MENTAL PRAYER: THE ONLY VIRTUE
 
Jesus when he was asked by a Jewish scholar, a scribe, what the greatest commandment of morality was replied as follows.
 
“The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31, King James Bible).
 
Jesus said that we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength (which is commanded by the depraved prophet Moses in Deuteronomy 6). That is, God is to be loved wholly. We do not love him most and give the rest of our love to others. We must love him alone and love others for his sake.
 
Jesus is saying we must love God not with some of our energy, most of our energy but ALL our energy. In other words, everything we do must be solely motivated by what pleases God. It is all about pleasing him. When you help the sick, it is not done to help the sick but to honour God. It is done for God.
 
You do not fully love a person when you are not thinking of them. The Church says that the love for God then is subconscious. But it is obvious that the greatest love is having a person in your awareness with a full desire for their wellbeing. The Church lies that subconsciously thinking of God is enough. If he comes first, it does not. Prayer is the awareness of God.
 
Prayer is communication with God. It is union with God and believers say it is two way. God unites with you when you pray and you unite with him.
 
Sin is what does not give to the Lord the honour which he is due. Forgetting God is a sin. If God comes first, as the very concept of God implies, he should not be forgotten. But we have to forget God to live in this world. For example, you cannot even cook the dinner if you are going to think only of God. Your concentration will fail you and the dinner will be a burnt offering.
 
Christianity says that God wants you to serve him by living in the world as a normal person. But this contradicts its doctrine that God has to come first. Out of sight out of mind.
 
If God is to be supreme then we should think of his presence and nothing else and forget about helping others and working for they are only distractions. They are idolatries.
 
Even vocal prayer, prayer that is made up of words, is sinful. When you say the prayer Jesus made, “Our Father who art in Heaven”, you are thinking of the words and not just not the presence of God. The words distract you at least partly from your focus on the divine presence. You can’t even have a picture of God in your head for that is thinking of an image and not of God. All you can do is be aware that he is there.
 
We see then that everything is evil and of the Devil except resting in the presence of God in a state of freedom from sin. Distraction need not always be sinful but it would always be evil. It would be something we need to be sorry for.
 
Like the Hindu holy men, we must sit staring vacantly into space and be passive. We must let the ivy grow all over us and the birds build their nests on our heads.
 
If this is against God’s will then God is evil. Then he did not make us to put him first and therefore has no reason to let us suffer. God having the right to let us get ill and suffer and die presupposes that he comes first. If I come first, nothing justifies letting me get sick. An almighty God can never need to make me sick to avoid some greater evil - eg to stop me dying in a car crash - being almighty he can think of a better way. So we suffer so that somehow it may make us better people inside. It's the inside he cares about.
 
If there is no God, what matters most is what good we do not whether we are really good inside or not.
 
If there is a God, what matters most is us having virtuous hearts and being holy and good inside. The external does not matter at all in comparison. This is a morality about God not people.
 
If we are allowed by God to suffer so that we may improve in virtue, then that is because we won't do mental prayer and constantly repose in him. It's punishment in the sense, "Okay, you won't do grow in holiness the right way so you will pay for that by suffering to get it done."
 
It would be cruel to say that we should suffer than that we should repose in him. Most Christians are actually participants in such cruelty by despising mental prayer and meditation though they would better for us if there really is a God.
 
If life is just about a choice between involvement in the world and meditation then suffering is wholly pointless in our human perception though God values it. The meditator would be condoning the depravity of God simply by trying to get close to him and to please him, to reward him for being bad, in effect. One might argue like the Christian Science Church that suffering is an illusion and that the hideous things one sees happening around her or him are not real. They exist so that we might make the sacrifice of treating them as unreal for God.
 
Some would say that God would want us to be able to meditate, or try to, despite suffering which gives our efforts more merit. But that if that is correct in principle it is not in practice because suffering distracts from God which means he has to do without it if he wants our attention.
 
If virtue is the means to an end then it follows that if God comes first then focusing only on him should be the end we are all after not helping other people or being happy. This is a revolting idea. Virtue that is not just a means to make other people happy is not virtue and that is the final word.
 
Virtue that focuses primarily on making a God who is already perfectly happy, happy is a perversion not virtue. What about people that bleed and suffer? It is even worse if the total focus is on pleasing God. Virtue that is not primarily focused on one’s own happiness is a disorder. To be focused on something like God that is going to get the benefit instead of others is to repudiate happiness.
  
The Church claims to agree with humanists these days that the person or human life is the most important thing to look after. But that totally contradicts the first greatest commandment - according to Jesus - which makes God the most valuable thing when it commands that you love God with all your heart and powers. It implies that it is better to die than to sin. The nearest way you can get to holding God as the supreme value and then life is by holding that prayer and thinking of God should be the only activities you care about, for yourself and for others. That means it is better to let a man die of a heart attack on the street rather than distract yourself from God by ringing for an ambulance. It means that parties and entertainment are sinful. It means that it is better to try and persuade somebody to think only of God than to take that person to the hospital for life-saving surgery. 
 
The Hare Krishnas are a sect that advocates constant consciousness of God. Christianity advocates it too but does the opposite. The birth of Christianity was the birth of ultrahypocrisy.
 
 
The WEB
 
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12608c.htm
Catholic Encyclopaedia. This discusses Quietism.
 
Books Consulted
 
BOOKS CONSULTED
 
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