LOVING
GOD: EXCLUSIVE LOVE
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JESUS SAID WE MUST LOVE GOD ALONE
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JESUS SAID WE MUST LOVE GOD ALONE
Jesus when he was asked what the greatest commandment of morality was replied as follows.
“The first of all the
commandments is, Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and will
all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy
strength: this is the first commandment.
And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself. There is
none other commandment greater than these” (Mark
Jesus is saying we must love God not with some of our energy, most of our energy but ALL our energy. In other words, everything we do must be solely motivated by what pleases God. Its all about pleasing him. When you help the sick, it is not done to help the sick but to honour God. It is done for God.
Some say Jesus meant that we are to love God by keeping God's commandments. Yes but he meant more than that. He asked us to love God personally. He asked us to love God as a person. Loving a person's commandments only means you love something other than the person.
The idea of some writers that loving God with all our hearts merely means keeping his commandments is an over-simplification. It is supposed to be that but more. If you love God's commandments, that does not mean you necessarily love God as a person. To love a person's rules is not the same as loving the person. Jesus said that we are to love God as a person with all our hearts. That means we do everything for God alone. We love God with all our hearts. Our neighbour is not to be loved with all our hearts. Neither are we to love ourselves that way. Why are we to love God then that much? Is it because he is good? It can't be for we are to love our enemies. Is it because he is a person? Then if he is, what about the people around you? What about your children? He might be a person with infinite power but he is still just a person. His power or rank makes no difference. Perhaps we owe him obedience because he made us? But he needs nothing for he is perfect and happy. So we owe him nothing. God should not be loved more than any other person. We are loving God more than others when people suffer and we say God is justified in letting them suffer. We are doing wrong against those people. God is not that important that we should condone what he does or what we think he does to others.
So we are to love God with all our hearts, all our souls, all our strength and all our minds. And the God that is to be loved this much is the God of Israel. Jesus makes that plain. He said first that there was only one God and Lord and that was the God Israel knew. This was God as revealed in the Old Testament. By implication, you cannot honour this God without being a Jewish believer. At that time, there was no Christianity yet and Jesus had not separated from Judaism.
When the greatest commandment of morality is to love God it follows that no rule at any time is ever more important than it. It is more important to love God than to save lives. Saving lives would not be holy unless you do it with love for God. (It’s loving God that matters and if you feel God is inspiring you to let the people die for some mysterious purpose of his then that is what you have to do.) From this we see that it is being claimed that there is no morality unless you believe in God and the stronger your faith the more you can describe yourself as righteous for then the more you can intend to do good and promote morality. If you have a weak faith and help a person out of love for God it follows that this act is not that good because your faith in the authority that commands it and makes it right is not strong. Anybody who does not believe in God and who claims to be a good person is really the most dangerous viper you could meet. To love God we must first believe so to love him more and more we must work to increase our faith. The more you believe the more you will love. These are the dangerous implications.
There can be no room for the idea that loving God above all things and loving him alone simply means that you do the right thing even if your mother/father or husband/wife or son/daughter want you to do wrong. It means that yes but more than that. It means doing what God says is right whether you understand it or not. If you want to do right, and you give into the evil wishes of your loved one, you are not really loving that person at all. To say then that you are to love doing right more than the person makes no sense. If Jesus simply meant that we put doing right first then what did he bother confusing us with the God talk then for? Jesus meant that we are to adore and cherish God not just obey him. You are commanded to be devastated at blasphemy against God more than the murder of your own child. If the child is murdered, the disobedience to God rather than the death of the child or his suffering is what should bother you. This was Jesus' twisted thinking.
Aquinas taught that faith is a gift from God. Its motive is God, its source is God, its goal is God (page 36, CATHOLICISM, Richard P McBrien, HarperSanFrancisco, New York, 1994). Faith then acknowledges that God alone matters. Naturally if there is a God he will help you to believe in him by being in your heart elevating your intellect above its natural inclinations and abilities to realise that he probably exists. Belief in God implies that God alone is to be loved.
Miracles cannot be taken as evidence for God unless one believes first. So what does God do them for when there is no point? The believer then does not accept miracles as evidence for God but as evidence that his notion that God has revealed himself to him in faith is true. In other words, the believer treats miracles as backing up his faith in his own ideas not as backing up God. That this is arrogant is proven by the inability of Christian sects to agree with one another on what God has revealed.
Jesus claimed to be the divinely inspired Son of God who repeats only what God told him. Jesus’ main teaching that there is no real good without God and loving God with your total being was wrong - for we know by experience that unbelievers can be good people. Hardly any competent philosophers believe that you can’t believe in morality unless you believe in a God who commands it. Then you are just blindly obeying God and calling it morality which is dangerous for you would be doing the same if he commanded murder. That attitude does not foster morality but immorality and it does not foster maturity but immaturity and it does not foster diligence but laziness. Its lazy to take your morals from authority instead simply seeing that the authority is right and obeying it because of that.
Jesus said that the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbour as yourself. This commandment is inferior to the first which Jesus said was the greatest so loving God is more important than loving other people or yourself. He was saying that love does not start with yourself which is why psychiatry is evil and heretical for saying otherwise and any Church that gives it a hearing like the Roman Catholic Church is doing serious wrong. It starts with loving God.
The commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself on the face of it seems to say that your needs are equal to those of other people. However, Jesus didn’t mean it like that for he held that you should sacrifice your happiness and welfare when your neighbours need you to. And even when they don’t. He commanded in the sermon on the mount that if an invading Roman soldier forced a Jew to carry his pack one mile the Jew should carry it another mile as well though the Jewish people were victimised by Rome. He is not endorsing self-esteem or self-love of any kind in the commandment for these would stop you and discourage you from sacrificing. Love your neighbour as yourself really means that you must love God in yourself and your neighbour for all people are made in the image of God and to respect the image is to respect God. The clue to this is from the other teachings of Christ and his assertion that the second greatest commandment was LIKE the first. It could only be like the first if it was another way of carrying out the first. It is like the first in the sense that both commandments are about loving God but in different ways.
Jesus wants you to live the first greatest commandment through the second. That is to say that when you look at another person or yourself you must see only God and love that so you love God by helping the other person and seeing only God – you see the image of God in that person. Each person is the image of God and that is how they are loved for what is like God in them is what is loved. That is the only way the two commandments can fit together because the first one says we must love God alone and yet the second commands us to love others as ourselves.
Any time we love people with ordinary human affection it is sinful. It is a sin to love your mother as your mother or your husband as your husband. Look at them and don’t see them but love God and that alone is virtue. Jesus said that anybody who prefers their father or mother to him is not worthy of him. We are doing that if we love them at all for themselves for he forbids it.
If you refuse to see the person but just look at what reminds you of God in the person and just see God’s goodness where there is bad in the person then plainly you will lose any capacity to protect yourself from evil people and will become a horrendous judge of character. If you don’t believe in judging then it only gets worse – and most Christians these days forbid judging so that they can sin without smearing their consciences. The doctrine of love God alone is such a severe and difficult and extreme and absurd idea that only people who wanted to use God to lull people into a pious dream so that they could take advantage of them could have invented it.
Only God would have the right to tell us to make him the only thing that matters so it follows that the two greatest commandments are revelations from God and the words of God. The same must be true of the rest of the Bible which is about endorsing the proper love of God. It might endorse salvation by faith without good works in the New Testament but even this salvation is about making us grateful children of God eager to do good works in gratitude. So when the Bible is about these commandments the whole Bible is the word of God.
So we see then that there is no morality and the commandments need to be the word of God to have authority so you need to believe in the word of God the Bible to believe in morality. It has to be the one true word of God, the Bible. Anything else will not do.
Nobody agrees on what God has commanded so what happens is that when you obey God it is really what somebody tells you to believe about him that you are obeying. You are obeying human beings all along.
Many evangelicals teach that Christ’s doctrine of exclusive love for God implies that salvation is by faith alone, “Everything we do is sinful because we cannot love God alone. Only God’s grace can enable us to and we cannot have it unless we accept the payment Jesus made to God to atone for our sins and earn salvation for us. This tells us that unless we see that we can do nothing to be saved and that faith that saves is a gift from God and that Jesus deserved salvation for us we cannot be saved. We have to understand how sinful we are before we can sincerely come to Jesus for the free salvation he offers. Roman Catholics believe that venial sin does not stop you from being right with God and destined for Heaven so this theology blocks you from properly accepting the salvation won by Jesus.”
And “There can be no salvation for anybody that does not believe in God or in the commandments of Jesus Christ.”
And “When we accept Jesus as saviour and ask him to help us do good works and to save us from sin we are not really doing this unless we understand that the Bible is the literal word of God and commands that we love God alone in the strict sense and that is why everything we do is sinful and no good deed can earn any reward from God. These truths are necessary for the faith that is necessary for salvation.”
And “Anybody who does not believe in the Bible, in loving God alone, that people are useless when it comes to genuine good and that Jesus earned salvation vicariously for us is an enemy of right and wrong and cannot be saved for they cannot see what they have to be saved from.”
And “Right and wrong cannot be
based on human philosophy. The Roman
Catholic Church and any other Church that employs moral philosophy is doing
great harm to the faith by implying that we can know what is right and wrong
without God. If God who is goodness
itself commands us never to kill babies that means we believe goodness itself
that cannot be changed makes this command.
But if we judge for ourselves without God that it is wrong to kill
babies this is just our opinion. If
somebody says that the more babies you kill the better for it curbs world
population then you have nothing credible to say in reply. Nobody deserves praise for doing what they
think is right for thinking is dangerous and could go one way or another. If we judge for ourselves we believe that it
was unjust for Jesus to pay the price for our sins for he was innocent. If we judge for ourselves we will believe
that nothing justifies hurting a child which insults the Lord who has made
fatal viruses that children are not immune to.
