The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser

Evidence That God Does NOT Answer Prayer

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Bruce Gerencser

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god answering prayer

Ask the average Evangelical “Does God answer prayer?” and he will emphatically say YES! However, in short order I can show that this claim isn’t true.

I’ve been blogging for eighteen years. Millions of people have read my writing, including countless Evangelical Christians. Thousands of God’s chosen ones have let me know that they are praying for me; either for my destruction or my salvation.

Yet, thousands and thousands of prayers later, these calls for judgment and salvation go unanswered. Either God is deaf to the prayers of Evangelicals or he doesn’t exist. I remain an unrepentant atheist, impervious to the prayers of righteous, holy people. This evidence suggests that, at the very least, God doesn’t answer prayer, and from my perspective, he doesn’t answer prayer because he can’t.

Pray away, Christians, but your fervent petitions to the God of the Bible don’t affect me in a measurable way.

Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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Comments

9 responses to “Evidence That God Does NOT Answer Prayer”

  1. BJW

    They will just say that God’s will is mysterious blah blah blah.

    Reply
  2. Avatar
    Matthew

    After 18 years and millions of reads, you haven’t been struck by lightning or suddenly picked up a Bible.

    I suspect the entire Evangelical prayer effort has simply resulted in a Divine Stalemate. All those fervent pleas for your destruction are being perfectly neutralized by an equal and opposite volume of prayers for your salvation.

    Think of it as a Spiritual Zero-Sum Game:
    Pdestruction​+Psalvation​=0

    The net result is you, the unrepentant atheist, existing in a state of perfect, well-balanced atheistic equilibrium. You are currently the theological equivalent of a perfectly insulated, unmoving object.

    Keep blogging—you’re proving that if you pray hard enough in both directions, the universe simply cancels the whole ticket and lets the subject carry on with his coffee and keyboard.

    Reply
    1. Avatar
      Bruce Gerencser

      Thanks, Matthew. ❤️

      Reply
  3. Ami

    I had a lady ignore my sign last weekend and knock on my door, trying to sell me religion. I was polite, instead of telling her to fuck off, I said, “Look. If you have God or Jesus show up in 15 minutes with a plate of cookies, I will listen to your spiel.”

    She left. I’m still waiting for the cookies.

    Yeah… when I questioned my pastor back in my teenage years about why prayers aren’t answered, he said that, “God answers all prayers. Yes, no, or I have something better in mind.”

    Pretty much covers it. What a crock.

    I would have saved myself a lot of time if I’d said the words about cookies to the pastor. As it is, I spent an eternity with a bunch of evangenital Christians.

    Reply
    1. Avatar
      Zoe

      This cracked me up Ami re: the cookies. I don’t get door knocks anymore but if I do . . . I’m going to request Jesus and cookies. I probably will shorten the delivery time though, down to 3 minutes or close to that, since, well, you know, miracles and such. 🙂

      Reply
  4. Avatar
    GeoffT

    Christians love to say that god can’t be tested when it’s convenient, for example in large scale studies designed to measure the extent of benefits provided by prayer (spoiler, there are none!). Yet isn’t that what is done every single time someone utters (or thinks) a prayer to god? Even the most benign of prayers, such as asking god for advice, requires that god must reveal itself. If the beneficiary tries to claim that god answered their prayer (which they almost always do) then they have tested god. In the rare event that the beneficiary says they did not receive a reply then, well, they still tested god.

    Reply
  5. Avatar
    Zoe

    I wonder if they wrestle with God as to their unanswered prayer(s)?

    I think probably those who say they’ll pray, pray once. Job done. Crown in heaven awaits.

    But, those who are repeat prayer warriors, I wonder, how do they handle the unanswered prayers?

    What does that say about the prayer warrior? Are they sinning? Are they not tithing up to par? Is God testing them to see how faithful they really are? Are they praying but not on their knees? Do they get to the point that they eventually give up the fight, with Bruce and with God and well, probably Satan too, due to exhaustion? Do they maybe get to the point of starting to examine their beliefs and end up deconstructing &/or deconverting, never to be heard from again?

    Reply
    1. Avatar
      matilddaa

      Great questions, Zoe, my two-pennyworth is that we fundies were told, ‘sometimes the answer is no, god knows what’s best and one day when you’re through those pearly gates, you’ll be able to ask him and he’ll explain the horrendous things you endured and you’ll just praise him that he allowed you to die in agony, or from starvation cos he loved you so much.’ Or you just twist yourself in knots to explain non-answers, e.g. you prayed for a parking space, but didn’t find one cos your loving heavenly daddy knew your body needed the exercise to have to walk a couple of hundred yards instead. Or the one that makes me shudder with distaste, especially when a child isn’t healed after prayer, ‘god needed another angel.’ And I hated the occasional night of prayer my church had for healing, or success in an evangelistic crusade – someone said they thaat made them imagine god up there on his throne with a stopwatch saying, ‘Well done my sheeple, you’ve stayed awake for 7 hours praying, make it another 2 and complete exhaustion, and I might consider granting your request.’

      Reply
  6. Avatar
    ObstacleChick

    When I was an evangelical Christian, I heard sermons and Sunday school lessons about prayer. Repeatedly we were told that God answers prayers in one of 3 ways: yes, no, or wait awhile. There were also rules about our praying. We had to believe that God can do whatever we’re asking. We had to be entirely sincere. We had to pray that the request was God’s will and to accept if it wasn’t (not my will but thine be done). We couldn’t get mad at God if he said no or wait. We couldn’t ask for selfish things. There were a lot of rules, and if we broke any one of them, that could be the reason for a NO answer.

    As a student, I used to pray before every test, quiz, or exam. I also studied. I got very good grades. Most of it I attributed to inherent intelligence and study. Very little did I attribute to God. And I knew that if I didn’t get as good a grade as I wanted, it was because I didn’t study that particular material well enough.

    No one that I cared about was ever cured of cancer. Some would go into remission for a while, but eventually the cancer returned with a vengeance. Loved ones got sick and died. My mom and stepdad struggled financially for years. My stepdad died from blood clots after a back surgery. My biological father never had an interest in me (although he did call me ONCE after I turned 18 and he wasn’t on the hook for child support which he never had paid).

    Reply

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