With that logic, why should I ask friends or family to pray for me? Why not just “cut out the middle man” since God hears me anyway?
Because unlike with dead people, you can talk to living people, communicate something to them that you want prayer for, and get a response assuring you that this will happen. You can’t do that with dead people.
These so-called “dead” people aren’t dead, either. They are alive in Christ! The fact that they are closer to God makes them perfect people to ask to pray.
They are absent from the body and present with the Lord. That means they aren’t here anymore. Furthermore, just because a person goes on to be with God
does not mean they become omnipresent or omniscient. I really can’t stress this enough- dead people do not take on any deity-like qualities. If dead people are capable of occupying the realm of the living in order to see and hear things (which I’m not sure they can), they can be
at most in one place at one time. Again, dead people do not become all-seeing and all-knowing. They always remain finite and limited to being in one place at one time. As a result, your prayers to Saint Peter come across as a little bit silly because odds are
very low that he is hanging around in your particular Catholic church in order to hear your prayer. If he is, though, you’d better make sure it’s important because his presence there takes him away from people on the other side of the world who might have something more important to say. If you really think Saint Peter is capable of being everywhere at once and hearing everything, there is something
very wrong with your conception of dead people. They don’t become gods.
The Church is a body of believers (including those who are already in Heaven), not just a bunch of separate individuals doing their own individual things with God.
However, it’s only the living ones that I am able to communicate with and ascertain that they have heard me and will indeed pray for me. If you pray to Saint Peter, you have no way of knowing whether he heard you or if he was somewhere in Rome listening to someone else’s prayer at a fancier cathedral.
You don’t even know for sure if Saint Peter ever hears your prayers, because you won’t ever get a response from him. Unless you use a Ouija board to get him to talk to you or something like that. Of course, you have better odds of talking to a demon than an apostle if you do that.
Those “dead” people love you and want to pray with you and for you.
But how can they hear a request unless they are able to be present in the same room as you and hear you? Surely you don’t think dead people can read thoughts from afar. Again,
they aren’t deities- they’re dead people. There is no shortage of living people to talk to. They are no more omnipresent than a dead person, but at least you can know that they are present with you at a particular place and time. It’s not like you have to pray to dead people, and it’s certainly a less certain mode of communication when compared to talking to a living person. If you ask me, the smart money is on the living, not the dead. Have the living pray for you.
Even more perfectly than people alive on earth, since they are no longer inhibited by worldly distractions. All you have to do is ask them.
Riiiigggghhht, their only possible distraction is the ability to worship God in His immediate presence at all times. I don’t see what would possible cause someone to want to stay there instead of leaving God’s immediate presence and spending all their time traveling from place to place on the Earth so they can hear people’s prayers and deliver them to God- when God already hears those prayers and knows them before you even say them! And you don’t even know for sure that dead people are able to do this in the first place. God has heavenly messengers, and they are called angels. Do you ever pray to angels? After all, you know for sure that they are present and active on this earth, and you can’t say the same for dead people. They are gone. They are absent from their bodies- this is what the Bible tells us. Some people feel that they are somehow closer to that dead person when they visit their grave, though. But do you really think their soul hangs around the graveyard, or is that just a feeling people get when they have a tangible reminder of the person? I’d say it’s just a feeling, while in reality the person’s soul is G-O-N-E Gone from that place and literally not present to see or hear anything that’s being said about them or (ostensibly) to them. When you talk to a gravestone, you’re talking to nothing but a gravestone.
I totally understand the feeling you get when you visit a grave and feel like you can say something that the dead person might hear, but I also recognize it as just a feeling and not a reality. Their soul is gone. It doesn’t come out at night and fly around like some sort of Egyptian ka. And it’s certainly not omniscient or omnipresent, and that has
got to be the only way that all those saints could possibly hear and respond to all the prayer requests they get. Like a person’s gravestone, your little idol or fetish or whatever you call it is merely a tangible reminder of the person that causes a
feeling of closeness. It doesn’t actually bring the person’s soul closer, though, and it really is
just a feeling- the person most likely can’t hear you.
On the other hand…there’s tons of living people who would be glad to pray for you! So ask one of them. Or five or ten; whatever you want. You know they can hear you, and you can know that they are praying for you. They’ll tell you.
] … but I also will look at the early patristic writings, the church througout the ages, even archeology and liturature.
… St Paul would not have joined you … he was "working out’ his salvation, afraid that in the end he might “lose” … but that is a whole different topic …