May 19, 2021
Prayer? No, a tribute to our creator, Yes
Prayer to God
People pray to God for protection from dangers of natural forces such as flood, storm, earthquake, volcano, and so on, for protection from a pandemic, epidemic, cancer, paralysis, and so on, and for wealth, health and prosperity.
People gift gold, land, building, cash, and so on to God for His or Her grace and fulfillment of their dreams and desires. This is nothing but bribing God!
Mystics pray to God (as a supernatural power) or the void or the earth or the universe or the universal soul for their merger with the chosen one of them as their ultimate spiritual goal of moksha or salvation or liberation from rebirth.
People pray even to saints and prophets, kings, religious gurus, snakes, rivers, trees, the sun, and material idols. People pray for peace to the soul of a dead person in heaven.
People pray for the healing of the sickness of a family member, relative, friend, beloved person like a local or global guru, national or international leader, and so on.
Some people in India pray to God with the clap of hands and candle lights for the end of Covid-19 in response to the political leader’s call!
Prayer of some people may be a method of meditation for mental equanimity.
People offering prayers to God etc. has been an ancient widespread practice in every country.
Prayer to the illusory deity
Never in human history, the God in any form answered human prayer.
Except for the prayer of the mystic or Sufi and meditational prayer, all other prayers like petition prayers are covered under the definition of prayer by Ambrose Bierce:
‘Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favour of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.’
As Christopher Hitchens puts it, ‘The man who prays is the one who thinks that God has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right. Half-buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self-canceling.’ This is the truth about religious prayer.
It is a paradox that human beings, God’s children have to pray to the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God for favors like wealth, health, and happiness. This is degrading and blaspheming God by the praying crowd. Please see the sample scriptural statements: ‘Now O Lord, thou art our father; we art clay and thou our potter; and we are all the work of thy hand.’ ‘Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication and thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.’
Christopher Hitchens makes an apt comment: ‘It is not for the mere human to be presuming that he or she can advise the divine.’
The scriptures contain many such contradictions. In fact, the scriptures make the human being a slave to God and the scriptures themselves and bound.
The petition prayers and intercessory prayers for someone’s disease healing reflect humans ’ imposed slavish and dependent attitude. Prayer does not cure and save a patient. Everyone knows that only medical science can cure and save him.
Rationalists, atheists, and agnostics do not pray to God. Their number has been steadily going up in recent centuries. I don’t pray to God; I pay morning tribute to Mother Earth, the ultimate creator of human beings.
Mahatma Gandhi offers a different method of prayer: ’For those who are filled with the presence of God in them, to labour is to pray. Their life is one continuous prayer or act of worship.’This way of prayer indirectly supports the Advaita Vedantic idea of the presence of divine element in the human being and Basavanna, the Indian mystic’s concept of the human body as the shrine.
He further says: ‘Prayer is the only means of bringing about orderliness and peace and repose in our daily acts.’ Gandhi has a liberal approach to prayer, though he himself was a deeply religious statesman.
God has no answer to any human problem.
Tribute to the creator
No need to pray to a deity. Pay tribute to your creator, Mother Earth, or nature. You pay tribute to Mother Earth for her gift of life and its sustenance to us. You have to pay a tribute of your gratitude and veneration to her daily as a sacred mantra preferably in the morning and to start your other daily activity. You have to develop courage, self-confidence, and rationality and to keep conscience and humanism as your guard to guide you to work, prosper and live a fulfilled life.
As poetess Lucy Bunch writes:
We pray to you Mother Earth with gratitude for your holding and maintaining love
For the air,water and soil that feed us
For the mountains and rivers and oceans that calm our spirits
For loving and supporting all beings and all creation.
…….
Mother Earth, in gratitude and humility we ask that you hold us and sustain us,
as we strive to live in connection with you and all life. Amen’
We are dependent upon nature from birth to death.
We have to forget that prayer can serve some human purpose. We have nature’s gifts with us and it is we who have subjugated some of nature’s forces and human maladies, physical or mental, harmful to us. Tsunami, pandemic, epidemic, ill health, misfortune, fear, and so on God neither controlled nor eliminated in response to human prayer, individual or collective.
To pray to some imaginary deity is to bend before that non-existing deity. To pay tribute to Mother Earth daily is to perform your sacred duty of gratitude, veneration, and humility to her and to stand erect,self-dependent, and unshackled without any divine interference, help, or control.
The long course of human life convinces you that prayer to God is futile. You have to pay tribute to your creator, Mother Earth.
It is not prayer but a daily tribute to Mother Earth you have to embrace and practice.