We need to have faith that God is looking after the world and in him to
really believe in being righteous. Only
the good works of the true Christian deserve praise. Unless you believe that loving God alone
counts, and unless you believe you cannot fulfil this law to any degree, and
unless you realise that the only solution is for Jesus to love God for you in
your place you cannot be saved and you do not have anything that deserves to be
called morality. Christianity, when
expressed through evangelical (faith alone) theology, alone is true
morality. To pray for the success of
other faiths, to give them money is to promote evil and hypocrisy. Good is not good unless you really and truly
believe in it and you cannot do that without the true gospel of Jesus the
Christ.”
The reason we need to think about what they are saying is that the commandment does imply that faith alone salvation is true. This means that since you can be saved once and for all because it is the only way for you always sin you can commit murder and still go to Heaven even if you die unrepentant. What this leads to is not morality but evil. No matter what evangelicals say about Jesus paying for our sins and bearing their punishment this is still in practice rewarding the sinner for sinning. It is evil to embrace such a faith for anything that disrespects the human right to life is to be condemned.
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LOVE GOD ONLY QUOTATIONS
Here are some quotations from religions that believe the only thing that counts is loving God. They tell us that God alone should be loved and we should love others just to please him meaning it is just him that is the real concern not them.
A Catholic prayer that the Church wants recited regularly is, “Oh my God, because you are so good, I love you with all my heart, and for your sake, I love my neighbour as myself” (page 66, A Catechism of Christian Doctrine).
This here is very clear. The neighbour or yourself is not loved for any reason but for the love of God. You love yourself and your neighbour for the sake of God alone and not your sake or that of your neighbour. This is not love in the usual sense of the word. People’s failure to see this monstrous doctrine has contributed to the deceptions of Christianity being foisted on so many in the world.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “The first commandment enjoins us to love God above everything and all creatures for him and because of him” (2093). “Charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbour as ourselves for the love of God” (1822). Real charity means that we would prefer to lose all things and even our lives rather than do what is forbidden by him (page 183, The Student’s Catholic Doctrine) – which is another way of saying God alone counts. It is obvious that Catholic charity will wreck people with guilt. If you see sin as something that God who is infinitely good must hate infinitely you will end up doing everything you do to avoid guilt and yet you won’t succeed. If this doesn’t happen then you must question the depth of your faith.
Here is an excerpt from Radio Replies, Volume 2, Question 905, “Mere kindness to human beings, whether for the love of those human beings, or for the sake of self-esteem, is profitless; and in any case based upon the error that man and not God is an adequate motive for doing good. Such kindness, therefore, should not be called “charity” but rather “philanthropy”, which means love of man for humanity’s sake; or “humanitarianism,” the cult of humanity.”
And in Volume 3 question 1001, “You advocate kindness to others without any thought of the love of God: That is straight out rebellion, because God commands us to love each other for His sake…It would be selfish to work for one’s own happiness, knowing that God’s glory would result. But it is not selfish to work for God’s glory, knowing that one’s own happiness will result.”
There’s more. “We love God for Himself, not for ourselves”.
Logically then we read this reply to the question of how you can be expected to love your neighbour when you don’t even like him: “When Christianity bids you love your neighbour whether you like him or not, it really means that you must let your love of God overflow to your neighbour. You really see, not your neighbour, but God; and without diverting your attention from God, you let your love of Him extend to all whom He thought worth making and loving” (Question 1000).
St Alphonsus De Liguori in The Great Means of Salvation and of Perfection stated that anybody who leaves family and everything that is dear to him for Jesus and who carries esteem for himself is carrying the most dangerous attachment of them all. Though the man has crucified himself he is not entitled to praise himself and is to desire to be slandered and maltreated and treated with contempt (page 401). And also that any attachment even to what is good is bad for we should be attached only to God (page 350) and that we should be willing to die for God and not to satisfy our own feelings or to get esteem from others (page 456). He wrote a prayer asking Jesus for help to put away all love for others so that Jesus alone would be loved (page 447). To have an attachment to creatures instead of being committed entirely to God (page 438, The Great Means of Salvation and of Perfection).
The hymn, Take My Life, and Let it Be, ends with the lines:
“Take myself, and I will be
Ever, only, all, for thee” (Book of Common Prayer, Hymn 669).
The hymn, My God, I Love Thee; not Because, says:
“Then why, most loving Jesus Christ,
Should I not love thee well?
Not for the sake of winning heaven,
Or of escaping hell;
Not with the hope of gaining aught,
Not with seeking a reward;
But as thyself has loved me,
O ever-loving Lord” (Hymn 380).
In the conservative Calvinist book, The Bible Tells Us So, we are all instructed concerning the Bible teaching to love God with all our strength: “He who withholds his love from God and bestows it on another is an idolater. So is he who divides his love between God and another. Let no one think that the divine law requires that we bestow most of our love on God and the remainder on our neighbour. It demands that we love God with our entire being, and that we love our neighbour for God’s sake. And the minister who preaches for his own glory rather than God’s glory is guilty of idolatry; but so is the minister who preaches for God’s glory and his own” (page 34). It says that because God has made us and loved us we all we have and are to God (page 91).
