Yes, God has already decided what He will do, and He can handle everything without the help of anyone, including the departed. We pray first because God told us to. Case closed. Then we pray from our own perspective because it is communication with God. In sincerity this is always good, even if we don't get the "thing" we supplicated for. Regardless of the outcome, prayer is ALWAYS good for the one praying.
Again, it is your paradigm that excludes love and how it works that prevents you from seeing the worth of prayer and intercession. We see God "awaiting" our prayers, just as a loving father awaits for his child to ask HIM for favors. That is our paradigm.
My paradigm doesn't exclude love at all. You seem to be saying that if I say that ALL my love goes directly to God, then I am somehow cheating God because I should have given some of that love to other men of the Church or other dead saints, etc. ??? I don't know. This doesn't make sense. Your argument appears to say that the correct course is to steer one's love away from God, and rather direct it toward a saint as an intercessor, or to Mary, or to a man of the Magisterium, and that is much better than directing one's love to God Himself, directly.
I have to pass on this approach. I do not tell my wife to love me by making out with the mailman. :) But it appears this is the same idea you are suggesting. And BTW, you are misrepresenting the theology when you make the comparison to a father who waits for his child to ask him for favors. For you, many times the father hears about what favors his own kid wants from the neighbor kids. Comparatively, Catholicism discourages the one-on-one relationship between the layman and Christ. Child - Parent.
So when YOU, a member of the so-called Elect, SIN, does THAT make God a failure?
To borrow a phrase, "BY NO MEANS". :) God never promised us in scripture that He would make us sinless upon regeneration. A remnant remains by His design. The very clear message of scripture to Christians is NOT "No worries, mate". It is indeed that we WILL struggle with both the world and with ourselves.
Does God desire men to sin?
Tricky question, but when it is necessary to further His plan, "YES". Think of the crucifixion and the million elements that all had to fit together for it to happen AND happen in accordance with prophecy. WAS this all a grand accident? OR, did God orchestrate it all with perfection?
WHY does He let you sin IF He is omnipotent in every aspect, all controlling and so forth...
The Holy Spirit used my sin to convict me of my NEED for God. Then I accepted Christ. That's a pretty good reason. :) I love God much more NOW because I know of my sin and how it alienates me from Him. Because of my sin, I appreciate His love for me a hundred times more than I would have, had I been protected from all sin. This is one of the main reasons I think it disrespects Mary to say she was sinless. Catholicism denies her what we sinners know all too well, we NEED God.
Or does God ALLOW men to choose to sin or not to sin (the latter only possible because of His grace, which does not overpower)
God allows men to choose to sin, yes. By specific grace, He allows SOME to choose to do good in God's eyes.
FK: "... look to every place in the Bible where Jesus begins a sentence 'The Kingdom of Heaven is like ...' That's what Heaven is like". :)
That belays a misunderstanding of what the "Kingdom of Heaven" means. It begins NOW, brother. Consult the Scriptures and see that eternal life begins when Jesus Christ comes to abide in us. John is ESPECIALLY clear that eternal life is accessible to us in this life.
We certainly do have a fundamental and absolute disagreement on what the term "eternal life" means. :) I still remember what you told me on the Luther thread. :)
John is ESPECIALLY clear that eternal life is accessible to us in this life.
Indeed he is, but in such a different way. :)
The Holy Spirit used my sin to convict me of my NEED for God. Then I accepted Christ. That's a pretty good reason. :) I love God much more NOW because I know of my sin and how it alienates me from Him. Because of my sin, I appreciate His love for me a hundred times more than I would have, had I been protected from all sin. This is one of the main reasons I think it disrespects Mary to say she was sinless. Catholicism denies her what we sinners know all too well, we NEED God.I fervently agree that what took me to "the next level" with Jesus was my own desperate awareness that I was "fell full foul in sinne" and couldn't bootstrap my way out of it. So clearly in our own lives we experience the truth that for the God who can turn the murder by torture of the only righteous man who ever lived into the salvation of the world turning our sinfulness to good purpose is no challenge.
But I want to maintain that it is not necessary for a human to sin to know how much we need God or to love Him. As Lewis says, it is waking that understands sleeping, not sleeping that understands waking. In my somnolent stupor, like a man who has heard the alarm and struggles to make himself get out of bed, my sullen, groggy heart blunders to-God-ward. But I suspect someone who was never drugged by sin would all the more lithely and eagerly give all his (or especially her) heart and attention to God. It was not so much sin itself, but the gracious awareness of the horror and sickness of sin that God used to bring me to Him. But rescue from moral and spiritual death is not the only thing that makes Him lovely, and the eyes of the sinless may see those beauties more clearly than we do, at least than we do now.