We Find Prayer Offensive
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WHAT
GOD DOESN’T LIKE ABOUT PRAYER
PRAYING
FOR PROTECTION IS FANATICAL
PRAYER
IS PSYCHOLOGICAL MANIPULATION
MENTAL
PRAYER: THE ONLY VIRTUE
Atheists find prayer
offensive. We will see that prayer is actually worse than magic which most
people consider harmful. Prayer is a declaration that religious dogma has value and not
people.
WHAT GOD DOESN’T LIKE ABOUT PRAYER
Prayer
is communication with God. It is union with God and believers say it is two
way. God unites with you when you pray and you unite with him.
Prayer
is not necessarily vocal it can just be an attitude you carry around in your
heart. It can just be an intention that you don’t put into words.
Petitionary
prayer, prayer that asks for something, either influences God or it does not.
All prayer is intended to be petitionary for even when you don’t ask for a
favour but just want to be with God you must necessarily intend that he helps
you be really with him.
When
terrorists murder innocent people, the ministerial sycophants step smugly
into their pulpits and remind the congregation that the terrorists need its
prayers. They need its prayers. That is they have a right to be prayed
for. Do they? The Church says we do not deserve grace or
help from God to live a holy life and we do not deserve to be forgiven our
sins. The purpose of praying for them
is that God will change their hearts.
That he will do whatever it is that will impress them best so that
they will change. So if that means making them get away with it, decide to
give up terrorism and start a happy family life or turning themselves in so
be it. Also, if somebody does
something bad Christianity and Islam would say that they hope the person was
insane for the sake of her or his soul which is in danger of everlasting
punishment. So praying for them can
amounts to several things. One of them
is wishing that the terrorists are insane.
Clearly then the concern is not really for the evil they have done but
for the evil they intend. If they are
insane they don’t intend evil properly for they are sick. So it is okay then if the terrorists keep
killing people as long as they are insane.
The
terrorists need prayers then to keep them from getting their come-uppance in
Hell. Praying for them is therefore
more important than praying for the innocent victims or their families. If there is a choice, it is the terrorists
that should be prayed for.
Praying
for the terrorists is fanaticism. It
is just another quieter form of the exact same fanaticism that impels
terrorists to maim and murder. The
praying is hypocrisy. It insults the
victims. Prayer is indeed a
declaration of ones attitude that dogma has value and people do not. Religion makes people so irrational that
they might not be able to let themselves see this.
Some
believers say that asking God for a favour is not asking for something but
rather asking that we become worthy of the favour even if he won’t grant
it. They argue that way for they say
that prayer does not change God. But
God has to change us which still amounts to making God do something! If prayer does nothing to change God then
what do we pray to saints to influence him for? And is it right to ask for your sick dog to
get better when you really mean that you hope you will be a better master to
him if he gets better? And why ask for
help to become a better master as if you shouldn’t be trying on your own to
be better? Why insult yourself that
you cannot be better for him without needing a God to give you a shot in the
arm?
If God is influenced by prayer then God needs to be influenced for he is imperfect and therefore not really a God and prayer is not an act of faith but an attempt to fool a stupid God into helping you. It’s black magic. Prayer is an act of pride. “Ha ha God, you need my influence. I am better than you though I am not the maker of the universe”.
It is a big thing in modern spirituality that nobody can hurt you unless you let them. This mentality blames the rape victim, for example, for being upset and devastated about being violated. If God helps and God does miracles, if magic helps and magic does miracles then this vicious attitude is more justified than it is. If there is supernormal or magical power available to help, it is far more the victim's fault for suffering than it is if there is no such power. That is the kind of malevolence that people who say miracles happen are engendering. Roman Catholicism upholds saints who suffered beyond belief for the faith as examples of how people can have peace and joy no matter what others do to them. The Church says these people turned to God and trusted him so much that nobody was really able to hurt them - they were so happy they might not have even registered the physical pain. So the Church then needs to explain why we should disparage rapists if the victims cause their own suffering. So the Church needs to explain why we should disparage paedophiles and child molesters for the victims have chosen to hurt themselves because of the abuse. It is small wonder with an attitude like that how the Church has so little sympathy for victims of child sex abuse. The Church has to think that the victims damaged themselves in relation to how they responded to the abuse and so the abuse itself did little harm. The Church has to think that the victims are evil for wanting the molesters punished for what the victims did to themselves.
Nobody
denies that even if there is a true religion, the mega-vast majority of God
people today have beliefs they wrongly think were revealed by God. These people get their erroneous faith
through prayer. When prayer fails to
wean them off error and give them light
is it not clear that prayer is making them pridefully sure that their
own DIY creed is from God. The
assurance is not coming from God but themselves.
If
God is not influenced then what he is going to do he is going to do and
prayer serves no purpose. It gives unrealistic comfort and it means there is
nothing you can do to guarantee happiness for God might send depression on
you or kill all your family in a car crash. Prayer then would not comfort
you. If comfort came, it came not because of prayer but because God decided
to give it irrespective of whether you prayed or not. You might as well never
say a prayer then. It would be more realistic not to seek comfort in prayer.
It would be a sin to look for comfort in it for that is making a demand of
God who chooses to do what he likes and whose total autonomy must be upheld.
No
matter how you view prayer, you cannot please God with it. Prayer is
blasphemy in his eyes. Therefore
religion is blasphemy.
<THY WILL BE DONE>
You
can pray even if you hate God for you can still talk to him. You must intend
to communicate because if you don’t you are not praying but just play-acting.
Prayer
cannot be any value or have any merit before God unless it is about entering
into communion with him which means letting him be Lord and master by
submitting all you want and do to him so that he calls the shots in your
life. If God is influenced by prayer then he cannot be swayed by prayer that
does not express the desire to be in union with him, that is, to love him or
submit to him. This communion must be selfless – seeking nothing for
yourself. We know how sick and
dangerous selflessness is. It suggests
that other people matter and you don’t and you are just an instrument while
they must be thought of as persons.
They are to think of you the same way so the end result is that nobody
should be happy.
Holy
prayer is the union of the heart and mind with God.