Evidence that Demands a Verdict Vol 1 quotes the Evangelical theologian John Stott with approval saying that in the Bible love means totally disregarding yourself and being empty of self-interest to serve God and others and states that love is sacrifice (page 121). You would not be able to sacrifice if you liked sacrificing. McDowell says that as a teenager he wanted to be the happiest person in the world. He says that happiness is not doing what you want to do but doing what you know you ought to do (page 363). This is right but he offers Jesus as the only solution. What about a person who uses logic differently and has different ideas of what they ought to do? What McDowell is saying is running down their experience. His is right and to Hell with everybody else’s. He knows he is right and everybody is, is wrong and knows it. This is a recipe for the violent intolerance and bigotry that has made Christianity the most notorious religion in the world in the view of many. When one can find meaning for life from arrogance there is something badly wrong and serious lies are being told by that one. Yet this bigotry was sanctioned by Jesus himself in the Gospel of John.
Page 238 of Reasons for Hope says that ultimately God alone is to be loved and is to receive our concern.
The Catholic Truth Society booklet, Charity, claims that charity is an infused virtue of loving God that God gives you what cannot be naturally acquired and that it is the greatest and best gift God can bestow (page 3). When God is insulted or left out of anything the person who has charity and sees this happening feels grieved (page 9). Anybody that does not put God first is his enemy (page 13). Atheists beware! This is fanaticism because if loving your child can make you happier and kinder than loving God would nobody has the right to condemn you for doing that.
Charity is disinterested in anything that you desire but only in what God desires and in its perfect state it closes God out altogether (page 15). Charity in its perfect state puts even the happiness of seeing God in the Beatific Vision second to simply loving God for his own sake and not our own at all. Then we are told that anybody who loves God right loves himself or herself in the right way (page 18). This implies that the person who denies God does not and is therefore an evil person. But we are never to love ourselves in the sense that we seek advantage for ourselves through charity (page 28). So loving yourself just means looking after yourself to please God and not yourself so it is really just God who is loved while you use yourself to express this love. This is made plain when I am told to accept it when others get all the praise from my work and I get none (page 36).
Extraordinarily, the booklet says that real charity for God means examining religious statements and claims with great circumspection and that it is not charity to be credulous (page 47). We learn that proper charity loves God without any thought for ourselves but that you need some self-interest in loving God at the start to develop proper and pure charity (page 55). God is to be thanked first for his own glory, for him being who he is. That is what he is to be thanked for first of all and principally. It is to be the main thought in our minds and the main thing we give thanks for when we thank God (page 56). He is to be thanked primarily for being what he is and not for what he does for us. This plainly denies that feeling good about and valuing yourself is where love starts and if it is wrong then this teaching is very vile and corrupting indeed. It is very unnatural to thank God for being God without any reference to the good he does.
We are told that if we make little of the wrongs others do and make a lot of their virtues God will do the same to us (page 57). Jesus did say in the Sermon on the Mount that if you judge others harshly God will judge you harshly and without mercy. Strange that you can commit loads of sins and be treated mercifully and just for having a bad attitude you get treated harshly! Sad! Poor Jesus was obviously feeling guilty about his own sins and hostile to those who judged him. Under the spell of revenge, he was desperate to will a God with his bias into existence!
The Jews, according to the New Testament, were sinners though respectable ones. Despite lying in religious affairs and taking the houses of widows to finance the faith, they were looked up to. Jesus however condemned them for condemning others such as prostitutes and tax collectors. Jesus preferred the sinners who were looked upon as filth. The reason the condemnations by the Jews were considered to be so socially acceptable was because people believed that good people condemn sin in an effort to root it out. The leaders then were claiming to love the sinner and hate the sin.
When Jesus condemned the Jews for condemning sinners though they were no better themselves, he thereby rejected their excuse that they were condemning the sin and not the sinner. He said that you must not see the mote in your brother's eye when you ignore the plank in your own and that the judgment you pass on others will be passed on you so judge fairly (Matthew 7:1-5). He was admitting that you cannot love the sinner and hate the sin. They had to use this excuse because everybody would have hated them and they would have been hated by one another. Jesus was being purely spiteful for his teaching left it wide open for his followers to make the same excuse! How? Because he taught loving the sinner and hating the sin too. If you love the sinner and hate the sin you have to hate the sins of others even if you are a sinner yourself. And Jesus said that all people were sinful. The Christians say they love the sinner but hate the sin and that they condemn the sin not the sinner which if true means they can condemn the actions of a person who is not as bad as they are. And if you can really love the sinner and hate the sin then why not condemn the actions of people who are worse than yours? Why not condemn people's sins because you want them to be better off than you and cleaner in the sight of God? When Jesus commanded the hatred of sin, he went as far as to say you should wish you could lose an eye rather than lustfully look at a woman with it, he was commanding the hatred of sinners and he knew it.
If you can really love the sinner and hate the sin, it makes no sense to forbid ANYBODY from judging their neighbour. To forbid is to acknowledge that the love is counterfeit.
Those who believe in free will believe that it is possible to sin. If you can love the sinner and you must hate the sin then you must consider it a duty to condemn and judge the sins of others even if you are as bad or worse yourself.
How can you hate a sin if you don’t judge people guilty of sin? Refusing to judge is the best thing you can do if you want to encourage sin and turns you into a worse hypocrite than the person who condemns people who do wrong though he is not great himself. So believers are having one on us when they say they do not condemn sinners but sins.
