Still thinking about Wiley Drake long after his notorious pronouncement of imprecatory prayer upon Obama’s life.  

I’m wondering, though, about how befuddled the immediate reaction against Drake’s announcement became, as the reaction varied between "This is Abrahamic religion in the raw" to "well, he’s not encouraging others to pray the same prayer, but it still could inflame violent opinion or reaction against Obama".

Now let’s think about it: Drake was officially entitled by the 1st amendment to pray this prayer for himself as long as he didn’t communicate this as a desire for other people to act upon (which could be described as "incitement to murder", or if there is a monetary incentive, "solicitation of murder"). However, that the reaction against the idea of an imprecatory prayer – where you pray to your preferred imaginary friend or imaginary surrogate parent to wreak havoc upon another individual’s life or livelihood so that you don’t have to – tends to exhibit the continuing fear within the public of incitement of the supernatural to harm a mortal individual.

But if, from an atheist standpoint, such incitements of imaginary beings are only being directed to a memory or concept within one’s mind, and that the violent thought is only involving the burning of an effigy within one’s mind rather than a public effigy burning, then maybe this burning or killing of one’s enemy within one’s mind counts as "autoterrorism", or terrorism against one’s own self.

It can be considered an act against the self because it dedicates the mind’s resources to killing one’s own concept of a living being through incitement of the imagination to that effect. Since this does not involve any mock killing of an effigy in public or the solicitation/incitement to the public to kill a living person, then the act of terrorism only takes place within the mind against an externally-influenced product of the mind. This playout of terroristic acts by the mind against its own production can only be described as terrorism against the self if the skeptical outside observer ignores or denies the existence of supernatural beings.

So prayer, when directed toward the solicitation of murder by a supernatural being, is meant as a reinforcement toward the mind’s own action of terrorism against its own concepts of an individual or group. Imprecatory prayer (including curses) can be best described as autoterrorism.