Jesus Christ, according to the gospels, was asked what the greatest commandment was. He said it was the Jewish commandment to love God with all one's heart and soul and power. Love your neighbour as yourself was stated by him to be the second greatest commandment. God is to be loved and valued and people are to be loved for which means that the love for them is really the indirect love of God. It is really loving God. If you love John for his money its really the money you love no matter how kind or good you are to John. The first Epistle of John in the Bible says that we can only be sure we love God when we love the children he made for himself, that is, other people. To love other people is to love God when it is done for him. The Epistle suggests that we won't be any good to others unless we believe in God. So the more we believe in God and religion the better.
Why should we love God so much? Is it because he is so good? That would mean you love his goodness more than him or his goodness not him!
It must be then because of his superiority and dignity. You can't say this is loving God's dignity but not God for God's personhood is his dignity. Only a person can be real dignity. We say persons have dignity but a person strictly speaking is dignity. A king is a king - this is more accurate than saying a king as kingship.
Atheists find the doctrine that we should love God most for he has the greatest dignity to be snobbery (page 45, Crisis of Moral Authority). A snob is a person who values people on their dignity. The Bible says we are to love others only for the sake of God which means that it is really him we love so it goes to the extreme in the snobbery.
There is arrogance in saying you love the greatest being possible. That is boastful for it is your judgement that makes God real to you so you are really putting yourself, your judgment, before God. You think you are better than the person who does not love that being or loves him less. It is bragging to state that you have a million in the bank in front of the poor so it is bragging to boast that you have the greatest friend ever. It is also boastful to say that that being loves you with an infinite love. Boasting is what happens when you refuse to know yourself and exaggerate your greatness and your possessions. You don’t know if God loves you infinitely like you would know if you had half a million in the bank so it is boasting to say you are prized that much. The Church says it is not for God’s love is undeserved. But you can boast about having half a million in the bank even if you don’t deserve it.
God loves nobody but God. God cannot love anybody or anything in preference to himself for he is infinite love and it is only fair that he loves himself. If he gives me some of his love instead of giving to himself he is preferring to love me in so far as he does that. He would be unfair to himself because he is important and I am not. Therefore, he has to love himself infinitely or totally because if he did not he would not love infinite love and that would be evil (page 8, Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine, Part 1).
If God permitted us to love anything other than him he would be a sinner and sinfully committing an injustice against himself for being perfect and infinite love he deserves all our love in return. We would be insulting him if we loved somebody who was not as good as him. He would not have made us unless he wanted us to love him only. God made us not to love us but for us to love him therefore he has to receive all our love and not just a part of it. To deny that God demands all our love is to deny the existence of God. We only love others in the sense that we love them for God’s sake not our own and not theirs. Strictly speaking, we don’t really love them. If we value them it is only because it pleases God and so that is what we really value and not them.
God loves himself alone when he commands us not to love others because we love ourselves but to be totally other-centred.
When the Bible command to love God with all our hearts and powers is the prime commandment it follows that the trendy idea that you have to love yourself first before you can love God or anybody else is being rejected. The trend is telling you to love God because you love yourself. To love God and your neighbour because you love yourself means that you only love yourself in the strict sense of the word. The command is that we love God because we do not love ourselves except in the sense that we do with ourselves what God wants us to do and God is right and good. It will be objected that you can hardly love God if you offer yourself to him and think you are worthless for that is meaning to offer him something worthless. But that is something we have learned in recent centuries and we cannot pretend the Bible is as wise as us. However, some say the biblical answer would be, “Grace is the power of God with which God helps us to do what we cannot do ourselves. God can make us love him despite our hatred for ourselves by a miracle for grace is a miracle”. If so then the Bible teaches that sin is a form of self-hatred. But it doesn’t. Sin is not a form of self-hatred in the normal sense. But if in Bible vocabulary you take love yourself to mean consecrate yourself not look after yourself or care for yourself then sin is self-hatred in that sense only. The Bible says we are all sinners so any good we do or improvement we make is an unnatural miracle for nature decrees that we sin all the time.