If you hate only the sin you find yourself guilty and claim that you cannot judge others as sinners and hate their sins for you don't know what their sins are then then you will naturally hate others for you can't then think much of yourself.
They can do all the condemning they wish if they are attacking sins and not sinners. But how could this console sinners? If a very evil person criticises your sin of adultery you will be offended and outraged. The fact that sin is believed to be worse than being punished for it though the sin is fun and the punishment is not makes us even more resentful of religious morality and godliness. The hypocrisy of making such a fuss about condemning and then no fuss at all about certain sinners going to jail or Hell is no help either.
There is just no point in saying you condemn the sin only when that teaching is so easily abused. Somebody could be condemning you and looking down on you while lying saying they do not condemn you but your sin and there is nothing you can do to know one way or the other. Verbally, condemning the sin cannot be seen to be different from condemning the sinner. Both sinner condemners and sin condemners talk as if they condemn the sinner. You don’t go up to a murderer and say: “Oh that sin in you is evil”. What you say is, “You are an evil sinful person”. You don’t separate sin from yourself. You, if you are religious in any shape or form, will call YOURSELF not it or whatever a sinner. A sinner means a bad person. Sin is part of you for a person commits it, you and to hate your sin is to hate yourself. When you call yourself a sinner then to forbid you to say it about anybody else is simply saying that individuals don’t matter and are entitled to disrespect themselves for that is not fair!
The fact that the God and Jesus of the Bible want us to say we are sinners and not people with sins proves they knew and taught that loving sinner and hating sin was impossible. The term sinner identifies people not as people but as sinners and so it is derogatory. It is an insult for the same reason as the expression disabled people is, for the expression should be people with disabilities. The Bible God and Jesus most clearly say that the sinful person should be identified in terms of sin when they say sinners belong to the Devil (for example God says it through John at 1 John 3:8) which is dehumanisation. To do good for people with that attitude towards them would be to degrade yourself for you act as if they are there to be dehumanised.
You know that when people criticise that chances are, they are condemning you because we all know that we hate our actions being criticised for they express what we are. You know you are being condemned as a sinner for there would be no sin without your deliberation. If condemning sin and not the doer of the sin were possible, we would like our sins being criticised or at least not mind so the way we react to it accentuates that he who attacks our sins attacks us as well.
We read that Jesus gave up his health and friends and life on the cross as an indication of full complete consecration or dedication to God (page 14, The Atonement: Mystery of Reconciliation). His voluntary death tells us that all should be renounced for God. Jesus showed us that the meaning of love your neighbour as yourself is consecrate your neighbour as yourself. If it meant what we take it to mean, loving yourself, then Jesus must have broken the commandment by renouncing all for the sake of consecration to God. Love in Christianity means doing what makes the person holier not happier or safer.
The Protestant reformer, John Calvin, wrote in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, that we cannot obey the commandments of God properly if we obey them because we love ourselves so the motive should be love of God and of neighbour (page 119). At the same time he stated that the person who lives the best way is the person who thinks of himself the least. He made it clear that when the Lord said we must love our neighbour as ourselves he meant we are to take the strongest inclination we have, self-love, and transfer this love to other people instead (page 120). When you could share your pudding with your friend out of self-love you are to do it because you transfer this energy to him to love him with that love. The result is that you love yourself less because you use the love you had for yourself not to love yourself but him.
The Catholic mystic, Brother Lawrence, who wrote The Practice of the Presence of God, teaches that you should do what you do just for God and you should not care if you suffer forever or not as long as you love him because nothing should be done for the fear of everlasting torment but for the love of God meaning that loving God and not your happiness is what is important (Conversation Two). You should think only of God and by prayer you can.
Radio Replies 3, Question 21 tells us, "The more one believes in and esteems God, the less he believes in and esteems himself. Any good that is in him he attributes to God; and he is keenly conscious of his own shortcomings as being his own work. Aware of his sins, he is not astonished that suffering and trial should be his lot. Instead of thinking he deserves only the best, he knows that he deserves only the worse. He therefore asks God to forgive him his sins; and is grateful to God for treating him so much more gently than justice would demand" (page 6).
The same book on page 234, Question 976 tries to answer the problem of, "Is it selfishness to seek eternal happiness?" It replies that God wants us to have this happiness so we owe it to God to seek it and take it so it is not selfish. It says we must work for God's glory and our happiness will result, but not work for our own happiness hoping that God's glory will result.
The Church says that if you do not like your neighbour you have to see not your neighbour but see God in your neighbour so that you believe you are helping and loving God when you are kind to your neighbour (Question 1000, Radio Replies 3). We are commanded to love our neighbour by God for the sake of God (Question 1001, Radio Replies 3). When the Church admits that it is not interested in charity work but in saving souls and that saving souls comes first (Radio Replies, Volume 3, 1351) it is no wonder. The doctrine of everlasting punishment implies that God comes first and not only that but is to be the infinite and only concern when serious sin deserves infinitely long torture.
