YOU DO NOT NEED SACRAMENTS THEREFORE YOU NEED NO PRIESTS OR CHURCH SO SACRAMENTALISM IS SUPERFLUOUS

In Catholicism, the seven sacraments are the ordinary means of salvation - they enable you to enjoy life with God in this life and forever in the next.

The Church says we need the sacraments and we are deprived without them and the sacraments are for making you live more holy. This is just a fancy way of saying that the person outside the Church who does good and only good is not as good as the Catholic for the Catholic has the best way to get to God. It makes many see dreadful arrogance and insolence here. The sacraments neither matter or do real good when that is the bottom line. We do not need them on a humanist or religious level. Relations between Catholicism and other religions then are forms of patronising friendship - on Catholicism's part.

Sacraments forge an us and not them mentality and thus are intrinsically bad no matter how sweetly they are presented.
 
The Churches preach that people can do without the sacraments and get grace by prayer alone when it is not possible to receive them. So the sacraments are unnecessary and only necessary for salvation when they are available.

According to the Church, it is a sin to refuse to receive the sacraments. But it cannot be evil to do that when there is no need for them. Sacramentalism accuses God of calling sinful what is not sinful. God should not be making needless demands.

God cannot do anything that gives people the occasion to sin far more. He cannot have created sacramentalism. In case you are in agreement with the Roman Pontiff that he can for any sins and abuses are nothing to do with him but the problem of those who commit them something needs saying. If God hates sin more than any evil he cannot. The objection is an attempt to obscure this point. The sacraments must be purely human rituals for they are something extra to sin over. Rome argues that they cure more sin than they become occasions for which is not true when one considers how long the world coped without them. She thinks the spiritual benefits they bring to us through the way they affect us psychologically makes them worthwhile. But this supposition smashes up the sacramental system altogether simply because the Catholic God can’t offer pleasure to attract his people for it is a sin and not selfless.

Sacramentalism cannot be accused of making ministers of sacraments more important than God if God has freely made this arrangement and it is good. Nor does it necessarily do this by putting our relationship with God in the hands of human beings for if a priest sinfully refuses to give a sacrament the penitent gets all the grace anyway. But it does in the sense that it has God doing evil to honour men meaning that he is afraid of them!

Sacramentalism is sinful for it accuses God of plotting to give us motives for more sin.

In the sacrament of baptism, God promises to be our friend forever and promises us mercy and not justice for the past sins. That is, he promises to be there when we need him. He would not be our Father and us his adopted children if he did not. This automatically makes the other sacraments superfluous. When God protects us all the time from the world, the flesh and the Devil not only is there no need for more sacraments but they cannot work. Sacraments cannot give grace to a person who is full of all required grace.

If Jesus made baptism a sacrament then he was saying that there are no other sacraments.

But even baptism is superfluous for it would be better to give the graces it confers to a person who turns to God wholeheartedly and who isn’t being baptised. When a person is at his spiritual best he cannot receive baptism and is forced to wait until he is less good. That is unfair.
  
The Humanist system offers a way to be free from fear and bad inclinations and to become happy without drawing upon alleged forces from another world to do it. The system works by using your own earthly resources and is non-spiritual for that reason. For a religion to offer benefits through sacraments is to offer a distraction from the system and give false hope when there is a better way. The sacraments are therefore anti-virtue and anti-happiness and are to be feared. The same is true of prayer. The Church should agree to be sued if its graces do not work. And yet it allows doctors to be sued for treatments that fail but which do less damage.
 
PRAYER REFUTES NEED FOR SACRAMENTS

The Catholic Church teaches that a sacrament is a rite that symbolises grace and which gives the grace it signifies. For example, the laying on of hands in confirmation symbolises giving the Holy Spirit and actually bestows him.

We know that the idea that God won’t forgive some sinners until they go to confession (to be forgiven by the priest) is blasphemy in the eyes of many believers in God but what about God refusing to help you to be good until you receive a sacrament?
 
A person who needs the priest to pardon him in confession may repent 99% because he is ashamed of sin and wants to avoid God's punishments and 1% because he wants to please God. The Church says that such repentance is so imperfect that it only gains forgiveness of sin if the person goes to confession. So confession magically makes the lack of concern for God all right! This is magic! It is not forgiveness the man wants but to get away with sin! This should not be seen as a peripheral matter. Most penitents come to the Church to repent but are doing it mainly for themselves and not God. And it shows a bad attitude to God on part of the Church as a Church and not just as individuals.

What if you have the right attitude to receive a sacrament but can’t, say, until you reach the Church? If God gives you the grace anyway then it appears there is no such thing as a sacrament for you already got the grace the moment you were ready for the rite.

Perhaps God gives you all the graces you need until you receive the sacrament when you pray? He will if he is good. Some say that we ruin the graces in us by sin and that is why we need prayer and the sacraments for a refill. God may leave some weaknesses untouched when these will not do us any harm and he will heal them in the sacrament. This shows that the sacraments are not necessary in themselves as far as grace is concerned. It is hard to imagine that God would create unnecessary magic spells like sacraments and make it a sin not to take them. Sacraments look like they are the inventions of an authoritarian Church to keep us on a leash.

FRUITFUL RECEPTION

St Thomas Aquinas taught the commonsense doctrine that a sacrament if it gives grace and help from God to live in a holy way you must not be blocking that help otherwise the sacrament is just a mockery. The idea is that a sacrament is not magic so it will not fix you if you refuse to believe what God has taught in any matter or if you resist God in some way. The sacrament will not take care of any blockages. You have to unblock and then let the sacrament help. This is about respect for your choice. Thomas taught that you cannot expect a sacrament to remove any blockages to grace such as the absence of repentance for sin and deliberate unbelief in what God has taught.  It prevents future blockages but does not override any current ones.  If you prepare properly then real identifiable change to your life and qualities will ensue. As evil tends to twist good and disguise itself as good, a sacrament that works despite you refusing to prepare right would not be fruitful. Lack of understanding of the important elements of faith that you need in your life would also be an obstacle.

CONCLUSION

Sacramentalism is not needed and is not really a good thing.



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