Are Sacraments Superstition?

SACRAMENTS ENGENDER IDOLATRY
 
The Catholic religion does not speak to God as if he were a friend or father. It makes rites and sacraments to worship him. This shows that their real focus is religion rather than God.  You can call your father daddy but if he needs red tape to connect to you then he is not a father.  Same with God.
 
The Catholic Church claims that it gives us grace through the sacraments. These are rites that are supposed to give grace, the power of God to change us and unite us with himself. The sacraments bestow a relationship with God. This is magic for if there is a relationship, it starts with you having the right dispositions. It is as absurd as saying a man has no love relationship with his woman until he marries her. The sacraments are obviously occult ritualism.
 
God says he will share none of his glory with idols (Isaiah 42:8). Not even a little bit. He will not share his glory with sacraments that he has not instituted and certainly not with them when they are occult.
 
To err about how God gives grace is far worse than to err about the nature of God and mistake an idol for him. Knowing the true God is useless without being able to appropriate his grace. Grace is the essence of a personal and real relationship with God. A religion that has the right God but the wrong way to approach him is more dangerous than one that has an idolatrous God because it gets your guard down and makes your heart harder against the right way to come to God for it will be plausible. God says that anybody that knows him and won’t come to him but uses the wrong way to approach him will be rejected for he guides them to see that they are or at least may be wrong. The devil works stronger through sacramentalism if it fails to give grace than he does through idolatry.
 
The Church has reported that there is a huge rise in the number of possessed Roman Catholics. They need exorcisms to get the demons out. Possession is when the demon uses the victim's body and controls it. It is strange that the sacraments and baptism don't guarantee safety. To use means of grace that fail to do that is not using means of grace at all. It is kind of opening the door to demons.

The Church blames dabbling in the occult for the rise in possessions but it cannot prove that. Its own sacraments could be the cause. Its own occultism could be to blame. It is has been noted by some that the Bible speaks of people being demonised or under demonic influence but never mentions possession in the sense that the demon makes your body his own. A translation error speaks of possession.

Jesus condemned the Jews severely and called them children of Satan but never said they were bad enough to get possessed. If some Roman Catholics are really possessed then that is a sign then of how evil and dangerous that religion is in the eyes of God. Possession then being more extreme than demonic influence would be an indication that a religion is at least tacitly in league with Satan. The Bible says in 2 Peter that the Devil and his angels are already in Hell so they influence people from there. How does that fit the Bible saying demons are to be cast out? Casting out really refers to their influence - a demon in you cannot harm you unless you are linked with it. And Hell is a state of being and not a geographical place.
 
Some sacraments work even if the recipient has no affection for God at all. For example, baptism is supposed to work for the stubborn sinner but the sinner gets no benefit from it until he responds to its grace. Clearly it is better to have the sacrament in case you turn to God. Clearly the rite is more important than the grace. The sacraments are sectarian nonsense.
 
The sacraments are the basis of Catholicism and its so-called spirituality. They lead to idolatry so the Catholic who depends on them even if saint worship need not be idolatry, the sacraments ensure that they will be.
 
IF GRACE IS CONFINED TO SACRAMENTS…
 
If grace and mercy are strictly or even largely confined to sacraments then the following are the implications.

God is evil if he keeps you weak and likely to sin until you get a priest. It is a sin to delay getting God’s pardon and it shows as much bad character to stay in unrepentance and away from God’s pardon as it does to murder if your sin is murder. So the sacrament of priests forgiving sins forces you to sin. When you are a sinner and separated from God by mortal sin you will reason you may as well commit all the sins you want until you get the priest to forgive you. So when God gives the priest the power to strengthen you in the sacrament he must do this evil of encouraging sin to please the priest. The priest is above God. If God is good then the priest must magically force him to forgive. This God who is forced to forgive and do evil to allow the priest to control him, is not a forgiving God at all. You need to be free to be able to forgive.

I should get the grace the moment I want it for anything could happen before I get my sacrament. God is trying to set the stage for me to sin. Some may object that God is not doing wrong by hanging on to it for he gazes into the future and sees that it will do no harm to leave a bit of vice in me for a while for I will not act on it. But God’s actions are caused by what he sees in the future in this scenario. Suppose he foresees that I will die tomorrow in a car-smash. He makes me sick to prevent it. Then he saw a future that will never happen which is not logically possible. The answer is unacceptable. Sacramentalists do not have a very flattering opinion of the Almighty. I understand now why I got no real comfort from the sacraments.

To get all the power you need to triumph over sin you need to have a sacrament administered to you. Most Christians reckon that God will make an exception for grave reasons. For example, Catholics tell you that if you are too sick to hear Mass you still get all the graces but if you miss it for no reason or a trivial reason you get none. The disproof of this exception stuff is the simple fact that there is nowhere that the line can be drawn. If I really really want communion now and have to wait to tonight my situation is no different to the person who can’t leave their sickbed to go to communion. If God withholds his grace then God is into unjust discrimination. The only alternative is to say that those that miss the sacraments even to save the world miss out on the grace.
 