Perhaps when we would do good infinitely if we could and if we were God we deserve the same infinite love as God does? Maybe God has to compromise and love himself and us as well? But religion replies that God gave us the power to be good and to want to be good and it is his power not ours. And also God is infinite love and we are only potential infinite love and what is real comes first. And Judaism and Christianity cannot accept that anyone could deserve any part of the love that should all belong to God. They teach that we deserve nothing but suffering.
The Church says we have infinite value for God values us infinitely. But when God alone is to be loved we cannot care about that. It is just one of the things the Church uses to bait us. Plus God only cares about his own dignity. If it is true that God values us so much then he only values us for himself so it is really himself that is cared about. We might be valuable all right but this value is only an evaluation and it does not mean that anybody or anything should value us. It is like 2 being a value but that does not mean that anybody values anything as two though they do do it.
Rome gives one of her kisses of spiritual death in ordering her slaves to agree that they can love God for some selfish reason and also for his own sake – a mixture - and calls it imperfect love. Can they?
If you really love God selflessly
you can drop the other motive. It is a
sin to offer imperfect love when you can offer better. God gives all his people the power to resist
sin (1 Corinthians
How can the Church of Rome be capable of genuine love for God when it advocates untrue love for him? Is her perfect love a sham – mere self-delusion? To really love God you have to make sure you aren’t doing anything he despises which she does not do. She is not giving the message. The message is that anything but selfless love for God will not do. Thus those members she has that claim to love God perfectly are lying because they would not support the Church policy if they did.
God religion teaches that the love of God and love of one another go together. If you don’t love God you oppose the one thing that others need which is not consistent with loving them. God is infinite love which means he hates sin infinitely. God hates sin with all his power so to sin is to offend him as much as you can. If you don’t love your neighbour you don’t love God for he loves them and wants you to do the same (1 John 5:1-3). Christianity says we are all sinners so we love nobody and nothing. All we are doing when we think we love is pretending. This teaching is enough to have anybody foaming at the mouth and put in a straitjacket. The doctrine of love for God which Christianity advertises as a healthy one is our in-doing.
We can’t say we love God in loving ourselves alone on the grounds that it pleases him for that is too easy. Any egoist could say the same. There would be no need for God then and people believe in him because they think the belief will comfort them and restrain them from moral degeneration.
You can’t do real good when hostility to good is adhered to. What you do may look good and bring benefit but since it is done with a dark heart it is not really good. We know that to do good while being an impenitent sinner is false and deceptive. For that reason, unconditional love for one person and not another or even for everybody except one person is worthless. It is not love at all for it is willingly defiled by the unrepented sins. It is defiled by your refusal to love everybody else unconditionally too. It is a mimic of the real thing. Only perfect people can have unconditional love. There is something vulgar and convenient and pompous about a person saying they unconditionally love somebody who has not lived that bad a life. It was easy for them. How can you know the love is unconditional when the person has not had the chance to be a Hitler and refused it? The love is just a act of self-delusion.
If I love God alone that means that any joy I have that is not completely founded on him is a sin assuming joy is allowed at all. He must be the source of my joy. Thus religion tells you how to feel and who wants to listen to that these days? But God is a spirit being without feelings. Aquinas said that God’s love is nothing like the kind of love we understand. We only call it love for the sake of calling it something. Any descriptive word used of God is vague and not far from empty. From this it follows that anybody who finds their joy in God is not really doing so. They are finding their joy in a subconscious or conscious anthropomorphism or picture of God. They are relating to God in the way they would to a human being though he is not one of them. Though they say that they do not believe that God has human feelings and responses they turn off that idea when they have their relationship with him so they bond with an idol and not the real God. The only way the Church can give meaning to life is by deception such as this. It foments this deception. It gives the world a stale and alien God the world does not want and makes it think it does want it. This drives many critics to say things like that the Church is thieving souls and thieving their money.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that you can commit something called mortal sin. This is a sin that implies total rejection of God. You expel the saving presence of God from yourself. Those who die in mortal sin go to Hell for they are separate from God and so can't go to Heaven for God lives there. The good works of a mortal sinner deserve no blessing from God. The works are sins themselves for the sinner is only desecrating the good by doing it without reconciling with God. To love a mortal sinner would be then to love something that there is no moral good in. You cannot love sinners and hate their sins for it is not sins we are against but bad people. Those who hate sin because it insults the God of infinite love and so is very serious cannot love the sinner. They say they can and do but they are lying. The doctrine of mortal sin prevents you from looking at the good side of the person. The good side of the mortal sinner is dangerous for it is not really good and the more good the mortal sinner does the less likely he or she will be to see how much he or she needs to correct their sin and make peace with God. The good side cannot be praised by the true Christian. Instead the sinner has to be despised. God has to be loved so much - indeed totally - so hating those who loathe him or don't take him seriously or who don't appreciate him, ie mortal sinners, would be inevitable. You cannot love God and love the mortal sinner.