God
has the power to reduce the inclination you have towards sin and make you
more inclined to do holy things. The Church says he helps us in these ways
and this help is called grace which means free gift. It is called free gift
because we do not deserve it! And the Church says we cannot be saved without
grace. God in his Bible says the same thing (Ephesians 2:8-10). If you don’t
pray you don’t get grace. What is so offensive then about prayer and grace is
the notion that we don’t deserve to be helped to live a better life. That is
incoherence. If we don’t deserve that we deserve nothing and are trash. If we
can earn God’s help then we don’t need prayer. Prayer is offering yourself to
God while you try to make yourself feel like dirt. It’s an insult to God.
Christianity calls this humility but it is degradation.
Holy prayer is not prayer or a sincere communion with God when it does not will only what God wills. It is just a pretence then. All holy prayer is, in essence, the hearty praying of, “Thy will be done.” It consists of confidence in divine power and submission to it which is the same as submission to him. In other words, you do not ask God to keep you safe on the boat tomorrow. That is expressing a desire to be safe when what you should be desiring is that God will do what he wants even if it means leaving you to drown in an accident. You are asking God to fulfil his desire instead of your own. In fact, if you really believe God is always right you will not wish to be safe on the boat. You will not wish it for anybody else either. You will wish that God will do what he wants even if that means he will send a storm to drown you.
Good wishes expressed through prayer, "I pray that God will heal you", "I pray that your marriage will be happy and blessed with children" and so on are really just believers being false. It is no wonder that God believers live out a hypocrisy that is often astonishing.
So
comforting people by praying for them PROPERLY is a waste of time. Religion
should have the honesty to teach this openly
and forbid prayer as it is always done. It should forbid wishing that
the children will not be picked up by some insane paedophile when they come out
of school for it might be God's intention that this should happen. But
religion refuses to be honest for people would see that it is only
foolishness to expect anybody to gain comfort and psychological strength from
prayer. Religion would lose its attraction so it keeps the sinister doctrine
under wraps to deceive its followers. Yet in dusty tomes that the public
never reads, the Church admits that prayer cannot and is not meant to change
God (page 133, Unblind Faith).
“Thy
will be done”, then is the essence of prayer. How can it be a petition
because God is going to do his will whether you ask him or not? All it is, is
saying, “I ask nothing of you. I want you to do what you want, I am not
asking you but I am just telling you what I want.” You can’t say you have
asked somebody what they are guaranteed to do for asking implies they might
not and need to be encouraged to do it. So rather than a petition, “Thy will
be done”, is an expression of submission to the will of God. It means, “I
approve of your will O God and I submit to it”. Therefore the prayer of
petition is a hoax. It’s a bait that the Church knows will attract you to her
and that is all she wants it for.
To work prayer has to require some power from God to see into the hearts and minds of others. Religion says prayer is useless unless you do it to request and find holiness through receiving gifts from God. If you pray to be holy you are praying above all for guidance for if there is no guidance there can be no holiness. So you need guidance to see who is trying to corrupt you, who is opposed to God and your holiness. You have to be shown the secrets of the hearts of others to some extent. So prayer is a sneaky attempt to invade the privacy of others. Its an attempt to violate their secret place. Astrology and fortune telling are evil attempts to find forbidden information about others and prayer is no better. The fact that the vast majority of people are not that holy and have no right to the information because of that shows how evil prayer is. It’s sneaky.
Religion says that we can be like martyrs singing with joy as the lions tear us to bits if we submit enough to God's will. "Thy will be done" then is a plea to Heaven for God to make you abnormal and the kind of maniac that would rejoice in suffering for him. It implies that we should not upset ourselves over the suffering of others for it is self-inflicted. If they loved God enough, it implies, they will not suffer.
PRAYER, ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY FOR
SALVATION
The
Catholic Church following the Bible which says that all who call on the name
of the Lord for eternal salvation will be saved teaches that prayer is absolutely
necessary for salvation. This doctrine is in the Bible which claims that the
prayer of accepting Christ is necessary for salvation (page 1, The Great
Means of Salvation and of Perfection). We have seen earlier that grace is
necessary for salvation and prayer is the means of obtaining grace so prayer
is necessary for salvation.
Anybody
that is damned is damned or thrown in Hell forever simply because they did
not pray enough or when they needed to (page 30, 31, The Great Means of
Salvation and Perfection). Without prayer to get God’s hand over you, you
would commit every sin you could (page 56, The Great Means of Salvation
and Perfection).
The
Church opposed the Pelagians for denying that prayer was needed for salvation
(page 5, The Great Means of Salvation and of Perfection). It observes
that Jesus said that without his grace one can do nothing and not that one
cannot complete anything (page 6, The Great Means of Salvation and of
Perfection). Logically then the reason Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden
was because he did not turn to God in prayer for help in the face of
temptation (page 10, The Great Means of Salvation and of Perfection).
If that is true then Adam sinned by not praying so he was a sinner before he
ate the forbidden fruit yet the whole point of the forbidden fruit was so
that Adam would sin if he ate it. So God overlooked the sin of not praying
for help in order to pick on Adam for eating a fruit. This is a totally
absurd doctrine. Not turning to God is worse than eating of a fruit.
The
doctrine that prayer is needed for salvation means that praying is more
important than doing all possible good works. It is better to give five
minutes of your entire life praying than to do all these works consistently
and heroically all your life without praying. This is misanthropic fanaticism
carried to the extreme. How people can claim to be humble while claiming that
by praying they have done the main good work is amazing. If you have the
right to believe something so horrible then how can you object if somebody
else believes in acting this horrible? I mean if somebody wants to offer
human sacrifices? If faith comes first as you say then you could not blame
them for thinking they should do it and are right to actually do it.
Forcing
a person to pray makes the prayer worthless. But if prayer is necessary for
salvation then you are forced to do it for you will rot in Hell forever if
you don’t. You might not feel forced but you would if you really believed.
You are asked to live every moment like it was your last. And prayer is
necessary to prepare for the last moment. It is the one thing that you cannot
omit. That means that if you are going to live as if you are ready to die you
are forced to pray as much as you physically and mentally can. Compulsion
makes your prayer impotent. The doctrine of eternal punishment prevents you
praying. The doctrine then could only come from the Devil if it is true that
prayer is the only way to salvation. If you don’t sense you are being forced
then you do not really believe in what you think is the word of God and you
cannot be saved anyway.
