PRAYER IS SOCIALLY APPLAUDED RELIGIOUS VANITY
Prayer according to the Church is raising the heart and mind to God. It means sincerely and consciously communicating with God. It is always asking God for something, it could be to love God more or it could be for something as materialistic as a pay-rise.
It is very vain to pray for say a dry day while babies around the world are starving. To do so, clearly implies that the babies are not your concern but God's and he is working on it. Religion may say there is no sin in this. To say I may pray for dry weather is to state that I have got special favours from God that the baby does not have. What does religion say to that? Just this incomprehensible garbage, "The babies suffer. They have a short life. But God is with them. He blesses them with graces. We are the ones failing to feed them not him. He wants us to do it and we are not doing it. A baby dying in agony for a month can have more graces from God than a long-living pope who dies at 100." This is insulting for it is a serious subject. It needs evidence to say big serious things like that. It just rationalises. Don't use a baby's suffering to make an argument about grace so that you don't look bad. Nobody has the right to look at a suffering person and argue that they are blessed as much as you but in their own way. If everything is a blessing nothing is.
The absence of evidence is one thing. But to contradict oneself and say, "I am starving the babies, and yet I have the right to worry more about the rain staying away" and that, "It is evil what I am doing to the babies and God hates it" is disgusting.
The grace thing is only a way to close the conversation. Why is the believer trying to shut you up?
Suppose God is essentially about us doing good to each other as most people
think. Prayer is an intention of connecting with God. If you are really
connecting you will not be going about telling rosary beads and eating communion
wafers but will be out connecting with God by feeding the homeless etc.
The Church says that salvation is impossible without prayer. That’s
discrimination against those who don’t pray but do some mighty good work. So
prayer is unloving and it cannot do any real good for it deepens darkness in the
heart. The virtue it produces is just self-serving vice in disguise.
If you are happy and confident, you don't need prayer. It is strong self-esteem
we need not prayer. Prayer is therefore incompatible with self-esteem for it
denies this truth. It only bestows self-esteem in some cases in spite of itself.
You would only need to pray if God won’t help you unless you open your heart to
him. A really good God would help you anyway. He could save you through your
sincere effort to live as a good person even without you knowing it is he or
that he exists. God will do what is best and he is the almighty boss so prayer
is not trying to help anybody. It is an evil God that will abandon people until
somebody prays for them. Praying to such a God for them would be insulting them
and doing them no favours - it would be like asking Hitler to take a bottle of
water to the Jewish family down the road. To pray ardently for people to a God
who will do whatever he wants and does not let himself be influenced by you is
not trying to help them. Magic would be more moral for it at least is really
trying to help by sending power to the person in need. Prayer is not for you
can’t influence or change God. It is not really trying.
Praying Christians know that Christianity is not a humanitarian religion - it is
about God and serving him through helping others - the others are not to be
helped for their sake but wholly his. Prayer is for them, just an attempt to
feel good about doing nothing. Then rancid selfishness is concealed by piety.
Even the believer has to admit that prayer is really doing nothing for another
person. God knows what is best. We might pray for healing. And it may come. Did
God answer the prayer then? That depends on his motive. Did he do it to answer
the prayer or did he do it just because it was the right thing to do? If he did
it because he was asked, then it was not because it was right. Maybe he did it
both because he was asked and because it was right? That means he refused to do
it entirely because it was right. In so far as God does not do it because it is
right he is acting amorally if not immorally. As he claims to be good, he would
be showing he is not perfectly good. Then prayer is saying, "I don't care if you
are evil or not do what I ask!" How is that supposed to help us become more
virtuous? No wonder there is nothing remarkable about the virtue of most
believers. Any virtue they have is there in spite of their faith and their
prayers.
It is said that if we pray we become more like God in virtue and this alone is
an answer to prayer. He helps us. But surely learning right and wrong then
matters more than praying? And even those most devout admit they are far from
turning into the image of God through prayer!
A tiny minority of believers say that if we want something from God, we must
make sure that it is spiritually good for us to get it. We have to make the
circumstances right for God to give us the blessing we want. If you want a
bicycle and pray for it then you have to acquire virtue so that you will
appreciate getting it and having it and try to grow closer to God through using
it. For example, you might use it to go to Mass more if you are a Catholic.
