"Dear... uh... God,
Can i call you 'God', or should it be Mr. Almighty? Look, i'm pretty new at this, and it still seems like i'm just talking to myself here, but my theist friends have challenged me to give this a try and UNLIKE them, i'm pretty open-minded so i'm doing my best here. I don;t expect any of them to try objective reasoning and logic in exchange for me accepting their challenge, but i'm not as afraid of being wrong as they are.
I don't much know what to do with my first prayer in over 40 years. I'm not here to ask you to cure anybody that's sick, or to make my sports team win their next game, or any of the stuff people ask for from you. Unlike your followers i've paid attention to the fact that their prayers for stuff or for a change in circumstances get the desired results at a rate that matches perfectly to random chance. Besides, if they're correct and you have some kind of 'divine plan' going, it's not likely that you'll be changing that in answer to a prayer you already knew would be coming in when you made the plan in the first place. I'm always unimpressed at the fact that the same folks who tell me we should all submit humbly to your will, never seem content to accept that will in their own lives when your 'plan' isn't unfolding to their personal benefit. .
Besides, i don't really need anything from you to improve my life. gain, UNLIKE most of your followers, i'm HAPPY with the life i have, and don't see myself as fundamentally flawed and in need of repair. I've been managing my own life very well actually, far better as far as i can tell than the lives of most of people who tell me they are guided by you.
A few of them suggested that i spend the time praising you. Hmmmm.... are you really as insecure as they present you there? I think that's pretty unlikely. If i had an ant farm, and i could get the ants to worship me, that would just make me pathetic, not 'holy'. I won't insult you by suggesting you're like that. Not to mention that, on balance - considering the state of the world and all those innocent people you don't seem to worry about - i'm still not inclined to worship you even if you're up there. If you're supposed to be looking out for all of us, especially children, i think you could do a lot better. I reserve my praise for people who rise ABOVE minimum competency in their jobs, not the ones who appear to be asleep at their desks.
OK, i'm not inclined to petition for anything, and i don't see where you've merited any praise... but i do have a question...
Your followers... are you as embarrassed by the actions of the vast majority of them as any omniscient being would have to be? If you see what i mean about a lot of those folks who think they're following your will and use that as an excuse to embrace ignorance, push intolerance, and even kill people 'in your name', and if you are taking requests, could you fire up another burning bush or something and clarify your position on this stuff?
If you could TALK to a few of them directly instead of hoping they'll ever figure ot what your old book is telling them, and clear up that you're not actually in support of their personal prejudices, and that you gave them BRAINS to use them, that would be good, too.
Speaking of that book. While you're at it, i think it would help your cause a lot if you'd bring out a new edition of it. The latest rev still has a lot of those references to goats and sheep, which arent that important to modern folks, and it's really kind of dated about science and stuff like that. People with a minimal grasp of science don't care that it's got lots of those kinds of mistakes, but the value of pi isn't equal to the number 3, and those kinds of mistakes make it harder for THINKING people to take the rest of the book as seriously as you might intend. That might have been Ok when people were just building fences to keep their sheep in, but when you're sending rockets to the moon, those extra significant figures in pi matter a lot.
Ok, Amen.
PS. And sorry you felt the need to torture your son to death a few millennia back. That kind of stuff makes your 'infinite love and mercy' PR pretty hard to swallow. If you really need to punish him for stuff HE didn't do, so you can forgive us for stuff WE didn't do, next time, maybe just ground him for a billion years or something less bloody, OK?
Ok. Later."
