I’ve spent some time researching meditation so that I could reap some of these benefits, but I have not made much progress because I really don’t have much motivation or patience to sit still thinking about nothing for longer than a minute or two.

  • christopher

    ok 10950
    now that is sad and depressing
    however there was the self delusional aspect to consider.
    ok now i’m depressed

  • So, some ideas – is there like a min amount of time that people will spend on Sundays in church regardless? Something like 2 hours? Tweaking of the code to make it be more… ‘accurate’ for lack of a better word.

  • 15,184, and that’s a low-end conservative calculation…I had to go to both a mosque and a Catholic Church when I was a kid…sucked big time.

  • You know…there’s the time spent driving to and from Church as well. Also, many folks tithe, which means that the time they spend working to make the money to pay those tithes is also time wasted on religion. Then there’s Wednesday night Bible study…
    Wow…

  • Of course the use case led me to equivalence partitioning and so far for the first edge case, 0 hours spent, 0 years, no answer was supplied; I’ll have to file a Low defect in bugzilla on this as I was expecting a whole, real integer, which includes 0.
    BTW, your code is solid and gave my atheist SO a laugh, said she, “Any time spent praying expecting a result is wasted, right?”.
    FB notstradamus

  • Stephen

    Total time spent/wasted on prayer: 3,468 Hours or 144 Days

  • Kyle

    I don’t want to know. I already feel like I’m wasting my life. No good looking back to see how much of it I spent talking to my imaginary friend.

  • Stan

    Man, my meager 1000 seems tiny compared to you guys. Guess turning atheist young and not praying often helped.

  • Never prayed, never been religious. Big fat zero wasted hours in prayer. I have other things to waste my time on instead.

  • Incidentally it is International Day of Prayer for Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome today. There are also Autism therapies and plenty of good deeds that need funding. Genuine practical help and funding for research is much better than wasting time of prayer and magical thinking.

  • David Gregory

    Why “spent / wasted”? Why not be honest and just say “wasted”?

  • I’m in line with hoverfrog.

    BTW, our boy scout troop is celebrating “scout Sunday” today. They want all the scouts lined up in class A uniform at church for worship service. We are sitting this one out. No compulsorily church attendance for us.

  • JulietEcho

    Fifty-one days. And that was my conservative estimate. Ouch! All the books I could have read!

    I don’t consider it totally wasted, because a lot of prayer involves introspection. Even if my introspection was targeted poorly (trying to figure out if I was living for God, for example), I still think it’s a useful skill to hone.

  • muggle

    “12,593 Hours or 525 Days”

    But I’ve no idea how accurate that is. It’d be too hard to remember so I just threw in 1.5 hours a day times 23 when I left religion off for good.

    I didn’t count the whole time I spent in church or synagogue, only the times spent praying. You don’t pray through the whole service.

    Hmm, I didn’t count singing hymns and I guess you could count that. Man, if you do that really ups the ante to twice that easily. More really. I sang songs of praise all the time. I once wrote a list of rock songs that praise god for my mother trying to convince her it wasn’t evil. LOL. I used to love belting out Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken”. I had no idea.

    Yikes. 1.4 to over 2.8 years of my life that I can’t get back!

    Besides bed time prayers and ritual prayers there were all those 2 minutes pleas to god that fell on deaf ears. Also, I was praying as long as I can remember which is age 4. I really don’t know if I prayed before then but figure I must have or I’d remember starting. Got to figure I couldn’t have until age one at the earliest so that already throws this off.

    I concur with Juliet though. It wasn’t all wasted. Not just introspection but steeling my nerves so I could face that job interview or not panic at that test I’d studied so hard for. To quell the fear when my mother ran around the house shrieking “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” because she was pissed that she caught me still listening to that devil’s music again.

    Really personal prayer does have some psychological uses…

  • Richard P

    Yeah now I know I wasted three years of my life. There are somethings better left unknown.

    I think I will go do something useful…

    On a side note..

    I came to an accident on the highway yesterday. A girl, about 20yrs old, coming around a corner, lost control of her car and went flying over a 30 – 40 ft bank. The car rolled at least once end over end. Landed at the bottom laying against a bunch of trees on the drivers side door.
    I arrived about 30 seconds after it happened. A guy ahead of us saw her go over the bank. When I got to the bank, the girl was just climbing out of the car. Not a scratch on her. We climbed down to help her.
    It was so wonderful. One person said. “good thing you had your seat belt on. Another person said.” That’s a well built car. The driver said, “I think my car saved my life today.”

    It was so great to hear people give credit where credit is do. Not one person said anything about a miracle, or to thank god, or anything like that, not even a “boy, were you lucky.”
    Yet, it is was absolutely amazing she was not dead.

    I love where I live. It gives me hope in our future.

  • BoomerChick

    I have only pretended to pray (saying grace before a meal) so as not to be disrespectful of other peoples’ beliefs.
    I’m assuming that doesn’t count especially since I spent that time deciding which dish looked the tastiest. Obviously not a waste of time.

  • 5,475 hours for me, and that’s an average estimate; some days I spent many more hours praying, and some days a lot less.

    And, Scott, I can speak from personal experience that praying is nothing like meditating–not for me, anyway. Prayers were full of aching and feeling worthless and begging; nothing helpful, there.

  • Derek

    “And, Scott, I can speak from personal experience that praying is nothing like meditating–not for me, anyway. Prayers were full of aching and feeling worthless and begging; nothing helpful, there.”

    The “not for me, anyway.” is a fairly important part of that statement. Personally, I can’t recall ever aching, feeling worthless, or begging. It does, however, relax me in much the same way meditation does.

    *shrug*

    Just part of my belief system I suppose.

    *braces for impact*

    PS The calculator is pretty dang funny though.

    Cheers and Excelsior!

  • Mikko

    0 hrs for me 🙂