Are Sacraments
Superstition?
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If
Grace is Confined to Sacraments…
Prayer
Refutes Need for Sacraments
WHAT IS A SACRAMENT?
A sacrament is a rite that pictures a grace from God that really gives this grace. For example, baptism pictures cleansing from the sin we were born with and baptism really causes this cleansing.
A sacrament is an occult spell. Believers say it is not because instead of working like magic, the sacrament only works on a person who wants to receive the grace and who has faith. But that is like saying that a love spell is not a spell at all if the one you want to love you has to consent to letting the spell work!
Many Christians believe that you should not do the Ouija Board or meditate for you don't know what kind of spirits or supernatural influence you are opening yourself up to. And they have the nerve to inflict sacraments on their babies and eat communion wafers!
THE DOCTRINE OF INTENTION
Nobody knows if the sacraments they get really work for the minister may have intended to simply pretend to be giving the sacrament.
Roman Catholic sacramentalism is not only irrational but also
unchristian. It advocates unjust
discrimination against those who are ordained over the Internet or who ordain
themselves.
The Catholic Church claims that it gives us grace through the sacraments. These are rites that are supposed to give grace, the power of God to change us and unite us with himself. The sacraments bestow a relationship with God. This is magic for if there is a relationship, it starts with you having the right dispositions. It is as absurd as saying a man has no love relationship with his woman until he marries her. The sacraments are obviously occult ritualism.
God says he will share none of his glory with idols (Isaiah 42:8). Not even a little bit. He will not share his glory with sacraments that he has not instituted and certainly not with them when they are occult.
To err about how God gives grace is far worse than to err about the nature of God and mistake an idol for him. Knowing the true God is useless without being able to appropriate his grace. Grace is the essence of a personal and real relationship with God. A religion that has the right God but the wrong way to approach him is more dangerous than one that has an idolatrous God because it gets your guard down and makes your heart harder against the right way to come to God for it will be plausible. God says that anybody that knows him and won’t come to him but uses the wrong way to approach him will be rejected for he guides them to see that they are or at least may be wrong. The devil works stronger through sacramentalism if it fails to give grace than he does through idolatry.
The sacraments are the basis of Catholicism and its so-called spirituality. They lead to idolatry so the Catholic who depends on them even if saint worship need not be idolatry, the sacraments ensure that they will be.
IF GRACE IS CONFINED TO SACRAMENTS…
If grace and mercy are strictly confined to sacraments then the following
are the implications.
God is evil if he keeps you weak and likely to sin until you get a
priest. It is a sin to delay getting
God’s pardon and it shows as much bad character to stay in unrepentance and
away from God’s pardon as it does to murder if your sin is murder. So the sacrament of priests forgiving sins
forces you to sin. When you are a sinner
and separated from God by mortal sin you will reason you may as well commit all
the sins you want until you get the priest to forgive you. So when God gives the priest the power to
strengthen you in the sacrament he must do this evil of encouraging sin to
please the priest. The priest is above
God. If God is good then the priest must
magically force him to forgive. This God who is forced to forgive and do evil to allow the priest
to control him, is not a forgiving God at all.
You need to be free to be able to forgive.
I should get the grace the moment I want it for anything could happen
before I get my sacrament. God is trying
to set the stage for me to sin. Some may
object that God is not doing wrong by hanging on to it for he gazes into the
future and sees that it will do no harm to leave a bit of vice in me for a
while for I will not act on it. But
God’s actions are caused by what he sees in the future in this scenario. Suppose he foresees that I will die tomorrow
in a car-smash. He makes me sick to
prevent it. Then he saw a future that
will never happen which is not logically possible. The answer is unacceptable. Sacramentalists do not have a very flattering
opinion of the Almighty. I understand
now why I got no real comfort from the sacraments.
To get all the power you need to triumph over sin you need to have a
sacrament administered to you. Most
Christians reckon that God will make an exception for grave reasons. For example, Catholics tell you that if you
are too sick to hear Mass you still get all the graces but if you miss it for
no reason or a trivial reason you get none.
The disproof of this exception stuff is the simple fact that there is
nowhere that the line can be drawn. If I
really really want communion now and have to wait to tonight my situation is no
different to the person who can’t leave their sickbed to go to communion. If God withholds his grace then God is into
unjust discrimination. The only
alternative is to say that those that miss the sacraments even to save the
world miss out on the grace.
The Christian has to be dragged to Mass no matter how sick she is for it
is the only way to get the grace.
Spiritual health comes first (Mark 8:36) and is more important than
staying at home instead of being carried into Church on a stretcher to throw up
all over the carpet or to die. A God of
love would not have established the sacraments.
Jesus said that loving God was the greatest of commandments and less
important than loving your neighbour. So
if a Catholic is too ill to go to Mass, there is nothing stopping God from
changing this rule and ordering them to go.
