Hate Preacher Wiley Drake: Maybe Our Prayers Killed John Murtha!

Y’all, that’s how powerful Wiley Drake’s “God” is. He can occasionally take out 77 year-old men with health problems. Yeah, feel that wrath:

Southern Baptist Pastor Wiley Drake of Buena Park sent out an email Monday night, saying that perhaps his prayers had been answered with the death of Rep. John Murtha yesterday.

“Maybe God took him out,” Drake wrote. “Maybe God Answered our IMPRECATORY prayer that we prayed every 30 days.”

The Pennsylvania congressman, a decorated former Marine who fiercely opposed the Iraq war, died at the age of 77 after complications from gallbladder surgery.

(…)

Drake said he and his prayer warriors had been praying for Murtha’ death for four or five months. Among other things, Drake said Murtha’ use of profanity and his use of God’ name in vain. Beside praying for the death of specific politicians, he said they pray for “politicians in general who are taking unrighteous stands.”

I bet he takes credit when Robert Byrd passes away too.

Kyle at Right Wing Watch points out that Drake also prayed for Barack Obama to die, because Drake is so Christ-like.

Of course, Wiley Drake believes that imprecatory prayer is biblical, and that it’s a Christian’s responsibility to pray for God to smite people to death if they have disagreements. It’s, of course, the ultimate cop-out (not to mention a functionally illiterate interpretation of the text), because Drake knows that his beliefs and ideas wouldn’t last a minute at the grown-up table in a debate. So the only recourse he has is to hide behind some obscure verse and whine and cry to his god to make the mean people go away. That his imprecatory prayer dog and pony show comes from a place of shivering weakness was never more evident than when he prayed for the leaders of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State to die, simply because they called his church’s tax-exempt status into question. It’s the religious equivalent of a misbehaving teenager screaming at his parents “I HATE YOU AND I WISH YOU WERE DEAD!” as the adult parents look on with amusement and say “Hokay! You’re still grounded!”