Even
if we reject eternal punishment there is still the problem that God hates sin
infinitely so it is the worst evil. God’s love is immeasurable so his hatred
of sin is immeasurable so we should hate sin at all costs and pray to avoid
it. Again compulsions steps in. Prayer is only really possible for those who
believe in Gods who are very human and have human frailties. Everybody else
just only thinks they are praying.
PRAYING FOR PROTECTION IS FANATICAL
It
is fanaticism to pray for protection, physical or spiritual, for yourself or
others. Yet all reverent prayer contains the intention that God will protect
your soul against vice.
If
you pray to God then you are praying to the most powerful thing there is. So
it follows that praying for a seriously ill person is far more important than
getting the doctor. Believers will get the doctor but that does nothing to
allay the fanaticism in their attitude. If they had to pray or getting the
doctor and they could only do one of these they would pray. The fanaticism
means they cannot object when they go that far if God forbids getting the
doctor so it is plain murderous. To prefer death for another is like willing
it so it is a black heart that would do it. Prayer is meant to lead a person
to better submission to the Church and its fanaticism implies, “If I can
regard prayer as more important than doctors because of the influence of the
Church then by logic I should heed and obey everything my Church commands for
God speaks through the Church”.
Prayer
brainwashes. If you would put your relations on a shipwreck in the hands of a
God whose existence you cannot be very sure of then you are mad for you feel
you love them but how can you when you are doing that? Would you love them if
you prayed to Sinbad the Sailor to save them? No for that is like asking
Hitler to look after your little Jewish daughter. When you ask God to save a life
you are resolving you will accept it if he does not do it so you are
confessing God has the right to kill. To approve of death for the sake of a
hypothetical God is very unreasonable and callous. To say that such evil may
be compatible with God’s plan in some unknown way is to make evil permissible
while to say that evil is useless gives it what it really should get, total
intolerance. We must will it not to happen. Full stop. God is an evil
hypothesis and so prayer is evil and dehumanising.
Though
God knows exactly what we need before we ask him, he asks us to pray. It is
not to tell him what we want or to tell him what he should do because he
already knows and if he should do something he will do it without prayer but
to be humble and show him that we are so inferior to him and so make a
sacrifice of time and our powers to please him alone (Question 82, Radio
Replies Volume 3; page 180, In Defence of the
Faith). This is degrading unless you are more sure that God exists
than you are that you exist which is impossible for you experience your own
existence though many religious people lie that they are that sure. You come
first and you are meant to love what is outside of you by loving yourself. It
is as degrading as bowing before an idol and not being sure enough that it is
a god. But the Church commands all to pray and even has agnostics doing it.
Young
people tend to pray to do well in exams. In essence, this is not praying to
become a better and holier person whatever happens and through whatever happens
so God will not listen to it. He wants you to be more interested in being
holy than in success. Praying to pass or do well is simply asking God to help
you to cheat. You want God to make sure only the material you are familiar
with or succeed in remembering will come up which is cheating for the purpose
of exams is for you to know everything on your course so that you will be
prepared for anything that comes up for anything could.
Confidence
in God’s power to keep you safe or to undo the damage you do is dangerous for
it will lead to a lack of effort on your part to at least some extent. When
you won’t act, God has to if he is good for the sake of other people. He
cannot let the worst happen intending to make amends later for that does not
justify it. That is all very well but what if there is no God? Religion is
usually reluctant to make sure that everybody knows all about the doctrines
its has. Religion tells people to turn to God in prayer for answers and that
is a dangerous approach if there is no God. It is fanatical. Psychics are
often bad news but this is no better.
We
know that belief in miracles is bad and irrational. Prayer makes no sense unless you think that
God is tweaking the way things work by secretly miraculously intervening to
do what you ask. It would be extreme
arrogance to hold that God has to do such things over you.
Prayer
is inhuman.
TESTING GOD
Christians
and Jews and Muslims say you should not put God to the test. You should not
pray in order to see if what you ask for will happen. For example, you cannot
plant two geraniums and ask God to make one grow well and the other grow a
bit and then die away to check if there is a God. But surely there has to be
circumstances in which this would be legitimate despite the fact that the
Bible and these cults forbid it totally. You have a right to know if there is
a God and if the evidence for him is good. The reason it is forbidden is that
it will soon become apparent that praying makes no difference to geraniums.
Testing God when you already have evidence would be wrong and he would be
right to ignore you but when it is right and still nothing happens then it
should be clear to you that there is no God.
Research
that says that testing God to see if prayer works seems to say it does. There
are many projects that give the opposite impression. But the research does
not verify the power of prayer but the power of testing God if it verifies
anything. To attempt to use it to get people to believe in prayer will fail
and it gives a degrading view of God. The prayers can only go to the Devil.
Believers
want sufferers to believe their suffering is for a reason when prayer does
nothing to allay suffering. They are supposed to think that the pain that is more
real to them than God should exist to please this being who is less real to
them. God knows he will benefit from their pain but they are not as sure so
this is a totally selfish one-sided arrangement on the part of God. Believers
pray principally that sufferers will learn from their pain. That is
self-righteous – it amounts to wanting God to make them suffer so that they
will be as holy and superior as themselves while they don’t suffer
themselves. The false belief that prayer is caring may help some sick people
for feeling cared for is good medicine but prayer is not caring.
How
could saying, “Your will be done,” for another person be praying for that
person? It’s ridiculous for that is not the same as the person submitting to
the divine will. Praying for one another though Jesus practiced it and
commanded it is a superstition. It is offensive to pray for anybody else for
it is trying to do for them what they ought to be doing for themselves,
namely telling God that he alone counts. If prayer helps sick people then God
has nothing to do with it and it is black magic or psychic power which he
forbids. Prayer for others tries to make a fool of God.
There
would absolutely be no harm in praying to God to give you a miraculous dream
that seems so real and happy and that seems to last for a week right now but
which really only lasts a few minutes for God can distort time as we know
from physics. But he won’t do it even when he could wipe your memory of this
event afterwards to let you go on as nothing has happened like he wipes it
all the time anyway. It is evil to pray to him. He does not want you to be
happy. He does not exist if he is all-good. Jesus’ promise that prayer could
make a mountain move when it is said in faith is false.
He can’t even pass a harmless test.