This seems to avoid the idea that prayer is an arrogant and prideful attempt to
manipulate God and to impose your will on him. But does it? It does not work.
Most Christians do not emphasise it or even know of it. This means that their
prayers are undoubtedly superstitious. The true devotee will try to be holy for
the sake of holiness and not for the sake of a bike. Such holiness would be
mercenary and thus it would be fake. And if it will help you spiritually to get
the bike you will get it even if you are not paving the way by becoming holier.
As for being good and holy and spiritual so that God will be able to answer your
prayers what about the many evil people who think their evil prayers to him are
answered? Jack the Ripper would have prayed to get through the streets after his
crimes without being apprehended by the police. He would have imagined his
prayer was answered. Believers would see that as proof that his escape was just
down to luck not God for God wouldn't hear his unholy prayers. Yet they refuse
to admit the truth, "There is no way of telling if an answer to prayer is
coincidence or a real answer." They carry on the same way as fortune tellers
with their superstition.
To love God with all your heart means to hate sin with all your heart as well.
Prayer is opening up to that and trying to do that. That is what really matters
if there is a God. Prayer indicates that God is good and so deserves all our
love and it urges people to sacrifice themselves on the altar of religion by
being eaten up by hatred. Then when they go out of control they can make out its
a crime of passion and not fully sinful as they were not completely free.
The prayers of most believers are not motivated by the intention to develop a
rabid hatred of sin so they are not prayers to God but to the image they have
made of God. The ego lurks behind their piety.
Prayer implies that it is God's will that matters and nothing else - it
conditions people to help themselves and others only for God. It implies that
God is what matters and people don't. It implies that if God needed you to
torture everybody else to death you would. Christians say that is a stupid thing
to claim for God would never ask that. But that is not the point and they know
it. The point is that it is hypothetical. You have to be willing to do it at
least in theory.
Why is it that one prayer is never enough? A good God wouldn’t care about the
quantity but the quality. Prayer then is a kind of a spell, trying to control
God and it insults his goodness. It puts people into a relaxed hypnotic state of
mind that is useful for religion to hypnotise people to believe its lies and
obey it. Surely if you pray, "Your will be done!" once you don't need to pray
any more? That is the only real prayer. Those who pray for help at job
interviews etc are hypocrites. They are trying to disguise magic as prayer. If
you pray for a bicycle, it is the bicycle you care about and not God's will. If
you trust God and care only for his will you will not be even mentioning the
bicycle.
Miracles supposedly aim to inspire prayer which if true, shows they
are signs not of wisdom and grace but of folly and evil. Religion
teaches that miracles only happen because people pray as there is no
point in God doing miracles unless there is a reasonable chance
people will pray. Doing miracles without enough concern for
inspiring people from within and building up their relationship with
God is merely showing off.
Does prayer matter in itself? If it does, then it is the fact that
it honours God that matters. God supposedly has to put up with evil.
Hypothetically, he has to put up with people never being happy if
evil goes that far. Obviously even then if there is a God we would
have to honour him though in our lives there is nothing nice or
good. It is not his fault if we suffer. True prayer then involves a
willingness to sacrifice a happy eternity for the sake of morality.
In that case, most people who pray do not really. They only feel
they do. Prayer then is a placebo - you relieve the pain of
witnessing the suffering of others and being unable to help and
unwilling to help. You feel that it is not as bad as it seems for it
is part of God's lovely plan. The truly good person does not risk
diagnosing evil as less than what it is. That only stops a proper
treatment.
Does prayer matter only because it gets us blessings from God? If it
matters even partly because of what we can gain then in so far as we
do that we are for self and not God. Prayer must matter in itself if
there is a God. It follows then that its lesson is that we must be
meant to suffer by crying out to God for help and getting nothing
from him. God then has the right to do this and even the obligation
to.
FINALLY
Prayer is a superstition that deserves all the condemnation that things like fate - ie that the supernatural and nothing else controls your life - and curses do.
