The delights of being an omnivore

As I said in my earlier entry for today, this is the day my pescetarian diet ended.  And it ended with this delicious masala chicken:

It was sunny and bright when I cycled to Little India to buy the masala chicken but on my return trip, what greeted me were lowering rain clouds enveloping the entire sky.

Instinctively, I asked God to hold back the rain and I pedalled furiously home.  Of course, when I said I asked God, I meant I did it as a matter of habit, knowing full well that prayers were notoriously ineffective.  I got home just before the rain fell.  Now, is that confirmation that prayers work?  Of course not.  The only way prayers can be said to work is when they bring about a result that cannot be due to coincidence or natural causes.   A good example is my best friend who had liver cancer.  All the prayers in the world could not make him avoid a liver transplant.  His entire church prayed for him and prayer requests were sent out to missionaries all over the world. But he had to undergo 3 horrible surgeries including a liver transplant and many rounds of chemotherapy and in the end, he still succumbed to the cancer like anyone else in the same state as he.  His life wasn't extended by even a minute.  In fact, quite a lot of liver cancer patients do better than he.  Prayers only seem to work when we ask for silly things that can go either way, eg asking for the rain to be held back for ten minutes, something which nature does all the time.  And if I had been drenched in the rain, there is a ready answer for it.  I was insincere when I "prayed".  Mine was more an exclamation than a prayer.  Naturally, God wouldn't answer a prayer that is so insincere and it's no wonder that I was drenched.  I should consider myself fortunate that I was not struck down by lightning.  After all, God has been known to do that to perfectly innocent people just because God was in a grouchy mood.  The example of Uzzah springs to mind.

For thousands of years, people have died from the simple common cold despite prayers to God.  And then suddenly, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin and for the first time in church history, God begins to heal people with infections in ways that he previously could not.  Sorry, I meant in ways that he previously chose not to.  We'll see success in prayers for those with incurable cancer when medical science progresses to that level.  God always keeps pace with medical science when it comes to healing.