What If You Were Told, "Starting Today, Your Prayers Are Invalid"?

I was reading about what happened to a certain religious organization, and I almost blurted out, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

The group is one of those religions that promise worldly benefits, such as health, success, and prosperity in this life.

Apparently, after some kind of internal power struggle, a group of members was excommunicated.

Then the leadership of the main organization that remained announced:

“Starting today, all prayers by those who have been excommunicated are invalid.”

Hold on a second.

Until yesterday, they were chanting the same mantra and praying to the same deity.

Yet the moment the head of the organization stamps the paperwork, “Okay, you’re invalid as of today,” all the spiritual merit they had built up supposedly disappears, and their prayers no longer reach anyone at all.

The deity, too, seems remarkably obedient about following personnel orders.

Even the Gods Have an HR Department

Think about it in terms of Christianity, and you can see how remarkable this logic is.

Protestants originally believed in the same God as Catholics.

Imagine if the Pope declared, “Your doctrine is different, so starting tomorrow, God has abandoned you, and you are all going to hell,” and that declaration were simply accepted as God’s own decision.

In fact, Martin Luther was excommunicated by the Pope.

But probably not a single Protestant ever believed that Luther’s prayers stopped reaching God because of it.

Can the power of gods and buddhas really be controlled by a human organization’s personnel authority and administrative procedures?

As an ordinary person, I can only tilt my head. But in the world of religion, it seems, license agreements for faith and transfers of ownership can be carried out surprisingly easily.

What’s more, the side whose license is revoked apparently loses not only the invisible asset of spiritual merit, but is effectively stripped of real assets and rights as well.

Once organizational logic kicks in, even the sublime world of faith ends up looking not much different from a terminated franchise contract or a forcibly suspended account.

A Holy War Stuck in the Mud

According to the article, the dispute became even messier after that.

It turned into defamation lawsuits, both sides spread fake news, and they even resorted to wiretapping, hidden cameras, and honey traps against each other.

I assumed they would settle things through the power of prayer. Instead, the weapons of choice were lawyers, disinformation, and seduction.

As someone watching from the outside, I end up less interested in whose prayers are valid than in whether religion itself is okay.

As a way of spreading the faith, it is probably counterproductive.

Still, it is a real blessing that this group’s deity is a gentle one.

If it were the God of the Old Testament, both sides would already have been wiped out together by a rain of fire and brimstone.