EXPOSING THE VANITY OF PRAYER TO GOD THROUGH INVOKING THE SAINTS
Prayer would be less bad if people who got negative experiences from it were encouraged to give it up. Religion in fact encourages you to keep going with it.
Trauma is associated with abuse but abuse can be subtle and crafty.
If a person who is important to you:
Dismisses your experience
Ignores how you feel or tells you that you do not feel it
Blames you for even some of their problems
Makes you too self-critical
Makes you feel you are not good enough
Makes you feel invisible and unheard
Seems to treat another person better than you, perhaps a stranger
Puts some activity such as work or prayer above you
Then damage may come along.
It is safe to say that if you are told God is important to you even if you cannot see it then at least some of these harms will take place. The person does not need to be real. It matters only if you think he is real or may be.
The harm done by thinking God does not understand you and is not guiding can be quite serious.
That is bad enough but some religions offer friends and guardians in addition to God.
If your mother is a saint and you pray to her you will not escape noticing that she is not doing the things you would expect. Think about that. Yet you are asked to make yourself think she is still by your side. Your experience that she is nothing like herself is dismissed.
Catholics pray to saints. They say God uses the saints to help those who pray to
them get close to him. If they really want to get close to God then they don't
need the saints. They can go straight. The saints who pray for you are
hypocritical for the essence of prayer is hypocrisy. If you ask their prayers
that is what you are asking them to be - hypocrites. If we thought they were
merely praying, "You know best O God and your will be done!", we wouldn't bother
invoking them. We wouldn't need to and it would be ridiculous to ask. Those who
pray to saints are trying to get them to manipulate and fool God for them. Only
demons will be interested in responding to such prayers! The prayers are really
attempts to bend God's ear and a sign of mistrust.
SAINTS AND SINNERS
The Roman Church says that we always have some residue of sin in us no matter
how holy we are.
“Lord, the end of another messed-up day. I let you down at every turn. I’ve
lived for myself all through” (page 4, Friday Penance, John C Edwards SJ,
Catholic Truth Society, London, 1985).
Even the greatest saint has sins (1 John 1:8-10). But to do good while sinning
is making it clear to God that you will do good when you feel like it and not
because it is right or because it is God’s will. That is totally evil as God is
so wonderful so the good is not good but defiance disguised as good. To
understand this is to understand the reason the Bible says that one sin defiles
all the good you do (James 2:10; 3:10-12) and makes you a good actor. The result
is spiritual blindness where doing your own will and not God's is made to look
good and even pious. So the saints are really sinners who are whitewashed over
by the Church. To honour them as saints is to honour their sins.
The Catholic Church prays to saints. If you really trust God and find comfort in
him you will not be asking saints to pray to him for you. You will pray to God.
The Church says that praying to the saints is really praying to God through
them, it is giving them the prayers to give to him. If praying to the saints is
really praying to God as the Church says then why don't Catholics simply pray to
God? The reason must be that praying to saints is really satisfying our natural
liking for having many human gods. Humankind did it for countless centuries so
we haven't changed.
If praying to dead saints is fine, then why don't Catholics pray to the living?
The reason is that the saints are thinly disguised gods and it is easier to
believe the dead know all things for the living clearly do not. It is no reply
to say that the saints have God's power to help and not their own power. In
paganism, many gods had no power of their own but they were still gods.
The Bible teaches that Jesus intercedes for us before God (Hebrews 7:25). That
blasphemously infers that God would ignore us and refuse to help us unless Jesus
asked him. A perfect God will give help when its needed and will not need
intercessors. Our asking is not important. God has to do x or its opposite
anyway regardless of whether we ask or not. It is not that he is rude but it is
just the way things have to be. He cannot keep waiting for our consent.
If God would bless you if Jesus never asked then clearly Jesus is not an
intercessor for intercessor means a person who tries to influence a higher
authority for you on your behalf and this authority has to make the decision if
your request will be granted or not. To teach that Jesus or Mary or any saint
can influence God is to deny that God is perfect. It is declaring them more
powerful than he is. It is declaring them to be the real Gods.
The asking is about trying to feel you have some control when you do not. That
is why prayer feels good but it is selfishness hidden as devotion to God.
If God won't help you until you ask or get a saint to ask, then you or the saint
is better than God and God can be manipulated. The saint for example must be
wiser than God.
Praying to saints is really turning to demons for it shows contempt for God and
resorting to beings that are against him. They must be against him if they
listen to your prayers and want them.
You can honour and respect the saints without praying to them.
Prayer when dissected is alarming and offensive and pays homage to fanaticism.
Involving a saint adds insult to injury.
