PRAYER VERSUS TRUST
PRAYER THRIVES ON DOUBT!
Prayer is communicating your love and trust and troubles to God and thanking him for all his blessings.
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. The Bible at 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 go out of their way to 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.
People feel comforted by prayer. This is because the habit of using prayer to feel more content is rife in society. We are influenced by this. But people feel better by touching wood. The same force that makes smokers feel happier when they merely reach for a cigarette is responsible. They associate cigarettes with feeling better so even taking a cigarette will have this affect not to mention smoking it. Praying is not a virtuous activity but encouraging our need to act like we need superstitious mascots and our attempts to emotionally manipulate ourselves.
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 is meaningless without the idea that God can intervene and change things to put them the way you want them. If you thought God would do these things anyway you wouldn't see the need to ask for change. The more asking you do the more you would be acting like you are trying to force his hand. If you really trust someone you just ask them the once. Prayer encourages egotistical thinking and desires.
You may pray, "God help me to submit to your will and accept whatever you choose to do." Prayer is really a disguised and dishonest attempt at magic. It is you trying to be a God who is independent of any real God that could be out there.
Johnny being a child will be asking God to do miracles. He will think of prayer more as a way to get what you want than as a form of submission to God. Encouraging children and teens to pray is encouraging them to want to manipulate reality by making things happen. It makes them too selfish. This can lead them to religiosity. Or it can lead to them ditching religion to be selfish. In either case, they will be made too selfish because of the irresponsible people who urged them to pray when they were in their childhood. Religion does more indirect evil than direct evil.
If God does secret miracles a problem with trust appears. Suppose you put an apple into Johnny's lunchbox and send him off to school. He prays during class that when lunch time comes that you will have put a peach in his lunchbox for he doesn't like apples. Then God swaps the apple with a peach for Johnny will never ask you anyway what you put in and he won't say about the peach. So nobody will ever know.
Is Johnny asking God to change what is in his lunchbox the moment he prays?
Is Johnny asking God to take his present prayer into account to change the past? Is he asking God to manipulate me to put in a peach not an apple?
Either way Johnny is asking for reality to be rigged up to suit his insignificant whim. Prayer suggests that God approves of one's manipulative urges. If God is like that then God cannot be trusted.
If I mark somebody's exam paper, they will never know if God altered the work after they did it. You might say one should trust that God would not do a thing like that. But we are asked to trust God no matter how bad life gets for us. So he hurts and lets bad things happen presumably for a good purpose. We are asked to become victims if God needs that for the greater good of others. So to say you should trust that God has not altered the marks is no better than saying that you should dictate to God what he can and cannot do. If you trust God, you will trust that he may have changed the work and that he knew what he was doing and had to do it for a good reason and not because he wanted to. So you can't really be sure of anything should you believe in miracles.
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.
Christians pray for sinners. Sinners who feel they can trust them because they pray for them are misplacing their trust. Here is why. Christians say they can condemn actions as vile and evil and abominable when these actions are carried out by people who are reasonably sane and who knew what they are doing. They deny that they can condemn the doers of the actions in the same way. They say only God can do that. That means they say that if God condemns you and they know it then they will hate you. To say you love a person because you don't know if they are unlovable or not is not really loving that person. It is taking a chance. The love is conditional. It is loving the conditions not the person. This is no good. If Charlie loves Andie because she is rich then it is really the wealth he loves not her.
God is said to communicate when we pray. He tells us when the bike we got that we prayed for was given to us because we prayed and not because somebody else prayed or because we were going to get it anyway. He tells the person that it will be okay when it keeps getting worse and worse. People do feel that God tells them when somebody is bad or damned. Thus though Christians say God must condemn people and not them they can get around this. They can say that God tells them who he condemns and why so that leaves them free to condemn and judge. Prayer is not talking to God but communicating with God. So prayer leads to people becoming arrogant and assuming they know more than they actually do.
To argue that prayer leads you to see that God gave you the bike in reply to prayer but that it cannot lead you to see that a person is condemned by God is just to make a fool of yourself. Why one and not the other? You argue that people don't have the right to feel that God tells them to judge as a result of prayer. Why then should you have the right to say that feeling you know he gave you the bike because your prayer was successful proves he did it? What makes you so special? What makes you the infallible authority on God? In the prayer of the humble, all one can see is the disguised pride and arrogance.
Jesus commanded unconditional love for God. You are to love God wholly and entirely because he is God and not because he is good. To love good would not be the same as loving God. He told us then to love our neighbour as ourselves. This is conditional love. Conditional love means, "I will love you if such and such is the case and as much as the rules allow it." The rule is that you don't love your neighbour as much as God or yourself. It is madness to think that the God of Jesus Christ really answers prayer when he is so hateful. A God that wants to be loved totally as you confer shoddy inferior "love" on yourself and others is not the kind of thing you would want to be praying to.
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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