One of my friends here in Bleiburg lost a close relative and asked me to pray for his soul.
He smiled at me, knowing that prayer and I are not the closest of relations.
This got me to thinking: Why do people pray to and ask for favours from a God, they consider "All Loving" and "All Just"?
The rules are very simple: If you die, having been baptized, confessed all of your sins and having received absolution, your soul ( some believe -and your body- ) after a short stop over in Purgatory, will go to heaven to exist in eternal happiness.
If, however, you die with an unconfessed and unforgiven "mortal sin" on your record, you will have to spend the rest of time, for all eternity, in the place called "Hell" under the rule of Satan who fans the fires and pours the Sulphur, and no amount of prayer will get you out of there.
1 John 5:14 tells us: "and this is the confidence we have in Him: that if we ask anything according to his will, He heareth us.
The operative phrase in here is "according to his will"
Many of the victims who died in Nazi Concentration Camps, or in the Russian Gulag, or in so many other dictatorial imprisonments must have prayed to Him and asked for Salvation -- and yet, they died horrible deaths. So it must have been His Will that they all, innocent and guilty, forgiven and unforgiven - all of them, shall die. Most of them without confession and absolution of their mortal sins are now roasting in Hell and will do so forever more.
If people pray for a departed soul, an action either superfluous or useless, then many will also pray for
Peace On Earth Everlasting.
Are these prayers heard ? Nevermore, says the Raven.
God steadfastly ignores these prayers and allows the death of multitudes in numerous wars.
"But God gave Man free will", some will say. But the inmates of detention camps and the foot soldiers of both sides of such conflicts, had no chance to exercise this Free Will.
Allow me to repeat: The death of the suppressed (despite the prayers) must have been God's will.
It should be, it seems, impossible for a thinking man to know of all which has happened and is happening and still believe in an
"All Loving", "All Powerful" deity who is aware of every 'sparrow which falls.'
Therefore, if you must believe in some sort of "intelligent design", a Designer - Creator - God, for God's Sake, be a Deist - believe, if you must in a Creator, but in one who does not care about the well being of his creation. Look at him as a willful child, who grew tired of his Lego set, slammed shut the lid of his toy box and went on to play new games on her I Pod.
3 comments:
Once again, I can't resist a comment . The efficacy of prayer is something I have wrestled with my entire life. As you know I was brought up in a very devout Irish Catholic household. My parents who were very intelligent, educated and thoughtful Catholics believed sincerely in the power of prayer which for us Catholics consisted mostly of the repetition of Hail Marys and Our Fathers which always seemed to me to be a waste to time and deathly boring. Over the years I have come to believe that prayer for some has a therapeutic benefit . It nurtures hope which is so important in life and it is a way to keep loved ones close in your heart and helps to nourish your love for them . As such, it can give meaning to a person's life and be a source of support. Prayer is for some an act of faith, hope, and love. I think for you and me , our appreciation of life and the joy we experience in nature is our form of prayer.
Dear John
You are quite right: Some people may benefit from prayer, as they benefit from hypnosis or from breathing deeply or from sitting on a promontory in Algonquin Park, watching the sun set, while listening to the Loon calling his mate...
This is an individual inner reaction to an external impulse.
What I am questioning is "prayer" in the Christian sense, where we ask an imaginary Creator, (for whose existance there is no evidence) to do us a favour, which we may or may not deserve. The appeal is inevitably accompanied by the caveat: If this is your will....
Well, if it is His will, than we need not pray for it, because it will happen anyway. If, however, it is NOT his Will, than our prayer is useless, because it will NOT happen. So, prayer, therefore, is either "unneccessary" or "useless".
If a Soul is condemmed to Hell, because the bearer of this Soul (for the existance of which we also have not one shread of evidence)has either not accepted Christ, is not reborn in water (baptism) or dies laden with one or more mortal sins, this Soul will inevitably spend the rest of the days in Hell, where it will suffer indiscribable pain caused by everlasting fire and sulphure. NO amount of prayer will halp this Soul in escaping from this damnation.
So, which way do you want it: Unneccessary or Useless ?
Those, according to the Bible, are the only choices.
Amen
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