Religion says that God creates earthquakes. If you live in such a unstable area, it is your own fault if you end up dying in an earthquake. That is what the God belief implies for nobody can say it is a great thing to be caught in an earthquake and end up crushed under rubble. To pray then that an earthquake will never happen when you are living in a dangerous area is the same as praying that you will not be hurt when you step out in front of a speeding car. It is tempting God and mocking him. Up to a point, praying for your mother never to get cancer is tempting God for we live in a world in which people do get cancer. And besides, God might call you selfish for such a prayer is wishing that somebody else's mother will get the cancer.
To this putting the blame on the victim I have to say the following. It is only in the last few thousand years we got to understand that some areas are dangerous. Most of the people who ever lived in those areas lived there long before we understood. We are not to blame for our ignorance. Also, God could fix the earthquake zones without anybody knowing just because there are people in danger there. If God and his creation is so great what does he need earthquakes to destroy his creation for? Most of the people living in earthquake zones have family and friends there and cannot be blamed for wanting to be with them and taking the risk. To suggest they should know better to leave is just inhuman.
Which is better:
1 If you live in an earthquake zone and you die in an earthquake and no all good magical being is responsible or has let it happen
2 If you live in an earthquake zone and you die in an earthquake and no all good magical being is responsible or has let it happen
With 1, one can say you didn't go there to force an all-good God to hurt you. With 2, you can.
With 1, one can revile your death and how it happened while with 2 you have to find a way to condone it.
With 1 you are more human and more feeling and you are not creating beliefs that require you to look on human suffering as not so bad.
WHY HOLY PRAYER IS WICKED
Holy
prayer, prayer that is seemingly meant to please God, is evil.
First
of all, we know it is bad for we know that we have unfree will. Free will is an illusion or a mere
feeling. A feeling has nothing to do
with showing we really have free will.
You can’t be free unless you know you are free and you cannot know
that. There is no being to answer
prayer and if there is then he is the Devil for though unfree we suffer
because he won’t do anything.
Second,
in this world, one event however small effects the way all others happen so
for one to be helped others have to suffer in the process. Prayer is
vindictively petitioning God to hurt others for your sake for frequently
insignificant favours. It is vindictive for it is fanatical to pray for
anything. Somebody has to lose so you
can win. It could be a loved one. Prayer logically reduces love and respect
for others and asks God to make a priority of delivering what you want. It is asking God to make a priority of you
and to hell with everybody else.
Thanking
God for the good things in your life insults those who suffer. You say they
suffer for a good purpose. But why thank God when the good things you get may
not be intended for you but are just sent for a good purpose? When God may
not be giving them willingly then why thank him? You are insulting sufferers
for their suffering is reckoned to be for a good purpose while your blessings
are taken to be gifts from God and not mere stepping stones to something
better if not for you then somebody else.
Third,
prayer is an act of camouflaged Devil-worship if we are sinners or think
ourselves to be. You cannot mean, “O Lord, thy will be done!” when you won’t
do it yourself and it is a sin to mean: let everybody love you but me.
Religion says that sin is always in us and is being done at the back of our
minds – eg. We would not do all we can to save the starving millions. Prayer
is indirect Satan-worship if it insults God and direct Satan-worship if God
is believed to honour your sin of prayer. “I love you, God” of which
petitionary prayer is an expression is evil.
Fourth,
you cannot believe in prayer without claiming that the God it is directed to
does evil for a mysterious purpose which is a dangerous and blasphemous
supposition. An all-good God would not want us to believe in it for if we do
then we should say the same about all monsters though no rational excuse can
be found. It allows religion to make cruel rules and say that the rules are
right because God knows what he is doing.
Fifth,
prayer is loving God alone while bending into the dust and inwardly moaning
about how worthless you are and that he alone counts. It is degrading to put
that which may not exist before yourself who you know does exist and before
others who you see and hear like him. The absence of self-esteem corrupts the
mind and can take away health.
Sixth,
praying for suffering babies in the
Religion
claims that you will feel you have to do more for them if you pray to God to
help them. God will put that feeling
in you so praying is putting yourself at his service. It is asking for the strength to fulfil the
prayer yourself. Asking God then to
help the suffering babies is asking him to send you to them or to do something
big for them. Such prayer cannot be
much good for only a tiny number get the call to help from prayer. Most do not.
The
Church writes prayers for all occasions. If prayer and those who do it are so
great then why are there no prayers for people going through a divorce or who
are coming out of the closet as gay? Even if the Church despises these
actions it could still pray that they will do what they feel is right for
them. It cannot for it pretends to know it all. This is nothing more than
accusing those people of doing what they are doing in bad faith. If they are
in good faith then pray for them. The absence of such prayers proves that the
Church is very unfair.
WORSHIP DENIES GOD
I
never love another person but my perception of them which is only as good as
what I think I see and what they want to tell me. The same is true of God no
matter how well I think I know him. It is arrogance to claim to know God.
It’s pride, the sin that made the Devil fall from
Religion
says you should not pray to change God for God knows himself what to do and
it would not be humble to. However it is accepted that it is right to ask God
to change you for the better to make you a more spiritual person. The man who
has no time for the superstition that prayer changes God who prays for his
dying child prays for the strength to help the child not for God to cure the
child (page 149, The Puzzle of God). But this is still
trying to change God for he is asking for God to change him if he fails to
tend his child. The man is really pretending he is asking God for help. What
he is really doing is administering therapy to himself. He finds prayer
soothing and so he does it not to love God but because it is soothing and
makes him feel better and consider what he might do to help his child more.
But that is not prayer and God would find it offensive for God likes to be
the be-all-and-end-all.
The
suggestion that God makes all the decisions and prayer cannot change him will
suggest that if he answers prayer then he foresaw what prayers we were going
to make and rigged things beforehand to answer them. But that has what has
not happened causing what has happened and that is ridiculous. It would be
more reasonable if God let the prayer happen first and then fix things. The
other view gives him too much control over everything that happens. It ends
up being fatalistic. It ends up saying that God is to blame for everything
that goes wrong.
Now
why would God do what the suggestion says and rig things so that you will
sometimes pray for what he plans to give you do that anyway when he works for
the best? He could just make his plans and forget about prayers which will
have the result that many people will pray for things he is going to do
anyway and they will think it is an answer to their prayers and it is not.
