Whoever is not for me is against me - Jesus. Whoever rather is not for political decisions being made on purely empirical secular grounds is against human rights.
The main function of prayer is to get guidance from God and to see his
action if he helps. There is more than a danger of arrogance in thinking that
your notions are from God. Prayer seeks to bring divine guidance into your
life and that of the one prayed for. But that guidance is basically hunches,
feelings and hidden messages/signs that nobody else can read. You outsource
wisdom and guidance to a higher power which is irresponsible and disrespectful
of yourself. You are the one deciding what the guidance is at the end of the
day so it is pointless. You arrogantly presume that your notions are God
wisely prompting you. Praying even for another to recover from serious illness
implies you want them to start looking for “guidance” too. None of this is
mature or healthy.
Faith must stop dictating to or manipulating the
state. Christians in politics may seem to be thinking for themselves but are
they? They won’t admit that they don’t value what they think as long as they
think they get a prompt from God that he agrees with or inspires them. Prayer
is mainly about alleged guidance and they pray. They will not admit the mental
scheme they have concocted in order to align with faith. While faith claims to
be the opposite of self-interest we see it is a particularly arrogant and
crafty manifestation of it.
No matter how good the end one prays for, the fact is that the divine is asked to manage harm, sickness and death to give you what you ask. The framework is both dangerous and not dangerous. What is taken from one is given to another and vice versa. Nobody wants to admit that you are taking on a terrible responsibility in principle. It is an insult unless one can prove there is a good divine plan and that the divine hears one and indeed should.
There are those who say that you are not trying to have outcomes redirected
and harms redistributed. That you are mere expressing hope, trust, or
alignment with a broader order that may not be fully knowable. In this view,
the concern about responsibility seems less direct, since the individual is
not assumed to control or manage events. But direct or indirect does not
matter. If you don't respect life, you may choose to murder somebody
face to face or simply fire at random into a place where people may be walking
among the trees out of sight. Those people are worse than those who openly
admit they they are trying to change outcomes as if their request for money or
more holiness were that important. Vaguely asking for a good outcome is still
asking for a good outcome. Remember that. And when you assume that
a good plan is behind all things you are making a plan, maybe a vague one, in
your head. Even if there is a plan, you are about your own plan - that
you project.