Because the sacraments are the means of putting us right with God it is a
sin not to receive them if you believe in their supernatural power. They are so potent that the quicker you
receive them the better. To take your
time is a sin and weakening yourself so that sin becomes more likely – another
sin. It is a sin to go to eleven Mass
when there is an earlier one.
If grace were confined to the sacraments then it would be obligatory to
celebrate them non-stop and to put a bus on to trail people to them all the
time. It would be a sin for anyone not
to be a priest and it would be a sin to start hospitals for the good of the
soul comes first. When the Church is
able to give deacons a part of the sacrament of holy orders it could give all
people the power to absolve sacramentally under certain circumstances.
The fact of the matter is that despite all the lofty claims of the
Catholic Church about the power of the sacraments one makes easier and better
progress with a good self-help book. My The
Gospel According to Atheism will be more helpful than ten thousand
communions if put into practice. The
sacraments degrade the recipients for they promise and cannot deliver. They waste time and they waste energy. It is self-esteem not them that you need so
their existence and the way they are stressed indicates that self-esteem is to
be opposed.
SACRAMENTALISM SUPERFLUOUS
The Churches preach that people can do without the sacraments and get
grace by prayer alone when it is not possible to receive them. So the sacraments are unnecessary and only
necessary for salvation when they are available.
According to the Church, it is a sin to refuse to receive the
sacraments. But it cannot be evil to do
that when there is no need for them.
Sacramentalism accuses God of calling sinful what is not sinful. God should not be making needless demands.
God cannot do anything that gives people the occasion to sin far
more. He cannot have created
sacramentalism. In case you are in
agreement with the Roman Pontiff that he can for any sins and abuses are
nothing to do with him but the problem of those who commit them something needs
saying. If God hates sin more than any
evil he cannot. The objection is an
attempt to obscure this point. The
sacraments must be purely human rituals for they are something extra to sin over.
Sacramentalism cannot be accused of making ministers of sacraments more
important than God if God has freely made this arrangement and it is good. Nor does it necessarily do this by putting
our relationship with God in the hands of human beings for if a priest sinfully
refuses to give a sacrament the penitent gets all the grace anyway. But it does in the sense that it has God
doing evil to honour men meaning that he is afraid of them!
Sacramentalism is sinful for it accuses God of plotting to give us
motives for more sin.
In the sacrament of baptism, God promises to be our friend forever and
promises us mercy and not justice for the past sins. That is, he promises to be there when we need
him. He would not be our Father and us
his adopted children if he did not. This
automatically makes the other sacraments superfluous. When God protects us all the time from the
world, the flesh and the Devil not only is there no need for more sacraments
but they cannot work. Sacraments cannot
give grace to a person who is full of all required grace.
If Jesus made baptism a sacrament then he was saying that there are no other sacraments.
But even baptism is superfluous for it would be better to give the graces it confers to a person who turns to God wholeheartedly and who isn’t being baptised. When a person is at his spiritual best he cannot receive baptism and is forced to wait until he is less good. That is unfair.
The Humanist system offers a way to be free from fear and bad inclinations and to become happy without drawing upon alleged forces from another world to do it. The system works by using your own earthly resources and is non-spiritual for that reason. For a religion to offer benefits through sacraments is to offer a distraction from the system and give false hope when there is a better way. The sacraments are therefore anti-virtue and anti-happiness and are to be feared. The same is true of prayer. The Church should agree to be sued if its graces do not work. And yet it allows doctors to be sued for treatments that fail but which do less damage.
PRAYER REFUTES NEED FOR SACRAMENTS
The Catholic Church teaches that a sacrament is a rite that symbolises
grace and which gives the grace it signifies.
For example, the laying on of hands in confirmation symbolises giving
the Holy Spirit and actually bestows him.
We know that the idea that God won’t forgive some sinners until they go
to confession is blasphemy in the eyes of many believers in God but what about
God refusing to help you to be good until you receive a sacrament?
What if you have the right attitude to receive a sacrament but can’t,
say, until you reach the Church? If God
gives you the grace anyway then it appears there is no such thing as a
sacrament for you already got the grace the moment you were ready for the rite.
Perhaps God gives you all the graces you need until you receive the
sacrament when you pray? He will if he
is good. Some say that we ruin the
graces in us by sin and that is why we need prayer and the sacraments for a refill. God may leave some weaknesses untouched when
these will not do us any harm and he will heal them in the sacrament. This shows that the sacraments are not
necessary in themselves as far as grace is concerned. It is hard to imagine that God would create
unnecessary magic spells like sacraments and make it a sin not to take
them. Sacraments look like they are the
inventions of an authoritarian Church to keep us on a leash.
CONCLUSION
Sacraments and superstitions thrive on irrational fear and both are
magical.
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Christians versus the Lies of Catholicism