The reason what they wanted to happen happened had nothing to do with their
prayers but God was going to do them anyway. What is the point of God
answering prayers when nobody knows if they are really answered even when the
requested thing happens? It is superstition to say that God answers prayers.
To suggest that any
answers to prayer we will get are preordained implies that God inspires us to
pray for things he will not give us. This doctrine infers that God is a crank
and cannot be trusted. All understandings of how God answers prayer deny that
he is reliable. If faith follows prayer then faith did it in spite of prayer
and not because of it.
PRAYER IS PSYCHOLOGICAL MANIPULATION
Religious
people want you to pray so that their agenda will have a greater hold over
you.
All religionists teach that belief in God and any interest in spiritual matters will die away without prayer. Quality not quantity should matter with God so if a person prays once to be blessed with graces from God for life that prayer should suffice. If a person prays once in their life that God must do whatever he wills no matter who doesn't like it they should not need to pray again. Religion doesn’t teach that prayer needs only be done once. It militates against the notion most vehemently. Its teaching shows that prayer for it is not about God at all but about clergy wanting to brainwash you. Prayer is like auto-suggestion that reinforces the undue influence of religious faith and cultism on you. To have a child pray is to abuse that child.
If one person in the world prays that God's will be done and nobody else prays ever the prayer will cover them too. If God answers the prayer he will do his will. He will give blessings and health to unbelievers and he may give suffering and poverty to his followers. What good can it do one of the lucky ones then to pray? Believers attribute the blessings in life to praying to God but people who don't pray get the blessings too. Prayer seems fanciful and seems to be as unhealthy and distracting from reality as daydreaming.
The
real reason why spiritual life flounders without prayer is that religion
disguises prayer as something appealing and something that is wholesome even
when it is a pain in the neck. This tells us that the trouble that religious
people cause is all for one thing, their own spiritual thrills. Spirituality
thrives on the denial that the human being is a naturally selfish (I mean
that we love ourselves and help others because we love ourselves not that we
are naturally violent and evil) creature even in prayer. Only a minority of
the people in any congregation might come close to being real authentic
members of the religion they profess so religion and prayers and Masses cause
a lot of dissension and hassle just for the convenience of a minority of real
– say - Catholics in the midst of a great crowd of fake Catholics.
How
anybody can say that religion is a justifiable evil is a mystery especially
when they and their religion believe that people are more likely to abuse
something than respect it or as religion puts it, because we have had
original sin we are more likely to sin than to avoid sin. Prayer gives religious
people the desire for gratification through religion. This is a subtle form
of selfishness and not just selfishness but unbalanced and unreasonable
selfishness.
Religion
encourages sinners to pray even when they are not repentant. The result is
that they feel better about their sins though they have no intention of
giving them up yet and when they retain sins they will retain some forever.
All are supposedly sinners so religion cannot dare forbid this abuse. Thus we
find that prayer is like an anaesthetic for the conscience that increases
love for evil for it certainly does not increase love for God when they are
staying in their sins. This creates an addiction. Religion tries to become
like a drug you get hooked on. How anybody can think religion is a source for
good is amazing! It may be a source for cleverly disguised good but any real
good is done in spite of it and not because of it.
Prayer
encourages suspicion and division between people with different views. It
causes antagonism. Prayer makes the devout look down on the good works of
those who do not pray. The devout say you need grace to do really good works
for we are all infested with sin. So the more religious a person is the more
likely it is that their good works are really good and done with a good
motive. Prayer then is intended to curtain the devout off from “inferior”
people.
The
devout say that God does the good works they do, not themselves. This is a
sinister denial of human goodness. When you do good don’t be afraid to take
the credit at least in your own mind. Don’t be duped by schemers who want you
to think you have nothing to offer without God. They want you to be addicted
to God to get false sense of self-esteem. Self-esteem that comes that way is
dangerous and fragile and is not the real thing.
God
is said to answer all prayers that plead for the enlightenment of the
atheists and others for wisdom is one of the most important gifts. So prayer
accuses atheists and agnostics and believers who barely believe of resisting
his light if they don’t convert to theism or convert properly or to whatever
faith the one doing the praying thinks is the true religion. Prayer is
insulting and arrogant.
Jesus
said to love your neighbour as yourself is like the commandment to love God
with all your heart. That clearly shows that the God dogma implies we should
all become fundamentalist fanatics for God said that no work that is good in
his sight though it may be good in the sight of men can be done without
prayer. The result is that we end up one of these fundies in our attitude
even when this attitude does not spill over into fanatical acts. The message
prayer gives is that humanity was made for faith and not faith for humanity
which is a clear invitation to the world to be full of poison disguised as
sweetness.
Prayer
is bad because religious belief is.
SINNERS AND PRAYER
The
Bible and the Church says that when we pray the Holy Spirit prays with us and
in our place to make up for our deficiencies and that all prayer is inspired
by God (Romans 8:26).
The
Catholic Church and many other religions tell people that they can pray well
and love God while deliberately adhering to sin which is impossible. People
who don’t speak out against these abominations are just as bad as the priests
and spiritual fathers who foster them.
A
sinner cannot love God. The sinner’s love for God is a mere pretence when
they adhere to sin for who can will what God wills and not will it at the
same time? The sinner can’t say, “God’s will be done”, and mean it.
The
love of God and the love of neighbour go together. So if you sin against your
neighbour you sin against God and if you sin against God you sin against your
neighbour. If you don’t love God then you don’t love the being upon which the
welfare of others depends so you cannot sincerely love them. If you don’t
love your neighbour you don’t love God for he wants you to love them and you
owe it to him to do what he wills. All sin so all are telling God how much
they fool themselves that they love him which makes them the most dangerous
enemies of God of the lot. Prayer mocks God so it despises neighbours too.
Praying for others is hypocrisy.
There
is no God when we can’t pray owing to deliberate sin for he made us to love
him if he exists. If we were made to love one another and not him he would
not reveal to us or care if we believed or not. He would program our
intelligence which is programmed anyway not to even think of him existing
when prayer is bad. People think of God not existing so there is no God.
Atheists
rightly take offence when somebody promises to pray for them. Praying for the
conversion of Atheists is patronising them and being self-righteous for it
comes from the “we are right and they are wrong” kind of attitude. Praying is
stranger than casting spells over a cauldron. Prayer is an insult to God and
if an answer from God is anticipated that only goes to show that it is an
attempted and shoddy spell. It is trying to control God by words and
thoughts. Prayer denies that God is God for he can be fooled by mortal men
and women.
