SINNERS AND PRAYER AND THE DEHUMANISATION

Prayer is communication with God. It is union with God and believers say it is two way. God unites with you when you pray and you unite with him.

Christianity says that prayer comes from a loving heart so if there is a God then your prayers connecting with him and reaching him depend on your spiritual and humble and virtuous disposition.  To tell somebody you will pray for them is to tell them how great you are!  And to say that God will listen to you for you are holy enough!!  Those who see prayer as a form of magic do not mind being prayed for.  Those who understand what it really is should mind.

Believers tend to hold that they must be an example of how their praying to Christ makes them be so good. They say prayer not only makes them more loving but God rewards their prayers by doing good when asked to. That leads to the notion that if somebody is praying away and their character never improves and disaster follows their prayers for others that the person is in fact evil and disconnected from God.

Prayer is not a great thing when religion attaches a price to it. It involves believing that trivial sins are very serious such as masturbation. You will go to Hell forever unless you repent. It involves believing that huge evils are minor or even good. For example, if pregnancy killed all women the Church would still ban life-saving abortions. Murdering people by teachings is seen as a virtue. It invents religious sins such as missing mass or not praying enough. These sins are concentrated on. Catholicism considers it worse for a state to make religion a private matter and ban it from advertising its gospel than for the state to let the poor starve. Religious stuff matters and social justice is collateral. The terrible thing about this is that if you are wrong about something being sinful and you go and do it then you have intended to do evil. Evil is bad enough when it is real evil you do. It is terrible when it is totally unnecessary. A person doing what is not wrong but thinking it is turns that person into a person who intends to do bad
 
Religion leads to people sinning a lot and corrupting themselves with the intention of using prayer to change themselves when they are tired of sin. But what if prayer does not work? Millions of Catholics go to confession every time with the same old story.

The Church definitely does teach that as long as you are repentant for all your sins on your deathbed that is all that matters! It plainly holds that the next life matters and this one does not except in the final moments.

The Catholic Church and many other religions tell people that they can pray well and love God while deliberately adhering to sin which is impossible. People who don’t speak out against these abominations are just as bad as the priests and spiritual fathers who foster them.
 
A sinner cannot love God. The sinner’s love for God is a mere pretence when they adhere to sin for who can will what God wills and not will it at the same time? The sinner can’t say, “God’s will be done”, and mean it.
 
Religion encourages sinners to pray even when they are not repentant. The result is that they feel better about their sins though they have no intention of giving them up yet and when they retain sins they will retain some forever. All are supposedly sinners so religion cannot dare forbid this abuse. Thus we find that prayer is like an anaesthetic for the conscience that increases love for evil for it certainly does not increase love for God when they are staying in their sins. This creates an addiction. Religion tries to become like a drug you get hooked on. How anybody can think religion is a source for good is amazing! It may be a source for cleverly disguised good but any real good is done in spite of it and not because of it.
 
The love of God and the love of neighbour go together according to Christian doctrine. So if you sin against your neighbour you sin against God and if you sin against God you sin against your neighbour. To attack your neighbour's rock is to attack your neighbour. If you don’t love God then you don’t love the being upon which the welfare of others depends so you cannot sincerely love them. Now loving God because it is the only way to respect the good things that come upon people and because God helps them and makes them is not loving God. It is utilitarian - it is using God as the means to an end. God to be God must be the end not an end.
 
If you don’t love your neighbour you don’t love God for he wants you to love them and you owe it to him to do what he wills. All sin as in doing wrong to the neighbour so all are telling God how much they fool themselves that they love him which makes them the most dangerous enemies of God of the lot. Prayer mocks God so it despises neighbours too. Praying for others is hypocrisy.
 
We can’t pray owing to deliberate sin. We never really pray for we never connect to God for we are always sinning. But God made us to love him if he exists. He could not have so there is no God.
 
If we were made to love one another and not him he would not reveal himself or a religion to us or care if we believed or not. He would program our intelligence which is programmed anyway not to even think of him existing when prayer is bad. People think of God not existing so there is no God.

A sinner necessarily needs mercy.  Christians snake-charm unbelievers and others by offering to ask God to bestow mercy on them.  You simply cannot ask or expect your prayers for mercy for another to be answered. Mercy is a matter between an individual and her or his God. Your asking can make no difference. And it is Christian teaching that mercy is the most important thing you can ask for or get from God for it is the pathway to any good thing that comes from God. Thus you cannot ask God to help a monster get through cancer without implying that you want mercy. The order of importance is mercy and then cancer.  But to ask for mercy for another is simply deceptive and arrogant.  It is not your place.
 
The benefits of prayer do not come from prayer at all which is why we should challenge people’s faith in prayer and have no regrets. The benefits are nothing compared to the damage that is done such as the hypocrisy of those who identify themselves as sinners.
 
The WEB
 
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12608c.htm
Catholic Encyclopaedia. This discusses Quietism.
 
Books Consulted
 
BOOKS CONSULTED
 
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