PRAYER IS FEELING GOOD ABOUT DOING NOTHING
Prayer is always asking in the sense that you are asking for you and God to
relate to each other. So even prayers of love for God are petitions in a sense.
All prayer is petitionary and we must ask if there is a problem with petitionary
prayer.
Some people believe prayer is not meant to do anything apart from make you feel
better about somebody else's suffering or your own.
Some believe prayer only helps a person inside - God gives them strength. A
change happens emotionally or spiritually or both. This pressures the person to
pretend to have changed otherwise people will think they are not sincere when
they pray.
Some believe prayer can also change what is going to happen on the physical
level. A person who should die may live.
Some get a good feeling from prayer because they reason that when they pray for
others’ needs and well-being, their own needs are answered! Praying for others
can be a tactic for getting blessings yourself! No wonder it can feel good!
In fact if your or somebody else's suffering is terrible then feel bad as about
it as possible so that you will do all you can about it. Be confident that the
person may be enduring something that cannot be made up for not even by God. Be
confident that if the person really is alone and no being is with her or him
that you have to be and that it does not matter at all if she thinks god is or
isn't with her. Anything that waters down these noble principles is an outrage.
ARROGANT
The problem with any kind of belief is that we tend to forget most of the time
that it is not a fact for you but just a belief. For example, if you believe
Jesus rose you still don't know for certain if this belief is factual. You will
tend to feel that it is a fact and treat it as such. Belief easily slips into
such arrogance.
Prayer reinforces that arrogance. You feel sure that you have helped others when
you should not be so sure.
When people hear about the bad things that happen in other areas or other
countries they may feel that they are somehow picked by something or someone for
special treatment. They may think the higher power regards them as better people
than it does the unfortunate people who have poor luck. Or it may be random
blessings. Both attitudes stink. Yet the feeling of being blessed or that one
can be is what prayer is all about. The atheist resists the urge for it is
repulsive.
If you pray for John to get better of cancer, and he does, you will end up
thinking, "I did it for him. My prayers cured him." There is something
stomach-churning about that. We sense you are using John's situation to get a
self-righteous thrill.
Hypocrites like to feel they are good people - the ultimate hypocrite does
prayers and superstitious rituals in order to convince herself or himself that
she does the greatest work of all. That is terrible in itself. It is incredibly
arrogant to think your saying a prayer for x matters while your helping that
person say get medical treatment does not matter in comparison. It is a short
step from that to reasoning that you don't have to do anything for others but
pray for them.
PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE
The idea that God always helps but through people means that if you are not
helped you blame others or blame yourself for not getting the help. If a loved
one is not helped you blame others or blame yourself. The main reason for blame
is that the praying was not done or was not up to standard. Prayer is
passive aggressive.
THE CHOICE
Suppose you had to make a choice - one or the other. You pray for a person who
is very ill or you give them medicine. If prayer is the best you can do then you
have to pray. Religion says it is. The atheist will reach for the medicine
bottle. Do you see the intrinsic hypocritical passive aggression in faith now?
A baby needs tablets from you to get better from a terrible cruel illness. You
have a choice, and it has to be one or the other. The choice is will I pray or
give the tablets? If God and prayer come first then clearly praying is the
choice. So you see the nastiness inherent even in the sweetest prayers! And if
God does not come first for you then to pray for him to work with a person is to
invite evil or the risk of evil into that person's life for they are asked to
connect with a God who isn't good enough to matter.
VIRTUE SIGNALLING
Most praying people show it in some way most of the time. This is virtue signalling to others. Private prayer can be understood as trying to virtue-signal to God. People forget you can also virtue-signal to yourself! People who are prayed for need to see how offensive it all is.
CONCLUSION
There are many ways prayer can be feeling good about having done nothing concrete to help the person. If you are praying for x and not seeing what you can do for x then you are just a hypocrite.