The Student’s Catholic Doctrine says that we can only be saved by worshipping God by faith, hope and charity which is another way of saying that all has to be done just for God and that being good without him is no use (page 1, see also A Catechism of Christian Doctrine Question 8).
Jesus said that a man cannot serve two masters so God and mammon cannot both be served (Matthew 6:24). You can serve God and money both by compromising between them. But you cannot if God wants to be served to the exclusion of mammon. Mammon does not ask you to serve it to the exclusion of God. Caring a bit about money is fine but Jesus says it is not. If we have to have anything to do with money we should have no interest in it or love for it but just use it for the glory of God.
So loving a person God is all that matters. His goodness and yourself and others are not to be loved – not really. You are to just love him. If we love God just because he is a person then that is silly. Why this person and not yourself or your wife? Celibacy would be a more natural state than marriage. The Roman Church has always taught that celibacy and chastity are better than marriage and we see why.
THEISM VERSUS LOVE
The Bible says we must love other people because in doing so we love the Lord.
The Bible may say that the love of God and the love of neighbour go together. It does not say that they are identical. You cannot love the sinner and hate the sin. The more you love God the more you will hate sin. The Bible says that nobody can keep the commandment to love God completely and with all their powers. Self-love gets in the way so much. Even the greatest saint wouldn't suffer the pains of the rack for a thousand years if God asked it or required it. The love of God and neighbour cannot be identical because we are told to love God completely with all our powers but we are told to love our neighbour no more than ourselves. If our love of God gives us a repugnance for our neighbour then that is not our fault and so we are without guilt. And such repugnance is unavoidable because we see God as good but our neighbour as deceitful and sinful no matter how charming or kind he or she is. You cannot love the sinner and hate the sin and even more so if you see yourself and/or others as totally sinful. Correct Christianity teaches that human good works are dross for people just can't put God first. Their good works only look good and so displease God though God commands them for the alternative is worse. In that case, the only commandment you can strive to keep is the one to love God completely and not love your neighbour as yourself.
Jesus said that we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength (Mark 12:29-31 which is commanded by the depraved prophet Moses in Deuteronomy 6). That is, God is to be loved wholly. We do not love him most and give the rest of our love to others. We must love him alone and love others for his sake.
Jesus said then that we must love our neighbour as ourselves. If we serve the needs of our neighbour for the sake of God and to please him then just as when you do good for others to benefit yourselves it is not loving them at all so it is when you do it for the Lord God. It is deceiving them, it is manipulating them.
But how do we explain Jesus telling us that we must love our neighbour? Is there a contradiction? No. Love your neighbour may mean treat your neighbour as God wills which is the good way for the sake of God. Jesus made it clear that he did not mean love in the sense of valuing the person in themselves and for themselves when he said the commandment to love only God was the principal one and he said the command about loving neighbour was a secondary one that was like it meaning that it was just a way of carrying out and practicing the first – he observed that the first great commandment is the key to the interpretation of the second great commandment. Only God is to be valued in and for himself when he said God alone matters for the believer.
Love of neighbour, in this view, means making a person good in the eyes of God but not being warm towards or valuing that person. So, if selflessness is love then love means making others selfless, making them sacrifice and die daily for God. So love of neighbour is not feeding the hungry or clothing the naked who are dying of cold or anything like that – they are only a means of luring people into the trap. It is converting them to slavery to God. We can’t say that we have to look after their needs so that they might be more open to the need for serving God without interest in anything other than his will for that is like helping people to sin in order to put them off sin. The solution would be to help them but to keep reminding them of your motive which is to bring them to consecrate themselves to God. The focus has to be kept on God.
That loving people means nothing
more than trying to make them please God explains why Jesus said that the first
greatest commandment was to love God with everything that is in you and that
the second, to love your neighbour as yourself, was like it. It would not be like it if it were not
intended to be done for God and nothing else.
It would be another commandment altogether while scripture claims that
they are the same (1 John 4:7). John
told us to love others for God has loved us (1 John
The commandment of Jesus refuses to accept people as they are. It says they have no right to their own lives or to their own opinion but must live and think God’s way. Who wants to be loved like that? Nobody of course. So to love God means to value God and to love people means making them do what God wants but don’t value them.
According to some, Jesus’ command to love God with all your strength does not infer that love is solely emotional but an act of will that is so determined to please God that nothing can make us succumb to the temptation to reject God. It is primarily an act of will for emotional love for God however strong does not guarantee you will treat him properly. The loving act of will means you are determined to serve God at all costs. Emotions will come. They are unavoidable but they will be painful for if you want God you want to be with him properly in Heaven and it will be agony to be surrounded by people who don't love him very much or who don't love him at all. The command to love God is an invitation to severe suffering.
Notice that it is a commandment. We are immoral if we do not love God with all our hearts, minds and powers. He said minds. So we give our mind, our power to believe to God which means we are obligated to believe in him and not only believe but believe with all our mind and be completely sure he exists. To make belief a condition for salvation and being moral like this is an outrage and a disgrace. It is the stuff bigotry and obscurantism are made of. And it is madness for we cannot be that sure God exists.
