HEAVEN — Following decades of criticism over His apparent absence during major global catastrophes, God confirmed Tuesday that every prayer submitted by humanity since March 2003 has been automatically redirected to His spam folder. The discovery came after a routine software update revealed approximately 46 trillion unread messages concerning terminal illnesses, natural disasters, wars, and other matters requiring immediate divine intervention.
“Holy shit, I thought you people had just figured everything out,” said the Lord, scrolling through the messages. According to heavenly officials, the issue began when God activated a filtering system designed to block requests involving football games, parking spaces, and men asking Him to make their wives less angry. Unfortunately, the system began classifying all prayers as spam after repeatedly detecting phrases such as “please God,” “I promise I’ll change,” and “just this once.”
“Technically, the filter was working exactly as intended,” explained the Archangel Gabriel. “The problem is that approximately 97% of human interaction with God is indistinguishable from begging.” Gabriel added that the remaining 3% consisted primarily of professional athletes thanking God for helping them defeat other athletes who had also prayed to win.
God reportedly became concerned after discovering thousands of unanswered prayers from families of terminally ill children, several million requests for help escaping poverty, and repeated warnings about an approaching global pandemic. “Some of these are actually pretty serious,” He admitted. “I really wish someone had followed up.”
Heaven has since announced plans to introduce a premium prayer subscription allowing worshippers to mark three requests per month as urgent. God assured humanity that He would personally review the backlog, although officials confirmed that He had accidentally selected all 46 trillion messages and clicked “Mark As Read.”