One of Eugene Volokh's readers asks if praying for someone to die should be prosecuted as attempted murder:

Some Christian Reconstructionists are urging their fellows to pray for the death of John McCain so that Sarah Palin will be become President. [Example here.] Are those who pray for McCain's death guilty of attempted murder, and are those urging them to do so guilty of incitement? It seems to me that they are. Although I don't believe that their prayers can have any effect, it seems to me that this falls into the same category as the oft-discussed firing of an unloaded gun or firing a gun into a bed that turns out to be empty. The intent to kill is present and an action has been taken in furtherance of that goal. Christians should presumably be all the more clear that this is attempted murder insofar as they believe prayer to be efficacious.

Volokh rightly points out that the letter-writer is in a no-win situation: If God doesn't exist, then repeated attempts at such prayers can have no more effect than the first (which isn't the case with a mistakenly empty gun); if God does exist, then it would be a bit hard to claim that his decision to end a life could be construed as "murder", given that he's the same entity who ended (or allowed to end) every life which has ever begun.

I disagree with the "reconstructionist" because he seems to want the US to be a legally Christian nation. (According to whose understanding of that?) But the letter writer is even more worrisome, because (a) he is, in some ways, a mirror image of the "reconstructionist" (this one wants to outlaw certain prayers), but (b) worse, the letter-writer's peers frequently seek to silence all incorrect speech, and often move into alleging and judging private motives and thoughts, and (c) more people share that particular error.

(For example, I've heard such people say that if one votes from a religious motive, one is violating the Constitution ("separation of church and state") by trying to enshrine part of one's "religious" beliefs as law. If taken seriously, that means religious people must either be kept from voting lest they commit thought-crime, or prosecuted after committing such. Truly scary stuff, but I hear it all the time.)

Something interesting about the "reconstructionist", and part of the reason I think such people are also confused: He says he's going to be voting for the "Constitution Party" (because he votes with his "conscience"), but asks others to "hope" and "pray" with him that McCain/Palin will win. What kind of "conscience" encourages an individual to act in contradiction to his own prayers? Doesn't it occur to him that God might ask him how he could take an action whose effect, by his knowledge at the time, would be to promote the worse of two outcomes? Has he ever heard the adage that a tree will be judged by its fruit?

The world is chock full of people I have trouble understanding.