Response to: Saints have no power but God's so they are not deities
1 Corinthians 2:16 For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, THAT HE WILL INSTRUCT
HIM? But we have the mind of Christ.
Thomas Aquinas referred to this line of scripture where God speaks through
Jeremiah: “The heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable, who can
know it? I am the Lord who search the heart, and prove the reins: who give to
every one according to his way” (17:9-10). He said it proved that “angels do not
know the secrets of human hearts.” The same must be true of the saints which
raises the question that if nobody hears your secret prayers to saints or angels
then who does? Satan? If you are saying prayers to angels and saints when they
cannot hear you that puts you in the same category as those who the Bible says
pray to statues that cannot see or hear them. It is idolatry.
True prayer is just awareness of God as pure love. The Church blocks this
awareness by having people allocate time for prayer and use it praying to the
saints. Why would you let yourself have this awareness? For God or for you or
both? For God for Jesus said we must love him with all our hearts.
Protestants worship the saints in a sense - but they do not believe this
involves invoking them. Catholics worship them as gods by talking to them as if
they can hear and see and know them in detail like God does. For many, treating
a saint as wise as God is idolatry and it is.
If the saints do not want to be treated like gods, Catholics are not honouring
them at all. It is interesting that occultism is full of invocations of angels
who are the same as saints to Catholics. Despite the Old Testament talking as if
angels are God, not once does anybody pray to an angel in the Old Testament for
help. The Catholic claim that the first Christians did not pray to anything
other than God because there were no real saints yet to pray to is proven false.
The angels were there.
The Church says the saints and angels are not divine and have no power of their
own. The power is not theirs but God’s. But if you are divine, it does not
matter where the power comes from as long as you have it. The saints receive it
from God so it is their power then. You don't say that a top world leader has no
leadership power of his own but it comes from the energy he gets from ecstasy
tablets. He takes the power from the tablets and it is not the tablets that must
get the credit. So the Church's doctrine that the saints have no power of their
own is dishonest - it does not matter whose power they use, what matters is that
it is now their power. Some who pray to Mary say that she has no power of her
own. The power is God‘s and they say that because of that it is really him we
pray to. The source of the power is actually irrelevant.
The beings condemned in the Bible as pagan gods claimed no power of their own.
The gods had to do magic and get power from other gods. Also they limited one
another’s power. Yet they were still gods.
The saints and angels are supposed to enjoy perfect freedom so they are far more
gods and goddesses than the deities of the heathen ever were.
The Bible tells the story of Elijah and the Prophets of Baal. There was a
contest to see if Elijah worshipped the real God or if the pagans did it. A
sacrifice was done. Elijah was to call fire from Heaven down on the sacrifice as
a test. The prophets of Baal called Baal to do this. They prayed and even cut
themselves to get Baal's attention. They got no response. Elijah told them to
pray harder in case Baal was out hunting or for some reason was unable to hear
them. They virtually had to shout to make sure he could hear them. Nothing
happened. But when Elijah prayed God responded by sending the fire down from
Heaven. Elijah had the prophets slain. Baal is really like a saint for he is not
all-powerful or all-knowing and seems to be almost human. He was more a saint
than a God. The Christians struggle to make the story fit with the Bible
teaching that it is a sin to ask God to perform miracles as in some kind of
test. They reason that it is only right to test God if he permits it and agrees
to be tested. But the Elijah story says nothing about that. A proper test would
be if God's servants were able to reach heroic degrees of holiness that pagans
could never hope to emulate. But what we have with Elijah is a selfish show of
power. The story is not about the worship of a false God so much as about a
protest against honouring a being that is nothing compared to God. It excludes
the veneration of saints.
The notion that to ask the saints for help is really to ask God for they have no
power of their own and there is only his power contradicts the fact that if that
is true then it makes no sense to invoke the saints at all. It shows a desire
for idolatry even if it is not idolatry.
Catholicism is seen by many as monotheistic in theory. But what about
emotionally? The heathens felt they wanted to adore many gods and gave in to
that. If you feel for Mary as for a goddess then you are an idolater even if you
believe, "God is boss not her."
Catholicism teaches that only God matters and that it means to honour God when
it honours its saints such as Padre Pio or the Virgin Mary. It says God has made
them what they are so he gets the honour when you honour them. But if that were
true, the Catholics would be forbidden to honour saints they know nothing or
little about. You can't see God in the saint unless you know a lot about the
saint. The saint cannot bring you to God except by helping to manifest God's
grace in his own life. The Catholic saints are really just gods and the Church
will fire priests who advocate the worship of the saints as Gods - and the
Church shows its two-faced fundamentalism.
If there is nothing occult about Catholicism, why is its favourite angel the
Archangel Michael? Michael is often invoked during occult rites to bless
water and magic circles.