CRITICAL THOUGHTS ON PRAYING AND WARNINGS
Prayer is raising the heart and mind to God meaning you are trying to let him in
to change you into being more like him. Asking him for anything implies asking
that you will use it in a worthy manner and grow in doing so.
Religion sometimes says that God does not ask for heroic service of others from
us! The New Testament certainly says different! And heroes are really just
ordinary scared people who made the decision to go among the dying and the
suffering. We cannot tell ourselves that it is not in us to be as good as them
for it is. Thus praying for people instead of going among them to suffer with
them and die with them if need be is trying to feel you are doing something when
you are doing damn all.
Why are religious people always careful to ask for things that will probably
happen anyway? This is not right when it involves praying for others. They are
trying to convince themselves that they have helped when they have not.
They accidentally pray for things that they thought could happen anyway and which
don't happen. If somebody whose recovery they pray for dies they tell themselves
that the prayer brought them spiritual healing and that cannot be seen. They
excuse failures and twist them into successes. Again it is themselves they are
trying to convince. They are using the misfortune and sickness of another to
fuel their own faith. Disgraceful!
Prayer does not truly respect God if the backdrop is anything other than the
attitude, "God is a noun but also an action verb. You must do what you ask him
for. For example, instead of merely asking him to feed the starving, ask him to
help you do it and go and do it." Thus those who pray for the poor and keep the
money that can help them are hypocrites. That means nearly all Christians.
Action should come before prayer or if you like action should be the prayer. If
your prayer is not helping the person you are praying for and you cannot help
that person, then help somebody else.
Some say that praying for another is a do thing not an ask thing. Or it is more
about doing than asking as such. You do the good as a prayer asking for divine
help. Religion defines prayer as a relationship with God that need not be
expressed by words. So you perform the request by doing what you ask God for. If
you want Tony healed then go and attend him on his sickbed. Prayer is action and
action is prayer. But then you will think it is the action being prayer that
helps not the action itself. In fact it is the action that helps. You are saying
it is God that helps not you. It is a denial that doing good is good in itself
regardless of whether you care for God or not. Your prayer in action is about
intending to do nothing though benefit is done.
Prayer is evil for some people would adore and revere an evil God and not even
admit it to themselves or see it. Action is needed here to prove the words. That
is why it is so important that before you call yourself good and compassionate,
you must try to suffer all the suffering that has ever happened or will happen
before you can judge that it fits the notion of a loving God who lets it happen.
Only a person who experiences all suffering and the good that comes from it has
the right to condone or risk condoning the evil that God lets befall the
universe. Those who think God is evil might still adore him for they feel he
will have them in Heaven forever and they don't care as long as it is to Hell
with everybody else.
Condoning evil that is done by a tyrant is motivated by a desire to stop fearing
and hating the evil so much. You want to protect yourself from those hideous
feelings. You feel a sense of control over the evil when you become complicit in
it by silence or however. Prayer facilitates and nurtures your ability to
condone the evil you think God lets befall people. There is no difference
between the person who condones evil that is allowed to happen by his ruler
saying it is for an unknown but good reason and one who says it is allowed by
God. Prayer is evil. It is about people condoning the horrendous evil they see
in order to delude themselves that they are bigger than the evil. They think
that their marriage with God in prayer makes them bigger than the evil so that
they do not have to fear it much.
When reality and the rational world get too scary, we can relieve that fear by
resorting to something irrational and illogical such as prayer and religion.
They make us feel we are overpowering the rational. They make us feel powerful
and in cahoots with the supernatural. Prayer relieves the fear of truth and
reality. It is embracing irrationality to practice irrationality. It is really
trying to feel good about doing nothing except dip into escapism.
Prayer is evil for if God helps a person because he was asked then he did it
because he was asked and not merely because it was good. It is evil to pray to
such a genie God who is not good at heart. You are not really about helping
people if you put them in the hands of such a god.
When you pray for somebody when you cannot help them, you will feel like you
did. No honest or fair person takes credit for helping others or claims they
tried to help when there is no evidence that they did. They do not give
themselves a pat on the back. They will not use somebody else's torture as an
opportunity to feel holy, good and self-righteous. And if you cannot help
somebody, then go and find somebody who you can help instead of praying for
them.
Why feel that your prayer has helped when you make excuses when you do not get
what you asked for? If your father is not healed of cancer, you argue that the
prayer did work in some unknown way but not in the way you asked or expected.
Why not say, "When I touch wood and make a wish I get it. If I do not get that
wish fulfilled it is because the magic has got me something as good or better"?
So you reason that without the prayer it would be worse. You believe in the
excuses more than in prayer or touching wood. The ancients argued that human
sacrifice gave them what they asked for though not always in the expected way.
