I’m annoyed.
Today, one of the top trends in Twitter is #prayforjustinbieber.
Why does Justin Bieber need prayers? To stop people from chasing him? Why doesn’t he just do what Graham Chapman’s character did in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and choose to die whilst being chased by a horde of naked girls clothed only in wrist and knee guards (and skating helmets, I think – I couldn’t find the video). He meets his end by leaping off a cliff – the girls chased him to it.
“Pray for” #twittertrends – I don’t get it. Why can’t people do something useful, like donate to charity or visit sick friends in hospital?
I understand that not everyone can afford to donate what they’d like to for charity. But every pound or dollar helps, and you can volunteer your time, too, in the event that you really are strapped for cash.
Why do people trend “pray for” – are they actually religious, or do they just do it because everyone else is doing it – rather like the phenomenon of “crowd applause” (I don’t think that’s the right name for it, but it happens when one person in a crowd starts clapping, the rest quickly follow suit even if they have no idea why they’re doing it – the desire not to be left out is so overwhelming that it overrides anything else)? This is something I learned about when I studied social psychology. So far I haven’t been able to track down a formal reference to it, but I’ll keep looking because now not knowing exactly the name for it is bugging me!
What about atheists? Isn’t it a little presumptuous to start praying en masse for people who don’t believe in your particular religion? What do you hope to accomplish on their behalf? Are you trying to make them feel better…or just yourself?
Prayer is passive; why not be active?
Uhoh, I feel a Grammarian rant coming on!
In first-year English class at uni, my professor would hold forth for entire lectures about how it was better to write in the active voice rather than in the passive. But writing in the passive voice does have its uses. I suppose what he was getting at could have been the idea that it is important to simply pay close attention to what you’re writing. Microsoft Word used to – I don’t know if it still has – a thing at the end of every Word Count that you run – statistics on the document, and one of those things is a percentage of the sentences written in the active and passive voice. I particularly remember this feature when I was working on essays on my Grandpa Marcel’s Mac computer.
Grammarians, care to weigh in?
I haven’t written an English paper in ages; the statistics thing at the end of the word count fairly exploded at the end of trying to calculate the percentage of passive sentences in any one of the psychology papers I had to write (APA style, which by its nature requires more use of the passive voice). Sorry, English professor Annandale!
Perhaps the reason people trend #prayfor has little to do with nebulous religious beliefs, but more to do with a visceral need for social acceptance. If you don’t show support for someone in need, and an “easy” way of support (i.e. by typing a meaningless phrase) is available, use it, rather than putting some effort into a concrete method of assisting someone in need that might actually do some good.
