which of the two is bound by the Law?
If you say, “servant,” that servant is a lifeless thing;
if you say, “Lord,” how could the Lord ever be charged with legal duty?

There is, moreover, a category that turns away from both sides—worship and seeking assistance. In other words, a third group who refuse to worship Allah and to rely on Him altogether. They break down into two sub-groups: people of the world and people of (corrupted) religion. The so-called religious among them follow a deviant creed: they worship other than Allah and call upon other than Him, pursuing mere conjecture and the whims of their own souls—“They follow nothing but conjecture and what souls desire, although guidance has already come to them from their Lord” (Q 53:23). The worldly among them chase their immediate cravings, relying on whatever causal means they happen to imagine.

Know that one must distinguish between someone who simply neglects worshiping Allah and seeking His help, and someone who actually worships another and seeks assistance from someone else.