PRAYER THRIVES ON DOUBT!
Prayer
is supposed to help faith grow. What it does is make doubt simulate faith. It
is this doubt that teams up with good feelings that brings the benefits not
prayer and not faith.
Because prayer is raising the heart and mind to God only the sinless can pray for only they can really unite with God. James 1 says the man who doubts cannot expect to receive anything from the Lord for he is devious and erratic. In other words, he is trying to trick God. If the doubter can’t expect an answer for prayer the sinner can expect less. Praying then is blowing your own trumpet. It is saying you don’t doubt and/or that you don’t sin. It’s only for hypocrites. Jesus famously said, contradicting James, that prayer can move a mountain from where it is and transplant it into the sea if you have a little faith, that is faith as big as a mustard seed. Some believers say he didn't mean weak faith but the unshakeable faith of one that barely knows anything about God. The faith is small, a mustard seed, in content but strong in force. The solution is not very believable.
So Jesus in typical confusion, taught the absolute necessity of faith for getting prayers answered. “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them” – Jesus, Mark 11:24 King James Bible.
Jesus suspected that prayer was hypocrisy and useless when he said sincere people do it in private but that still didn’t stop him deceitfully advocating prayer.
Suppose you doubt. If you don't have a strong faith that is the same thing as having a faith and doubting it. Jesus says that strong faith is necessary for God to answer prayers. James says it too and James is supposed to be the word of God, scripture. Suppose you pray to heal your child. Now, that means if you pray with little faith or with doubts then you are forcing God NOT to answer your prayer and do the opposite of what you ask. He can't answer the prayer for he has said that he will not reward pathetic faith with an answer.
Some Christians say that prayer develops faith. When you find God working in you through it and answering prayers it gets stronger. You see it working and so it grows. This contradicts the doctrine that strong faith is needed before prayer has any hope of being answered. Faith must be weak to start off with. So how then could prayer develop it when God cannot answer the prayer of weak faith?
The
man who has not tried to reduce doubt by putting learning about the faith and
incorporating what is learned into his relationship with God is no better
than a doubter. In so far as he keeps his faith less strong than it could be
he is doubting. That means that all the incredible answers to prayer that
most believers report are all in their heads for they are coincidence or they
have done something to answer the prayers themselves. And the answers only
produce hypocrisy for they are happier to get what they want from God than
they would be to die for him rather than be separated from him for two
seconds. St John Mary Vianney stated that we should love God so much that we
would rather that happened and we would die than lose him. No God is going to
degrade himself by answering the prayers. If they are being answered then it
is some lunatic God or Satan who is doing it. So Mary in her apparitions at
I
find the ban on boasting in the Bible to be inexplicable while Christians are
allowed to boast about their faith and lack of doubt when they tell you they
will pray for you! They are saying, “We are great and we have let God remove all
our doubts so our prayers will be effective which is why we will pray for
you”. That is totally insulting to doubters who have good reason to doubt and
it is totally pompous. It shows that the boast of the smug apostles and their
Church that Jesus and the faith he preached gave nobody the right to think
themselves more moral than anybody else (Ephesians 2:8-10) to have been
another of their shameless multifarious deceptions.
Many
people with very weak faith and who are full of doubts report cures at the
hands of healers. I am not saying the cures have anything to do with God.
What I am saying is that it is bigotry to say that prayers are answered
according to faith for, if there is a God, who knows? So James that is you
told! Your saying that is just as much a boast about yourself as it is for
you to say that Jesus is the only way to God like your Christian brethren do
for that is saying, “I’m great and better than you Buddhists and other pagans
for I know something you don’t – the only way to Heaven”. Jesus said he was
the way and the truth and the life and no man could come to God except by him
(John 14:6) so his prayers did not gain him much genuine virtue either.
Prayers and sacraments just give false hope.
If you trusted God you
would not ask him for something more than once.
Jesus
criticised the pagans who prayed tonnes thinking that they would be heard for
their many words (Matthew 6:7). So, quality matters and quantity does not. It
follows that if one person prays for the world to be holy that prayer will do
and is as good as a billion billion similar prayers. Yet Christianity blames
the falls of priests and religious into sin on people not praying enough for
them. God would find that unspeakably offensive for it accuses him of
neglecting them because other people didn’t ask him to help them. It
contradicts the stuff about quality alone being what counts. (All apparitions
of the Virgin Mary and the saints and Jesus make the same error.) It is
blasphemous to order people to always pray like the Bible does (1
Thessalonians 5:17) for when one prayer does there is no need for any more.
God would not order people to do what they don’t need to do on pain of sin
and punishment if he is love.
Prayer
is impotent when one prayer is not enough so its failure is a proof that
there is no God. If religionists thought that one prayer were enough they
would not be saying more. And if one is enough and God can’t do more than he
does then prayer is blasphemously and unreasonably complaining about this.
People forget to do it which a good God would not allow if that is all we are
put on earth for. Sinners feel like praying so the inclination to prayer is
not evidence for the existence of God. Prayer disproves God though it is
supposed to be evidence for him.
Often,
Christians say that prayer is not trying to influence God. If God does not
need it then it is a waste of time. A good God would rather you spent your
time helping people. Prayer is an insult. God cannot need your prayers for he
is almighty and knows what he should do without you asking. The Catholic
Church when it holds that the saints intercede with God cannot hold that
prayer doesn’t influence God for interceding means influencing. You might not
get what you intercede for but you have still exerted some influence. Perhaps
God just asks for prayer so that we will spend time with him in love and
develop a relationship with him? But we can do that without getting down on
our knees and praying. Obeying his commands to help others knowing that it
pleases him should be the kind of prayer he asks for because it is striving
harder to be his friend. Things like going to Mass and taking communion are
wrong.
Jesus told the parable of the corrupt judge (Luke 18:1-8). The gospel says the parable is about the importance of not losing heart. In it the judge refuses to help a woman and doesn’t care about her. But she asks for his help many times and he gets scared and then gives her what she wants. Then Jesus says that this shows that God will help those who call out to him day and night. Christians deny it but it cannot be denied by honest people that Jesus was saying you have to ask God a lot of times to get his attention. The context proves it. Jesus then was turning God into something no better than a man. Some Son of God then. Jesus was a fraud. His miracles were not genuine for his doctrine was false.
