So are people in hell.
Everyone is alive somewhere so that kind of justification or rationalization is ludicrous.
Anyone without an agenda of justifying their unscriptural religious practices recognizes the ordinary fact that when people talk about not contacting the dead, it means that people physically alive here on earth are prohibited from contacting those people who have physically died and are physically no longer alive here on earth.
Also the argument that people praying to *saints* in heaven is not asking them for anything but rather asking them to intercede to God for them is demonstrably false.
There are a plethora of Catholic prayers to dead people Catholics call saints that can be found online with a simple google search that prove that to be untrue.
Catholics ask those dead people to do things for them all the time.
It's like they think they can get something out of them easier than they can get something out of God.
Like the *saints* would go outside the will of God for a person.
It's a shame Catholics don't trust God enough to answer their prayers Himself, like He promised He would do for us, that they are afraid to go to Him with their needs and requests.
In Mt 25, Jesus says, "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. . . . And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." He here draws a clear distinction between those who are alive in God in heaven, and those who are suffering "eternal punishment" in hell.
Only those who are engaged in justifying their unscriptural departures from the authentic Christian faith would miss something so obvious.
Anyone without an agenda of justifying their unscriptural religious practices recognizes the ordinary fact that when people talk about not contacting the dead, it means that people physically alive here on earth are prohibited from contacting those people who have physically died and are physically no longer alive here on earth.
So Jesus, when he spoke to at the Transfiguration, was either sinning or just setting a really, really bad example for us?
And when Hebrews 12:1 says the saints surround us as "a cloud of witnesses," we're prohibited from asking for their intercession?
It's like they think they can get something out of them easier than they can get something out of God.
As usual, your argument descends into objections that are equally "valid" as attacks on intercessory prayer in general. But since intercessory prayer is clearly taught in the NT and clearly practiced and encouraged by the apostles, you are stuck arguing something that is clearly contrary to Scripture.
Didn't Paul know that he could go directly to God? Why does he ask people to pray for him? (Ephesians 6:19 and elsewhere)
The root issue here is that the church, as a supernatural reality, is not in your "Just Jesus and me" solipsistic theology. But that's not in the Bible. The Bible says that the Church is the Bride of Christ, the Body of Christ, the pillar and ground of the truth, and was created directly by Christ and gifted with his promise that the gates of hell should not overcome it. That means, among other things, that the church is just as alive in heaven as she is on earth, and the bonds of charity which connect her members are not divided by death. "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"