CONCERNS ABOUT PRAYER AND ITS RELATED ISSUES OF GOD'S LOVE, SIN, AND OTHERS

People who can't or don't do much good, feel good about themselves if they pray for others. We are made in such a way that we need to do good for others in order to feel good about ourselves. People need to feel they do good. Prayer for others is about indulging that. It is not really about doing good or caring if you do good. It is about feeling that prayer is doing something so that you can feel good about yourself. It is evil to use the plight of others so that you may pray for them and feel good. It should lead to others being neglected if it does not. If the person still helps others, it is not prayer that is making him or her helpful but other reasons.
 
Some say that belief in God is good for us for God does not judge or condemn or tell us we are bad or see us bad but instead he loves us and sees us as adorable. But nobody can take such a God seriously! It is like somebody saying that burnt toast is perfect toast. It does not match our own perception of ourselves as flawed even if basically good. Some say then that God does not condemn us but we condemn ourselves by refusing to open ourselves to his love and to let ourselves love as well as we should. Such a doctrine has to have consequences for us. If I exclude myself from God, then the Church can exclude me and say I have excluded myself!

If God exists, God is perfect and deserves all our love so he comes first. To tell anybody that their loved one was killed for a divine purpose is to tell them that they should be happy that the purpose will be able to be carried out instead of being very sorry that the person died for the purpose is more important. God logically implies that we should be careless with human life. He devalues it. God is a belief and to say God comes first is to say your opinion that he exists comes first. Yet we call people who put their opinion before people evil for that is what all evil people do and it is what makes them evil.

It needs also to be recognised that anyone who feels attracted to believing in sinister doctrines like eternal punishment for the wicked must have a sinister conscious or subconscious reason for believing in such.
 
Desire is behind everything we consciously do. Desire means, “I want the fulfilment of seeing this thing to happen.” Therefore even the most altruistic of actions is really an egoistic one.
 
It must be recognised that the ability for us to be either altruistic or egoistic is a universal delusion fostered by the Christian Church and other cults. There is only one thing that we can be and that is egoistic. Even when we help somebody we want to under the circumstances and it is the fulfilment of the desire to help that we are really after and not helping the other person. We have a desire that craves fulfilment and we only help to fulfil that desire. It is meaningless to argue that there are selfish desires and unselfish desires for desires are just desires and are geared towards fulfilment. Selfish desires have no meaning apart from self-fulfilment and the so-called unselfish ones have the same meaning and motivation so there is no difference. It is argued that when helping another person we are not thinking of our own fulfilment. But the mind has to switch off the thought of the goal for we can only do one thing at a time and it is still there subconsciously. So it is still there. If the argument is true then it follows that when you work at a job you despise and which you are only in for the money that you are not working for the money only because you forget about the money most of the time to get the job done!
 
Every moment we have something in our mind we are not conscious of what came before we are only aware of a thought and the desire that causes the next thought so every moment we just submit to the strongest desire we are aware of. We are fulfilling ourselves all the time and what we don’t want to do and do is done because it is what we wish to do under the circumstances. Even if we have free will we do not have free will to really sacrifice ourselves. When all we do is indulge ourselves there cannot be a God and strong and serious belief in God must be considered a neurosis. Why? Because there is no point in a God making us and allowing pain and suffering in a world in which we only please ourselves. God allowing suffering implies that suffering is necessary to make love possible so love is sacrifice. If God exists then the more we suffer the better. The subconscious mind will produce lack of self-esteem and perhaps even sadism and masochism as a result. Small wonder serious belief in God has always been destructive and authoritarian throughout the ages. A God who opposes the self can only be a projection of our own lack of self-esteem.
 
Believers in God say we must love the sinner and hate the sin for we are to judge actions not people. It is unhelpful because people will judge you for who you are more than what you do. Some will judge you 99% because of who you are. The message cannot console or help for it does not recognise how society thinks. If you think people are duty bound not to judge you for who you are that will only lead to anger and frustration for they will not do it. All that is bad enough but to say God demands it adds to the pressure.
 
Loving sinners and hating sins is dishonest because if you say John’s essay is stupid that is the same as calling John stupid though many pretend it is not. Religion does this pretending which shows that religion is wilful dishonesty and false charm. This makes altruism impossible for it is meant to be free from lies but this bases it on lies. So egoism is the only option. It is bad enough to be an unbeliever and promote the lie of loving wrongdoers and hating wrong but it is worse to say that God does the same, to blacken the being you say is all good. Despite all its “love” for God, God-religion is intrinsically blasphemous and deepens vice. It encourages deception and God is evidently a crutch to get through life. It is only for the weak for most people are not very interested in prayer or God so it shows a lack of courage and self-esteem. It is an illness. It is intolerable selfishness to put God first like Jesus asked because that means it is yourself you are really worried about.
 
If you have beliefs you think they are for the best so you have to support people with your beliefs more than anybody else. That means if you are a Catholic you should save a Catholic life when you have a choice between a Catholic life and a Protestant one. That shows that beliefs should be based on reason and not on popes and revelations from Heaven and thought out for yourself. Anything else is divisive and sectarian. Religion is sectarianism even when it seems ecumenical. Religion cannot expect to have any credibility when it condemns sectarianism. It is exploitive and therefore anti-self-esteem.
 
The believers in God say that God loves us unconditionally and that we must love one another the same. Obviously, if we can’t love unconditionally there cannot be a God. That is because to love X conditionally is to love what they do for us and not X. But unconditional love is not unconditional liking and we prefer to be liked. We prefer people to like us because we give them pleasure. If God gave us free will then it was a choice between unconditional love and evil so it certainly was not between pleasure and pain which implies that divine morality is cruel.

The notion of love being sacrifice proves the hypocrisy of the Church when it does not tell people it is a sin to deliberately fall in love for falling in love makes it a pleasure to care for the loved one and not a sacrifice. Dark doctrines are kept from the people so as to manipulate them. No religion that hides itself like that has any right to get paid for its services or to be called honest.

If there is a good God like Jesus and Moses said then he would do infinite good for us and deserves such good in return from us. This implies that sin is infinitely ungrateful. It’s an attempt to offer an unlimited insult to God. When God allows evil and suffering and allows millions to suffer terribly it is in the name of giving them a few virtues such as patience and compassion. When God permits evil and suffering to happen it must be for a greater good and that good must be for us to become holier and more unselfish. This evilly implies that it is not as evil to be crippled by accident as it is to commit adultery. In other words, God prefers to allow the accident to happen and take responsibility for it than let you commit adultery. This implies that morality is about obeying and not about making one another happy. Whatever that is it is not about right and wrong. Belief in God urges you in principle to be harsh on sin. Better to see it as harmful but not to go as far as that. Belief in God should be discarded. It is only a belief so why not?

We all believe that persons should be made happy. This implies that life is more important than happiness for if life is not then why care if living beings are happy or not? Theism gives God the right to take life and that makes it both callous and dangerous. No theist can say that capital punishment is always wrong because God could allow it. He could delegate his right to kill to us. When life is so important and absolutely valuable we have no business encouraging a belief that has even the slightest chance of endangering it.

Religion says the reason bad things happen to good people on earth is because all that happens is a part of God’s plan to make the world holier. The bad things are stepping stones in the great domino effect of events that will lead to God’s goal. Their indirect effects will produce it or give it the best chance of happening. This will lead to people being manipulated into obeying rules that make no sense but which are supposed to bring about the divine purpose.