WE WANT TO FEEL CARED FOR AND THAT LEADS TO THE CARING ILLUSION

Caring looks right and good and laudable even if others are deliberately neglected. People are so biased and they have a need to believe there are enough good people around for it stops them worrying about their own welfare so much. So the good person is praised while the bad they are doing is ignored or excused. Doing good is not enough to make you good for saints can be fakes. Your heart may have secret motivations that are on the dark side or it could be about showcasing how wonderful you are. Cherry-picking good is a sign of badness not goodness for it shows you are capable of doing good properly but won't. The brain rewards good deeds even when they are not really good but about you doing good not because it is good but because you feel like it. Prayer is top of the list when it comes to trying to experience this reward. It is the easiest and can be the laziest. As bad as it is to help a person when you are dodgy in everything else it is worse to pray instead. Believers may find this statement totally offensive but do they really want a world where everybody prays for the orphan and gives her or him nothing? Prayer realistically is not what truly matters though it presents itself as if it is for it is based on the notion that all comes from God so God alone can matter and does matter.
 
If people pray a lot and still labour 24/7 to help others, this is their human nature at work. It is not prayer. They are good because they are good. It is not prayer that is helping for it cannot. If it is not helping it is stopping them from being even better than what they are. No wonder it is easy to find disasters in how Mother Teresa cared for the sick.

Prayer is about feeling God listens to you. A problem shared and talked about is not lessened but feels less terrible. You get warped if you seek that relief if the pain you feel is about somebody else. What if it is an acquaintance? What if it is the starving children on the television famine appeal? Or the victims of the Nazis? You are dulling your empathy and your good deeds for them will be nothing compared to what you could do. Chances are you will do nothing but pray or pray that somebody else will help them so you can go to Mauritius.