As you’ve already heard, the Atheist Foundation of Australia was hit with a denial-of-service attack earlier this week (you can learn more about it in this interview of Jason Ball by Catherine Deveny).

I rather like their planned unofficial response.

This is a call to all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to join us in a global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God (in this context, the Christian god, God, as distinct from the Greek god, Zeus, the Egyptian god, Ra etc etc) with so many useless prayers that it causes his divineness to go offline as as result of our own DDOS (‘Divine’ Denial of Service).

The prayer minute will be at exactly 8pm (Eastern Standard Time) & 9am (Greenwich Mean Time) on Sunday 8 November 2009.

Please join us in this important task, with any luck it will take God a while to get back online, ensuring us at least a few days of godless peace. It will also give the Westboro Baptist Church some much needed time to catch up on paperwork.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to join in, because whatever I have planned for that time, whatever it may be, will be far more interesting and productive than babbling to an invisible man. I’m pretty sure I won’t be needed, though; I understand all modern prayers are first funneled through a 110 baud modem, then passed further upstairs by telegraph, then pony express riders gallop it over to the Pearly Gates, and then a rewritten version is passed on to a team of long-dead Sumerian scribes for transcription into cuneiform on wax plates, and then and only then is it in a format that a bronze age patriarchal deity can understand. I don’t think it’ll take much to swamp the celestial bandwidth (which actually explains a lot, if you think about it.)