The Catholic Church claims that we encounter Jesus through partaking of his body in the form of bread and his blood in the form of wine during the Mass. It invites us to think we sense him in the forms of bread and wine. Imagine you sense that Jesus is telling you he is the wafer. You look at it and seem to be getting an intuition from him that he is it. How do you know it is him? Could the entity you are assuming you are engaging with through the occult activity of telepathy be somebody else? A demon or pagan god maybe? The pagans reported similar sensations.
 
The Catholic Church claims that whatever makes bread to be bread changes during Mass into whatever makes it the body of Jesus. So in reality the wafer is turned into Jesus like a frog turns into a prince in the magic story. And there is another perhaps even greater magic that is called for. The wafer has to seem unchanged! It is one spell to turn it into Jesus and another to make it seem to stay bread. If the magic to make it seem unchanged were taken away how many Jesus' would there be if the changed wafers took on their true appearances?

The Christian has to be dragged to Mass no matter how sick she is for it is the only way to get the grace. Spiritual health comes first (Mark 8:36) and is more important than staying at home instead of being carried into Church on a stretcher to throw up all over the carpet or to die. A God of love would not have established the sacraments.
 
Jesus said that loving God was the greatest of commandments and less important than loving your neighbour. So if a Catholic is too ill to go to Mass, there is nothing stopping God from changing this rule and ordering them to go.
 
Because the sacraments are the means of putting us right with God it is a sin not to receive them if you believe in their supernatural power. They are so potent that the quicker you receive them the better. To take your time is a sin and weakening yourself so that sin becomes more likely – another sin. It is a sin to go to eleven Mass when there is an earlier one.

If grace were confined to the sacraments then it would be obligatory to celebrate them non-stop and to put a bus on to trail people to them all the time. It would be a sin for anyone not to be a priest and it would be a sin to start hospitals for the good of the soul comes first. When the Church is able to give deacons a part of the sacrament of holy orders it could give all people the power to absolve sacramentally under certain circumstances.

The fact of the matter is that despite all the lofty claims of the Catholic Church about the power of the sacraments one makes easier and better progress with a good self-help book. A sensible one will be more helpful than ten thousand communions if put into practice. The sacraments degrade the recipients for they promise and cannot deliver. They waste time and they waste energy. It is self-esteem not them that you need so their existence and the way they are stressed indicates that self-esteem is to be opposed.

Catholic priests warn that the occult is of the Devil and that it is one of the worst sins possible to get involved in it because it denies the place of God in the universe and that we should let him control our destiny. Yet fewer than one in a thousand attack and endeavour to stamp out the work of faith-healers and seventh-sons in the midst of their parishes. The Bible sees this tolerance as a mortal sin that God will take a terrible vengeance for. Even if priests do not know this they should for they have the Bible and they are still mortal sinners. To do what you think may be a mortal sin is to commit a mortal sin for you think, “I am doing this sinful thing whether it is a serious sin or not”, which is obviously a mortal sin. The Church cannot say that it leaves the healers be for people think it is of God and it comforts them and they don’t want to turn them against the Church. But encouraging disobedience and ignorance is a strange way of being worried about the Church.
 
I have had to do newsletters in my time advertising yoga and Reiki and other things which the Church associates with paganism and heresy and blasphemy and occultism. The true Christian would be obligated to leave the job rather than do things like that. The parish priest did not condemn the occultic practices from the pulpit.

EVIL AND THE OCCULT

Christians argue that some occult practices are disguised as spiritual and holy.  They say you need to look for the harmful side to see that they are actually magical or occult.

The priest took advantage of you when you were a baby to make you a Catholic at your baptism. If that is a legitimate way to enter a religion then why do they get mad if you enter the baby into another religion?
  
How can a religion that says that God should not accept unbaptised babies as his children call itself good? This is sanctimoniously saying that the baptised are better than the unbaptised. It is also the kind of attitude from which racism and sexism are made.

The Church gives all children the sacrament of confirmation. It does not mind if they feel in conscience they cannot go through with it as long as they do go through with it. The Church knows that some children have a problem with it and still it makes them accept confirmation.

The Mass though it is claimed to connect you to the risen Jesus in fact tries to connect you to the corpse and blood of Jesus.  The words of consecration make it clear that the doctrine that the Eucharist is the risen and living Jesus is a smokescreen.  They plainly say that the bread is the body of Jesus being given up - that is on the cross and dead.  The blood is separate from him and the chalice is called his blood meaning he is dead and the blood is dead.  Thus the Mass is occult - hardcore occult!

The test of evil shows these sacraments are evil and occult.

SOME CONSEQUENCES OF SACRAMENTAL THINKING

Occultist Aleister Crowley wrote that letting a little blood out gives occult power a huge boost. 

Moses thought that murdering adulteresses by stoning them to death purged evil from the community and cleansed it.

Myra Hindley felt that the blood of the victims sacramentalised her relationship with Ian Brady.

Jack the Ripper used symbols on a victim Catherine Eddowes.  His murders were marked by some tendency to religious symbolism and ritual.  He attacked the seat of life in women and took their uteruses as relics.

Zodiac, Charles Manson ... there have been so many.  All these cranks thought there was some kind of energy or grace in shedding blood.

CONCLUSION

Sacraments have obvious dangers time brings out the other dangers.  They are nothing more than spells in the guise of religion and sophisticated theology.