THE FOUNDATION OF PRAYER IS A FOUNDATION OF NONSENSE

WHAT IS PRAYER?

Prayer is the awareness of a relationship with the divine. It can be called talking to God but mere talking to God is not necessarily having a relationship with God. Prayer indicates adoration of God and absolute dependence on him.

A DIVINE RIGHT TO BE PRAYED TO?

The Church says, "God has the right to be worshipped not because he is good to us but because he is good in himself."

The Church says that God is so good that he has a right to be worshipped. They say he does not need our prayers. This then contradicts the notion that he has a right to be worshipped. Indeed telling us to worship or even worse commanding us to is really offensive in terms of human rights.

How can we say he is not to be worshipped because he is good to us?

God does not need prayer. He is all perfect and all happy so he has no needs. He has no right to demand devotion from us because rights are based on needs. The Catholic Church says that wilfully refusing to look for the true religion or to join it when it finds it - the true religion being Catholicism according to the Catholics - is against the rights of God. It also says that not praying is an equally abhorrent violation of the divine right to be worshipped. What demeaning doctrines and they show that the Church does not have the moral intelligence it pretends to have. They are bully doctrines. A religion that tries to make people feel they are evil for rejecting it cannot be trusted if it acquires supreme political and religious power in the world. To agree with the Church that God has this right is simply to show that you have problems is pathogenic.

God has no right to prayer. Religion says we should need to pray. Thus it wants us to develop a new need to add to our real needs such as eating and drinking and shelter. In other words, it wants to mess up our heads and make addicts of us.

PRAYER MAKES A GOD OUT OF YOUR OWN INNER PROCESSES!

Religion tends to assume that God helps us to pray and inspires us to do it. It is arrogant to assume this. It is seeing one's own mental processes as the work of the maker of the universe. Religion will reply that as God gives us all we have that it cannot see how that could be conceited.

PRAYER CANNOT CHANGE GOD

Christians say that God is outside of time. That means past and present and future are all rolled into the present for him and this present never changes. It is like a frozen state. They say that since God saw we would pray for things he rigged up his creation beforehand so that we would get them. But is this answering prayer? No. If God already knows everything that he is going to do, there can be no room for indecision and therefore the prayers of his followers can have no impact on what he is going to do.

The idea that when you pray you change yourself but not God then it would mean that the act itself does this and it is going to do this whether there is a God or not. God is actually made irrelevant in the practical sense.

If you pray to turn yourself into the God of the Bible you will be making yourself like him who wanted innocent people put to death by stoning and who sends sinners to Hell for all eternity.

Jesus took time to pray and for himself and for his own needs so as to be able to help others better. He was a fraud. He was trying to manipulate God for he didn't understand that prayer cannot change God's plans.

Prayer insults the intelligence. There is no evidence that it is any good. The Church makes excuses when prayers fail to show any results.

How could it be really right to pray for somebody to get better when there is no evidence that prayer has any efficacy?

The teaching of the power of prayer is a lie. Prayer itself has no power. If you ask a king for a favour the asking has no power. It is only in his deciding to give you what you ask where the power lies.

Some say the more you love your neighbour the more you love God for he loves them. This mistakes benefiting God for loving him. It is simply wrong.

PRAYER HELPS NOBODY!

Prayer does not help anyone. Christians say prayer does not change God. Logically then if that is the case, it should not make us feel better. Should you feel better after writing a letter to the judge who put you in jail for life to let you out? No. You should feel worse in fact.

Some people feel happier and more resigned to the future after praying. Some not all.

Magic is better than prayer. At least you feel you are donating power to help others even if it does not seem to work. You will feel you have tried. Praying is not trying. Those who feel better after praying are in fact only disguising prayer as magic.

We look around and see how all events have results. Some of these results will benefit us and some will benefit others not us. So for me to have coal in my grate is a result of people dying the coal mines and many other things. When I pray, I am asking God to make people sick and kill them so that I may get what I want.

Christianity knows fine well that there has to be exceptions to every rule. Indeed you should steal if you need food to save your life. Yet it has the nerve to make a blanket ban on granting a death with dignity to those who are unremitting pain from terminal illness.

Christians oppose abortion pills. This does not stop abortion but it delays it. There is disagreement about when a new life in the womb can be considered to be a person with the right to life. The reasonable person will want to encourage early abortion for those who need it.

The prayers of the true Christians confirm them in their own depravity and fanaticism. What a testament to the power of prayer.

PRAYING TO GET SOMETHING IS UNCHARITABLE

Praying is begging God to prefer dealing with your problems at the expense of helping other people. You ask for this help not because you deserve it or are entitled to it, but because you want it.

PRAYING FOR SINNERS

Christians say that their prayers for your conversion only help you if you open your heart to God. But it would follow that if you opened your heart without their prayers, you would be as well off. So there is no point in those prayers. The prayers are really just magic - attempts to control you against your will. They are a polite way of indicating that you are considered despicable and worthless as you are and only a thing not a person.

THANKING GOD IS NASTY

Believers tend to thank God and his grace if they survive some disaster. It is extremely offensive and objectionable that these people can have the narcissism and the self-deception needed to think that God lovingly spared them while he lets infants burn to death. When nothing suffices to prove to a Christian that there cannot be a loving God surely the attitude, “Even if God allowing this evil to happen cannot be condoned I want to believe that it can,” is there simmering away? It's poison. It's uncharitable. It makes hypocrisy of Christian relief efforts.

God cannot be known as you would know a fact. At most the believer may hold that God's existence is more probable than improbable. To condone the fact of human suffering for the sake of a belief or worse, an assumption, indicates that the belief is itself evil.

UNANSWERED PRAYER

Christianity teaches that God does not answer prayers if you are in sin (James 5:16; 1 John 3:21-22). He does not answer selfish prayers (James 4:3). He does not answer prayers unless they bring him glory (John 14:13; 2 Corinthians 12:9-10). Also, if somebody is trying prayer out but isn’t confident that God will help he will ignore such prayers (Mark 11:24). When one doesn’t know God’s will well and prays that prayer will be ignored (1 John 5:14,15; Matthew 27:39-41). If you need to do all that before you can pray then why bother? If you get answers to prayer despite these restrictions, then clearly there is no God or Satan is hearing your prayers. Perhaps you have deceived yourself into thinking you want to worship God while it is Satan you worship.

Believers in the power of prayer then are just thinking of the times the prayer seemed to be answered and forgetting the times it was not. Prayer is good psychological training to become the kind of person that is deceived by fortune tellers and psychics. Their clients forget that they give the information to the seer in the first place and they also forget the mistakes the seer makes. They just remember the “hits”. It is because they want to believe.

The notion that the Holy Spirit gives you the power and the prompt to pray is interesting. It amounts to saying he is helping you to make unanswered and unanswerable prayers! It accuses him of being dishonest and a hoaxer.

The Church says that not forgiving people means that God will not answer your prayers. The Church will say that this is not vengeance but is you putting a block in the way of God’s plan for your life. This is rubbish because not all failure to forgive is that serious. The Church will say that failure to forgive eats away at you over time and eventually leads to a loss of health and that you deserve better than that. You have to say “you deserve better than that” to encourage people to do it. But you can’t say it if you are a Christian. Jesus said not forgiving is such a serious sin that if you are guilty of not forgiving, you cannot ask God to forgive you.

TALKING TO YOURSELF

We talk silently to ourselves all the time. We find this is good for us. Prayer in a sense is talking to ourselves. We create our perception that there is a god. We make our idol out of our perceptions and feelings. We talk to that. We feel relief from our problems. It is not really prayer that helps but the talking to ourselves. Prayer as prayer is useless!