Prayer
does not work and the reasoning behind it is wrong.
Inability to trust others indicates that you don't trust yourself. If you like yourself, you will find it easier to trust others. If you dislike yourself, that causes you to fear that others will hurt you. It diminishes trust. If you believe in God but don't trust him that would indicate you have very serious problems indeed when you cannot trust an all-good God. You would need therapy. My advice would be to drop the belief altogether. That you would need to drop the belief, shows there is something wrong with believing in God. Prayer encourages this wrongness for it is based on trust in God.
Imagine you are struggling to help somebody. You lack strength or you feel you do. You pray and you feel stronger and complete the task. You will be afraid to believe that this strength was your own and that it came from God. This is just putting yourself down. It is refusing to trust yourself which raises questions about the sincerity of your trust in God. If you didn't trust God, the prayer wasn't answered but ignored even though it looks like you got what you asked for. Just because you pray for something and because you get it doesn't mean the prayer had anything to do with it.
Maybe you created the strength yourself.
Maybe you were stronger than you thought all the time.
Praying urges you not to take the credit for your own strength. It encourages dependency.
Perhaps the main reason people bother with God religion is so that they will have something to hang on to when they are on their death beds. Do the dying feel they are doing something to help themselves when they pray for death? But when prayer means that you have to leave the future and decision making to God that cannot be the case. The feeling then would be sinful for that reason. God can allow really deep depression to happen. He doesn't give comfort to everybody. Feeling loved
Praying that your suffering will end in death or praying for another to get to their rest and be relieved of their terminal agonies does not fit the modern religious claim that life is more important than happiness and so that life must be the thing that should be looked after at all costs! Religionists are always contradicting themselves as hypocrites do. To desire that somebody will die would be wrong when God can have other plans. We can't pray for God to mercifully end a life for that is not a mercy if life is so important. What then is the point of bothering with religion? It would be evil for us to bother when it causes so much trouble.
To pray for somebody to die is to consent to their death. Is that not fanaticism? Is that not staking too much on a mere belief: God? If there is no God, perhaps they are better off alive than annihilated.
PRAYER IS NEVER ANSWERED
It
has been found that statistically people who pray are no better off than
those who don’t (page 157, The Puzzle of God) so
that shows that there is no God or that prayer is no good if there is. Bishop
John AT Robinson in Honest to God wrote that when you pray for another
you are opening yourself up unconditionally to love for him or her before God
(page 99). We are incapable of this love – we only love selfishly - so prayer
is only for perfected saints. Coming from anybody else it is a show-off and
could not possibly cause supernatural benefits except by black magic.
Ayn
Rand claimed that belief in God is demeaning because it suggests that man is
an inferior being and has to worship an ideal represented by God that he will
never achieve (page 230, Christianity for the Tough-Minded). She is
right for you should be happy with yourself as you are and this will improve
you automatically. There is no way then that prayer with the example and
message it gives could be really helping another person. Any help it gives is
useless compared to the damage.
Some
hotly contested studies claim to show that people who pray are mentally
healthier and get better quicker than people who do not. It is certain that
since one prayer should be enough if God is going to help you that this is
not down to prayer but to the good feelings it may induce. Prayer is
relaxing. But any relaxation technique that appeals to you should do. We are
not told about those who prefer to heal themselves through the power of
relaxation and inner peace not by prayer but by using crystals and spells and
other actions which the Church considers profane for they imply that magic is
necessary to get favours from God for he is incompetent in many things.
Prayer does not help because it cannot help without a positive outlook so it
is magic that really does the work if anything supernatural is happening. The
relaxing and hopeful attitude behind prayer helps but that is not the same
thing as prayer helping. Cheerfully chatting all day is great therapy when
you are sick. Prayer has the same effect for it is like cheerfully chatting
to your friend God. But God is not nice so the good results have nothing to
do with him and you only imagine he is a nice guy. Prayer is not supposed to
be about healing and helping but about bringing yourself and others into
submission to God so the studies are irreverent and distorting what prayer
would mean if there is a God. Only the Devil could ensure that the results of
the studies are positive towards prayer.
The reason the Church says that prayer is necessary for remaining a true believer in God is that most believers in God believe because they think they have got results from their prayers which indicates that there is a God out there. So when Jim prays for a bicycle and he gets one within days he thinks this is an answer to his prayers. But Jim has a brain and knows he might have got the bike anyway. There must be a fear then that makes him ignore this and attribute the act to God. The fear is that he might be ungrateful and get no more favours from this God if he decides it was not or might not have been God after all. So it is guilt then that makes people think that prayer works even though most of the time prayers are unanswered. Prayer is bad for this reason. If God or prayer were really good then a person deciding that a seeming answer to prayer was not a real answer from God and was just a coincidence would be seen as doing nothing wrong. To condemn or penalise them is simply to hold that they have no right to think for themselves or have their own opinion. So prayer is not so virtuous and wonderful after all! Anything that produces guilt dents self-esteem which is so essential for living a life of decency that has concern for others so prayer causes much indirect evil and violence.
We want people to find us lovable. If we think we are causing people to love us say by magic that love will not satisfy us. It is manipulation that is causing the love. The love isn't real for it is not us that is found lovable but magic making people think we are lovable. It is about the magic and not us. Christianity teaches that God enables his true followers to love one another and that this love is not natural but a supernatural gift of God called grace. It is another way of saying that real love is magic. The Church says love needs to be a gift from God and not our creation for we are so bad and stupid and imperfect. This wouldn't be love. God and love are irreconcilable. Prayer is basically asking God to help us love him and others far more or to start loving others as God wants. The Church says that prayer is about love above all things. Prayer is evil. To derive satisfaction from it is delusional.
Prayers
are never really answered when they steal your soul and mental balance for
some seeming answer to prayer. What you get is not worth the praying for
prayer is inherently demeaning and has bad psychological effects that
outweigh the psychological benefits.
MENTAL PRAYER: THE ONLY VIRTUE
Sin
is what does not give to the Lord the honour which he is due. Forgetting God
is a sin. If God comes first, as the very concept of God implies, he should not
be forgotten. But we have to forget God to live in this world. For example,
you cannot even cook the dinner if you are going to think only of God. Your
concentration will fail you.
