Prayer as God's communication with you and how you shows
you don't really think he does that
A person who only goes to the fortune-teller who tells them the useless general stuff only wants to believe. The fact that they won't even go to a fortune-teller who seems to have real ability says it all. They don't really believe. If you think getting communication from God is demented, you may want to have it but in a way that does not seem mad. That is where prayer comes in. It seems less disruptive to imagine God is privately guiding you in an unclear way - in other words non-guiding guidance. You don't have the faith to tell a person if you think God gave you a clear message for them. This is role-play not faith.
Nobody wants to be honest and admit how many Nazi monsters prayed for the strength to obey sick orders. Nobody wants to admit that if you think you have to torture people for somebody else will do it anyway, and you cannot just walk away, that you surmise that God understands and blesses you. Nobody wants to admit that seeing signs and a divine pattern where there is none or where you may be seeing the wrong signs and patterns leads to faith and faith has dangers. Faith leads many today to assume God and human nature are so good that the Holocaust may have been or actually was exaggerated. There is no way for a person to see if the plan they think is at work is real or only in their heads. Also, something expected taking place only means you were lucky. It does not mean you are much good at telling what a God is doing.
The Bible first and foremost tells us to pray to God. People pray for they feel
that they have tuned into a God who can protect them. They get deluded for they
can't see how they are no better off than people who don't pray. People pray and
get a sense that things will be all right. This is divination - the person seeks
reassurance by using tarot cards or reading tea leaves. They get a vague sense
of reassurance, they divine that things will be all right somehow. Prayer itself
is occult. The same comfort that you get from reading your horoscope is the
comfort that prayer gives you. Prayer is superstition. The miracles of the Bible
can be understood as supporting the basic Bible endorsement of prayer. They are
based on the occult and they endorse it. Prayer shows no respect to those who
fear the occult or condemn it for they are prayed for.
Religion says God inspires us to pray. It claims that prayer is no good unless
he inspires it and guides it for all good comes from him. Does God inspire us to
pray because he has planned to give us what we seek through prayer? Then why do
people experience unanswered prayer? They pray for things they don't get! Don't
answer that God must have inspired you to pray for something just because you
got it. That is arrogance. How can you be grateful to him? It is like being
grateful to X for your mystery gift when you are only guessing that X was the
benefactor!
God is said to communicate when we pray. He tells us when the bike we got that
we prayed for was given to us because we prayed and not because somebody else
prayed or because we were going to get it anyway. He tells the person that it
will be okay when it keeps getting worse and worse. People do feel that God
tells them when somebody is bad or damned. Those who bereave a suicide victim
feel that way quite often. Thus though Christians say God must condemn people
finally and not them they can get around this. They can say that God tells them
who he condemns and why so that leaves them free to condemn and judge. Prayer is
not talking to God but communicating with God. So prayer leads to people
becoming arrogant and assuming they know more than they actually do.
To argue that prayer leads you to see that God gave you the bike in reply to
prayer but that it cannot lead you to see that a person is condemned by God is
just to make a fool of yourself. Why one and not the other? You argue that
people don't have the right to feel that God tells them to judge as a result of
prayer. Why then should you have the right to say that feeling you know he gave
you the bike because your prayer was successful proves he did it? What makes you
so special? What makes you the infallible authority on God? In the prayer of the
humble, all one can see is the disguised pride and arrogance.
The Bible and the Church both say that when we pray the Holy Spirit prays with
us - and in our place to make up for our deficiencies and that all prayer is
inspired by God (Romans 8:26). When you pray for your baby to get better and it
doesn't, did God inspire you to pray for something that was against his will?
The doctrine is so absurd. It shows that if prayer works, it is not down to a
God. A God that inspires you to pray for things he has no intention of giving
you is a deceitful God. Prayer would prove his sneakiness more than his
reliability. It wouldn't prove that prayer works. If you ask a disobedient brat
to do something and he does it, it only proves he did it to please himself and
not because you asked him. Your asking him didn't work - it only looked as if it
did.
Nicky Gumbel of Alpha fame in his crazy book Alpha Questions of Life said that
if you are in a relationship you can pray if it is right in the eyes of God. In
other words, if it is wrong or more spiritually harmful than spiritually good,
you ask God to end it. If it is spiritually fine then you ask God to protect it.
That is fine but what if there is no God? What if you have got rid of a good
partner because you imagine God wants the relationship to end? Gumble goes as
far in his book as to encourage people to pray to see why somebody suffers. He
speaks of a sick woman who was prayed for and the message from God was
forgiveness. The woman was prompted to forgive somebody and she was healed.
If prayer leads to you deluding yourself like a mystic or psychic then is best
abandoned. If it works for you, what about the harmful example you are leading
for others?