The excuses can justify any superstition. They make one superstition as good as
another. Prayer thrives on the superstitious attitude so if you encourage prayer
you should encourage other kinds of superstition too. When you like blueberry
pie you have to invite others to try pies of different sorts to see what they
like. It thrives on your desire to feel that you helped. If you really want to
help, you will be careful to avoid excuses and you will ground yourself on
evidence.
Prayer is taught in such a way that it cannot be shown useless but that means it
cannot be shown useful either. If people suffer, that is too serious of a matter
to be trivialised with such nonsense as the alleged power of prayer.
Prayer is based on the notion that God communicates with you just as you are
communicating with him by praying. Anyone in any kind of relationship knows how
important communication is. Without communication from God and with God, it is
hardly a relationship at all. So prayer goes hand in hand with inducing a
delusion on yourself and in others through your example. This is enough to risk
you getting detached enough from reality and other people that you are of little
use to them. And it is arrogant to think God is communicating with you for no
two people agree on what he is saying to them. It is their own thoughts they
ascribe to God and it is arrogance to imagine you can work out what is from God
and what is not.
Some people believe that even the staunchest atheists have a relationship with
God without realising it which would mean that everybody prays somehow and that
nobody can say, "Those who think prayer doesn't work are not trying it". They
say God is bigger than any errors a person makes and if the person has a good
heart God is in that person and that person is connected with God. If this
argument is true, it disposes of the notion that those who say prayer is no good
for it is never answered are guilty of not doing it to try it. They would be
praying without realising it. The argument gives more weight to the evidence
that prayer is indeed useless. It makes prayer totally non-testable. If prayer
is good we cannot know and we cannot blame anybody for giving up on it. It makes
religion useless as a genuine spiritual force that betters the heart.
Some people get the same feeling from saying a prayer as they do from having
done something good. They may pray a lot because it is this buzz they want. They
work for the buzz indirectly but they still work for it. Others will not get
that feeling and hardly ever pray. The buzz comes to mothers who give their
alcoholic sons a bottle of wine too. The buzz that one gets from praying for
another is less impressive when it can come from doing fake good.
Real prayer involves trusting God even if he does something terrible to a child.
You must intend that he does his will even if it means that somebody has to be
tortured by aliens for all eternity. God's plan lets evil happen which means the
plan will not necessarily make anybody happier but works on developing the
greatest virtue in the greatest number. The prayers of believers are not
motivated by super-sacrifice intention so they are not prayers to God but to the
image they have made of God. Prayer is not really about genuinely helping
people. How can they be when they are not about connecting to a real God in the
first place?
Believers hold that if you pray for something good to happen and for God to give
you graces etc that he will reward you for praying even if he didn't answer the
prayers. It would be horrendous if people were praying for the sick because they
want the reward! It would be horrendous if they were consoled by praying at the
thought of the reward. That would be using the thought of a reward to dull the
pain that you should feel when you see people suffering.
Rewards mean nothing to us unless they are approval of us. People praying for
others to get approved by God is selfish even if they do not care about money or
any other reward.
Religion is often vindictive. The believer often feels good about adoring an
evil or partly-evil God and sees his evil as good. This believer is happy to see
others suffer at the hands of this God for he thinks that they are suffering
like him at last. Some think the suffering of others while they enjoy their
lives makes them special in the sight of God and are happy that others suffer
not them. Prayer urges people to sacrifice themselves on the altar of such
religion by being eaten up by hatred.
Prayer can be a way of letting your aggression out. It is an insult to the
goodness in you and others to say that this goodness is not yours or theirs in
reality but down to prayer/God. People who pray adore a God who supposedly makes
sure that bad results are attached to your sins. So the wish to see justice or
the come-uppance is there. There is no evidence that bottling things up is
always bad. It depends on the circumstances. Your angry tirade against injustice
will make you feel madder. Religion makes anger a sin but it has to get out and
it will out. The ban on anger stops religious people from being honest about
their anger.
It would be terrible to be at the mercy of our feelings all the time and have to
do what they demand. We don't really want to do what we feel all the time.
Submission to whatever will be is all we need. We do not need to submit to God.
Just submit and forget about God and the manipulative religious baggage that
comes with God.
Prayer is bad in principle. It is always bad. Principle means it is bad in
itself regardless of how good it makes people feel and how harmless it may
appear. All bad things start with bad principles - that is why bad principles
need to be nipped in the bud. The person who prays is not an island. God and
prayer are not just about you. Other people are into them too. Do not pray and
do not share in the culture of prayer. If you do, you share in the evil that
will result and are disgracefully behind the risk of other evil coming. Truth is
not about you.
Conclusion
People might think prayer brings relief but it never does. There are better
explanations for that feeling of relief. We should go and do all we can for the
person in trouble instead of asking God to do something about it. We will do
that if we really care. Those who are encouraged to appreciate your prayers for
them are being manipulated.