Christianity
says that God wants you to serve him by living in the world as a normal
person. But this contradicts its doctrine that God has to come first. Out of sight out of mind.
If God is to be supreme then we should think of his presence and nothing else and forget about helping others and working for they are only distractions. They are idolatries.
Even
vocal prayer, prayer that is made up of words is sinful. When you say the
prayer Jesus made, “Our Father who art in Heaven”, you are thinking of the
words and not just not the presence of God.
The words distract you at least partly from your focus on the divine
presence. You can’t even have a
picture of God in your head for that is thinking of an image and not of God.
All you can do is be aware that he is there.
We
see then that everything is evil and of the Devil except resting in the
presence of God in a state of freedom from sin. Distraction need not always
be sinful but it would always be evil. It would be something we need to be
sorry for.
Like
the Hindu holy men, we must sit staring vacantly into space and be passive.
We must let the ivy grow all over us and the birds build their nests on our
heads.
If
this is against God’s will then God is evil. Then he did not make us to put
him first and therefore has no reason to let us suffer. It would be actually
crueller to say that we should suffer needlessly than that we should repose
in him. Meditation is better for us.
If
life is just about a choice between involvement in the world and meditation
then suffering is wholly pointless. The mediator would be condoning the
depravity of God simply by trying to get close to him and to please him, to
reward him for being bad, in effect. One might argue like the Christian
Science Church that suffering is an illusion and that the hideous things one
sees happening around her or him are not real. They exist so that we might
make the sacrifice of treating them as unreal for God.
Some
would say that God would want us to be able to meditate or try to despite
suffering which gives our efforts more merit. But that if that is correct in
principle it is not in practice because suffering distracts from God which
means he has to do without it if he wants our attention.
If
virtue is the means to an end then it follows that if God comes first then
focusing only on him should be the end we are all after not helping other
people or being happy. This is a revolting idea. Virtue that is not just a
means to make other people happy is not virtue and that is the final word.
Virtue that focuses on making a God who is already perfectly happy, happy is
a perversion not virtue. What about people that bleed and suffer? Virtue that
is not primarily focused on one’s own happiness is a disorder and to be
focused on something like God that is going to get the benefit instead of
others is to repudiate happiness.
Serving
others so that when you see them happy, that will make you happy, is really
to work for your own happiness and not theirs for your motive is your own
happiness. Their happiness is but the
means to the end, and the end is your happiness. But God says love your neighbour as
yourself so he forbids you to get self-esteem in helping others. You help
others as yourself without doing it all because you love yourself and
consider yourself worthwhile. That command is meant to do one thing, break
people down and turn them into failures. It is no wonder the majority of
Christians live bad lives at least from a God or Bible perspective. Yet
prayer is about trying to love your neighbour as yourself so prayer is a
deadly device.
God-based
religion is certainly pro-perversion whether it notices it or not and must be
firmly but gently corrected. God, if he is maker of all things, then made the
aberration in us that makes us develop happiness when we stop focusing on it.
This suggests that happiness is something he does not like. Religion might
say we are only to have stopped directly focusing on happiness and we are
still after it but indirectly but if God made that system it suggests a
grudging tolerance of self-love. He can’t stomach it but just endures it. God
prefers us if we distort our feelings and end up depressed and miserable. To
see us happy is as vulgarity to him.
The
Church claims to agree with humanists these days that the person or human
life is the most important thing to look after. But that totally contradicts
the first greatest commandment which makes God the most valuable thing when
it commands that you love God with all your heart and powers. It implies that
it is better to die than to sin. The nearest way you can get to holding God
as the supreme value and then life is by holding that prayer and thinking of
God should be the only activities you care about, for yourself and for
others. That means it is better to let a man die of a heart attack on the
street rather than distract yourself from God by ringing for an ambulance. It
means that parties and entertainment are sinful. It means that it is better
to try and persuade somebody to think only of God than to take that person to
the hospital for life-saving surgery.
MY LETTER
This is an excerpt of a
letter I had published in The Freethinker in 2003.
I believe that the
Christians are right that prayer develops their faith and makes them take it
more seriously and that people fall away from the faith when they stop
praying. That is why I think it is very important that prayer be exposed for
the superstitious uncharitable activity that it really is. If people get
ashamed of praying it will lead to a downslide in religious influence.
It is certain that human
life is absolutely valuable. The biggest essential for human life is
consciousness. Consciousness is more important then than free will or memory
or virtue. This means that nothing ever justifies suffering for consciousness
is hurt by suffering. Yes, we have to cause some suffering for a greater good
but it would mean that a God would have no justification for making suffering
possible for he has the power to prevent all suffering unlike us. For example,
he should not have made viruses to cause agonising diseases. Prayer implies
that God needs to make us suffer for a good reason which is therefore a total
insult against the dignity of human beings.
Everything we get in life
comes about as the result of a worldwide process for all events effect each
other. When you are praying you intend that a lot of things will happen both
bad and good in the world to make the forces of chance give you what you ask
for. Is it not fanaticism and criminal then to ask for the gift of patience
when so many terrible events and deaths had to happen before you could get
it? Is it not fanaticism to ask (indirectly) a God you only believe in but do
not know to kill people to give you what you want? You are trying to get people
killed over a belief because that is all that God is. God makes life cheap
when you can try to kill just for the sake of a belief when you need proof.
If prayer does any good it
does it in spite of itself.
CONCLUSION
Atheists have a right
to see prayer as an evil activity. It conditions people to prefer God’s
rights to human rights and to deepen the religious hold on the world with all
the terrible disasters that brings. Prayer insults people. The view of
God that it proposes for us is vile and has resulted in the vile hypocrisy
that is so common in people of faith. One wonders if people who are
unaffected by its poison really believe or only imagine that they believe.
Prayer implies God
should let good people suffer for he has the power to save them and won’t. It can
only lead to trouble. If people didn’t see the need for praying they wouldn’t
see the need for believing in God so prayer must be exposed.
The benefits of prayer
do not come from prayer at all which is why we should destroy people’s faith
in prayer and have no regrets. The benefits are nothing compared to the
damage that is done.
The WEB
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12608c.htm
Catholic
Encyclopaedia. This discusses Quietism.
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