In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul declares that you should not have sex outside marriage because you are not your own property when you follow Christ but you belong to the Lord for you have been bought and paid for. If I am not my own then how could I have any regard for self-esteem then? Self-esteem means I consider myself to be my own property and to be an okay person. If God existed you would be his property so he and others would have the right to slap you down firmly if you try to be independent of him.
Paul asserted that you must not treat your body as you please for Jesus bought it at a price so it belongs to God (1 Corinthians 6). You must not have sex outside marriage. This certainly suggests that just as you have the right to tell on a person you see shoplifting you have a bigger right to order them to obey God and not have sex outside wedlock. You are God's property as they are and so you have the right to stand up for God and the duty for you are his property and must speak for him. God comes first in this thinking. You are to esteem your being God's property. You are to base everything you do on that concept. You do not base it on self-esteem.
In 1 Corinthians 13:3, Paul says that if he suffered and sacrificed and even died for others it would be no good without love. The love he means is love for God for he is loving others when he does these things for them. You are not going to die for others for a bad uncaring reason. The Bible says that unless an act is done for the love of God alone it is dirt no matter how much good it does.
Perhaps we should enjoy ourselves because God wants us to, that is, to please him and not ourselves? But if we should do this it is not because we should be happy but because God should be pleased. In other words, we should not be happy. It is easy to think that your motives in accepting happiness are selfless and godly. Perhaps they are not. You can’t be happy if you think your wellbeing is not entitled to be looked after and only sacrifice matters. God should not command us to be happy in that case. All he would care about would be his rules.
We know that if God exists then he is the perfect or the most perfect being and so other people must be loved only for his sake while all our love is given to him. But it is a disgrace to do this though Christianity and Jesus accept and command it.
We are aware that that is not loving your neighbour at all. If we repress our good feelings towards others what kind of existence will we have? We need to be cared about and appreciated, not used to score points with a thing that may not even exist!
The only justification you can have for loving God alone is that he is the best and that his existence can be verified. If God cannot be shown to be a reality then it is a fact that true devotion to him is wrong even if he does exist. That is because we cannot be sure. The people we see, hear and feel come first for we are surer they exist than we are that God does. To do what God wants is to intend evil towards humanity – it is an act of hate. God may make us indifferent to people in themselves as people. Indifference may be neither love or hate but choosing it is an act of hate. It is worse than hate for nobody hates somebody so much that they would love to see them suffer forever while the apathetic soul approves by simply not giving a toss. Religion says that God cannot be harmed. Since he is all-powerful nobody can do him damage so everlasting punishment is immeasurably harsh. So religion sinks very low to say that God who cannot be harmed should be all that matters or come first despite the fact that it is those who can bleed and cry and suffer that should come first. Let God take care of himself. He is able to.
When the servants of God thank him for somebody’s recovery from sickness they mean, “I am not saying I feel grateful but that I approve of what you did O Lord because it was your will and I thank you because it was your will and done for your benefit and nobody else’s”. When they pray, “Give to me the joy of your salvation,” they mean, “Give to me the joy that comes as a side-effect of your salvation which I only accept to please you God and not me.” This prayer really means, “Give me the virtue of altruism – don’t let me seek or ask anything nice for myself. If you don’t want to give me happiness then don’t.” They don’t want the joy but the altruism but they have to ask for the joy because it is the same as asking for the altruism when the pair go together.
Christians claim that there is more dignity if you are made for God than if you are made for an ignoble thing such as yourself so those who say we must love people not God or more than God are wrong (Radio Replies, Vol 3, Question 1001). In other words, you don’t have any dignity of your own at all. You need to believe in God to get dignity. To say that God gives dignity is a lie because he is only believed in. It is belief in God that gives the dignity. And its artificial dignity for nothing can give you true dignity if you are not entitled to it.
Why is it dignified if God makes us for himself? Is it because he is so perfectly good? Then it must be less dignified or undignified then give yourself to another human being in a loving relationship for human beings are imperfect. Its degrading.
Is it dignified if God makes us for himself because he makes us so happy in Heaven? Yet God is the one that said there is more dignity in loving enemies and the poor than your family or the rich.
The doctrine that there is more dignity in being made for God than for people or yourself shows clear and badly hidden contempt for people.
If this contempt is right and the God belief implies that it is, then we have no dignity. Is it a solution to pretend that God gives us dignity when we have none? Of course it isn’t. God would be wrong to pretend we have dignity. He’d be a liar and how can a being you accuse of being untrustworthy give dignity? If we have dignity we don’t need God. Wouldn’t it make more sense to hold that as weak and fallible as we are that we would love to fill the universe with joy if we got the real chance so our dignity is infinite? Human evil is a sickness in which evil is misperceived as good not a moral flaw. You cannot believe in evil unless you believe that it by definition mars our dignity. Believers could still be wrong about God – belief means you are not beyond the possibility that you are wrong in what you believe. From this it follows, that human feelings about God and ideas are what gives dignity. Man gives dignity then if you need to believe in God to believe in dignity. If man can do that then why God in the first place? To say you need God to believe in dignity is to say that Atheists or those who have barely any faith are opponents or nearly opponents of right and wrong.