Liberal Catholics say you must love the mortal sinner for it is not for you to judge if a person is such a sinner. So it can't be for you to judge if somebody is a murderer either even if you are a judge. The Bible stresses that bad people are to be avoided and Jesus only bothered with them if they were on the verge of repenting or thinking about repenting. Judgement is necessary.
Loving God more than people is bad. Loving God and using people to put that love into action is abominable.
A CATECHISM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE, CTS,
A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, VOL
6, PART II, KANT, Frederick Copleston SJ, Doubleday/Image,
AQUINAS, FC Copleston,
Penguin Books,
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Penguin,
BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER,
Association for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge,
CATECHISM OF THE
CHARITY, MEDITATIONS FOR A MONTH,
Richard F Clarke SJ, Catholic Truth Society,
CHRISTIANITY FOR THE
TOUGH-MINDED, Edited by John Warwick
CRISIS OF MORAL AUTHORITY, Don Cupitt, SCM Press,
EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT, VOL 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha, Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995
ECUMENICAL JIHAD, Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press,
GOD IS NOT GREAT, THE CASE AGAINST RELIGION, Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books,
THE GREAT MEANS OF SALVATION AND OF PERFECTION, St Alphonsus De Ligouri, Redemptorist Fathers, Brooklyn, 1988
HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN
APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch,
HONEST TO GOD, John AT Robinson, SCM,
HOW DOES GOD LOVE ME? Radio Bible Class,
IN DEFENCE OF THE FAITH, Dave
Hunt, Harvest House,
MADAME GUYON,
MARTYR OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, Phyllis Thompson, Hodder
& Stoughton,
MORAL PHILOSOPHY, Joseph Rickaby SJ, Stonyhurst
Philosophy Series, Longmans Green and Co,
PRACTICAL ETHICS, Peter Singer,
PSYCHOLOGY, George A Miller,
Penguin,
RADIO REPLIES, 1, Frs Rumble & Carty, Radio
Replies Press,
RADIO REPLIES, 2, Frs Rumble & Carty, Radio
Replies Press,
RADIO REPLIES, 3, Frs Rumble & Carty, Radio
Replies Press,
REASON AND BELIEF, Brand Blanschard, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1974
REASONS FOR HOPE, Ed Jeffrey A Mirus,
THE ATONEMENT: MYSTERY OF
RECONCILIATION, Kevin McNamara, Archbishop of
SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY
GOD, Jonathan Edwards, Sword of the Lord,
THE BIBLE TELLS US SO, R B Kuiper, The Banner of Truth Trust,
THE BRIEF OF ST ANTHONY OF
THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE MORAL DILEMMA, G R Evans, Lion Books, Oxford, 2007
THE GREAT MEANS OF SALVATION AND
OF PERFECTION, St Alphonsus De Ligouri,
Redemptorist Fathers,
THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, Thomas A Kempis, Translated by Ronald Knox and Michael Oakley, Universe, Burns & Oates, London, 1963
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING,
THE NEW WALK, Captain Reginald
Wallis, The Christian Press,
THE PRACTICE OF THE PRESENCE OF
GOD, Brother Lawrence, Hodder & Stoughton,
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, CS Lewis,
THE PUZZLE OF GOD, Peter Vardy, Collins,
THE SATANIC BIBLE, Anton Szandor LaVey,
THE SPIRITUAL GUIDE, Michael Molinos, Christian Books, Gardiner
THE STUDENT’S CATHOLIC DOCTRINE,
Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns & Oates,
UNBLIND
FAITH, Michael J Langford, SCM,