Atheism is not only the only true philosophy but the best. Any advantage theism has can still be enjoyed in Atheism. Let us go and proclaim Atheism to every creature because we don’t truly come as near to caring about others as we can if we don’t.
LOVE GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART
The Bible is claimed by the Church to have been authored by God through men. They have to accept its teaching as true to be Christians.
Christianity claims to agree with
the Bible, God and Jesus that we have to love God with all our power and love
others as ourselves just for his sake (Matthew
The first commandment of the famous 10 Commandments forbade anybody to adore anything in Heaven or earth apart from God himself. When you can’t put anything in front of God it follows you can’t even partly put anything in front of him either. If you love God and love another person for themselves and not for God it follows that you are blocking God out as far as you do that. You only love for God’s sake which means in the final analysis you don’t love the person but just God. The commandment excludes both adoring something in God’s place or adoring a god as a lesser god than God which would imply that any god is a servant of God who uses his influence with God for you. Even if that god is an angel who really exists it is a sin. This tells us that God wants to be loved ALONE for he will not even tolerate our loving an angel but wants all the love and wants the love for the angel to be an expression of love for himself so it is not love for the angel. So its all about God.
Notice too that to say you must
love God with all your powers is to automatically make this the main rule and
the greatest commandment for you are being told to sacrifice all to God. Accordingly, that is very serious and heavy
stuff. A rule concerning the love due to
such a supremely good being would have to be the greatest rule for that being
is the greatest. Since loving God alone
is the greatest commandment according to Jesus, the Son of God (Mark
The Jews were right to make sure that reminders containing the text of the commandment were stuck up everywhere so the Christians not following suit shows that nearly all of them are under divine wrath for the commandment is so serious and so difficult that one cannot be allowed to forget it even for an hour. The commandment is part of what Jews call the Shema. The failure of the apostles to make sure the Shema was exalted to a prime place in the symbolism and literature and worship of the Church indicates that they were heretics. If the apparitions of Jesus and Mary were real they would recite the Shema first thing every time they appear so they are either empty spaces or demons. The Shema implies you must have an appropriate view of God - a God who is worthy of that devotion. The god of the Mormons then would have to be out for being only an exalted man he would not be entitled to all that devotion. So the Shema requires you to be an expert on the nature of God both intellectually and spiritually.
Those who are not experts will not be saved. Deathbed conversions are no good unless the dying person is an expert. Believers with little faith and Atheists and Agnostics are committing the greatest evil possible, not preaching and living out the Shema. It would be madness to execute murderers and not kill them or at least dump them in dungeons and persecute them. The Law of the Land needs credibility to have authority and if we undermine that we should be destroyed or persecuted for we are opposing the Law and bringing trouble on it. Every sin is against the greatest commandment. It is declaring yourself independent of this commandment despite its greatness. Therefore every sin is grievously wrong. Every sin no matter how slight we think it is, has only the eternal punishment of Hell as it’s due.
The philosopher, Baruch Spinoza who was born in 1632 and died in 1677 thought the commandment to love God with your entire being and strength, was to be put in practice by doing loving things for your neighbour. But to love God with your entire being and strength means you love him with all your will and your emotions leaving no room for anything else. If you do good works for a neighbour you do them for God only. The actions are inwardly for God and only outwardly for your neighbour. Spinoza ignored these facts and basically reduced the command to love God to loving one's neighbour. He concluded that the two commands and the scriptures that taught them declared that we can believe whatever we wish but are under obligation only to believe in what is strictly necessary for carrying out loving service to our neighbour.
Spinoza should then, to have been consistent, declared the Bible to be an evil book for it obliges us to believe that Adam and Eve sinned for us and ruined creation and that Elijah went up to Heaven in a flaming chariot and that a man should not have loving sex with another man. The entire Bible claims to be the word of God. Spinoza was a Jew. It is worse for Christians for they have a longer Bible than the Jewish ones and are obligated to believe needless ideas such as that Jesus was born of a Virgin and that he could create bread to feed five thousand plus out of a few loaves. Even the view that the short and unnecessary epistle by Paul to Philemon is inspired by God is an example. It follows then that if Spinoza is right that the Bible is only brain food for bigots. Spinoza is right that only what is necessary for doing the best for ourselves and our neighbour is right and should be obligatory. But he is wrong to interpret the vicious commandments as supporting that idea. The love of God in the Bible means believing all the Bible says about God. The commandment says that if belief in God is unnecessary and harmful or if it disturbs mentally ill people it should still be promoted. This is clearly saying that Bibles and Gods and religion come before your rights and those of your neighbour. The commandment to love God entirely says that the neighbour or yourself isn't as important as God. Thus it is up to God not you or you feelings or your reason to decide what it is to love your neighbour. Loving them means treating them the way God wants them to be treated. So it is love then when God commands it to put an adulteress to death or to mutilate a baby boy in the act of religious circumcision.
CONCLUSION
Loving God the way the God belief suggests you should implies that you are suffering from some addiction. You turn away from loving others and yourself to love a concept. What you don’t see is put before the people you do see. To serve others while valuing God and not them is to manipulate and fool and trick them.
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06 Aug 08