LOVE GOD ALONE!

Jesus Christ was asked what the greatest commandment was in the Old Testament. He said that it was the command to love God with all ones heart and soul and mind and strength. He said the second greatest commandment was to love one’s neighbour as oneself.

God roughly means the supernatural being that is entitled to your concern and your love. 

Does this mean that God should be good or believed to be good?

Actually there is greater heroism in loving a God that is evil than one that is good.  If evil is caused by error as religion says then clearly the evil person should get the most love if it has to be him or some good person.

The Christian faith says that you must love God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind. God and Jesus say that in the Bible.

If you love God with all your heart or more than anything, it would be hard to see if you really love your neighbour.  He gets your attention.  No wonder those who claim to be extremely holy are often cruel.

If you love God passionately you can’t see if you love others properly. Love blinds.

The Church may say that love of God and love of neighbour go together.  But if I love my child with all my heart and soul and mind that does not necessarily mean I must love others too.  I wouldn't even have to love his nurse.  The only way to make sense of the Church teaching is to argue that loving God and obeying him go together.  Therefore if you love God you have to obey him by loving your neighbour.  Jesus stated that loving God means obeying him.  He said that he who loves God will keep the commandments.

The command to love God with all your mind does not mean God approves of your power to think and avoid contradictions.  It really means you let God tell you how to reason and think. It forbids you to think for yourself.  The Christians have never taught that the more we use our minds the more we can love God.  They do not expect all people to be academics.

"Love God by loving your neighbour for it is his will".  This command cannot mean you are being asked to care emotionally for God.  Indeed it implies a cold obedience is fine.

True love for God  means loving him because he is good in himself.  To love him because he is pleasant or good for you is to love what you get out of him not him.  It is valuing what he does and not what he is.  God is not necessarily good for you even if he is good.  True love of God means you would love him if he had reason to let you suffer horrendously forever.

Some say the more you love your neighbour the more you love God for he loves them.  This mistakes benefiting God for loving him.  It is simply wrong.

The Catholic doctrine that our love for God is measured by how hard we try to keep his commandments is ridiculous. What would we think of a person who said that a wife’s love for her husband is measured by her obedience to her husband? We obey the law but does that mean we really love it or trust it?

Laws that consider people not God are against God. No system of law can be perfectly just. Not even God’s. Nor is it meant to be. God’s law is necessarily only perfect under the circumstances. Every law hurts some innocent no matter how fair the makers of the law tried to make it.

Love should not be an obligation. You cannot obligate anybody to love. Those who say that those who reject love will go to Hell forever for there is no love there are blackmailing those who fail to love. To present people with a God who is love or whose law is love is to oppress them. It accuses people who don’t make a bigger effort to love of being partly partial to Hell.

This commandment to love God with all our heart and strength does not tell us to put God first. Rather it tells us that all the loving we do must be for his sake. We love our neighbour to please God and not the neighbour. This love does not really value the neighbour except as a means to please God. If we feel affection for another, we must make sure that it is only allowed for God’s benefit. So strictly speaking, you are to love God alone.

If you put God first, that only means you love him and love others but you love him the most. You do not give him all your heart.

Should We Love God Alone? An Essay!

Why is it so important to some people that we believe in God and a specific kind of God at that?  What is wrong with a vague sense of powers that can help us if we tune into them?  Their stance shows more concern for dogma than for human welfare.  It shows a level of intolerance.

Do we need a God to love?

We are better to love the living and our dear departed.  They are better role models for us.  They are practical role models.  It does not matter if you worship a poster of Britney Spears as long as you feel happier and keener to do good because of it.  Its okay if it is the best for you. 

Jesus Christ taught, “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength.  This is the greatest commandment.   The second is like it, you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” 

This law was given by God to Moses according to the Old Testament.

The teaching says that the God of Israel is the only true God.  This God revealed himself through the scriptures and the prophets.  It is this God that must be loved.  Anything else is the wrong God.

So according to the Bible, the main commandment is to love God more than yourself or anything else.  That is one element of the commandment.  The other is that we are not told to love God with a little of our powers, most of our powers but we are told to love God with all our powers.  This means that all we do we must do solely out of love for God.  When the next commandment says we must love our neighbour it means we only value our neighbour because God says so and not because our neighbour is to be valued for herself or himself.  If you value your neighbour because God says so then it follows that it is God that is really being valued and not your neighbour at all!  The commandment certainly condemns humanism – it condemns our knowledge that religion and faith are to be restrained within the limits of human needs alone.

The main commandment implies that those who do not believe in it are evil at worst and morally defective at best. 

To say the commandment is the greatest moral law of all is to say that morality is based on authority or on the Bible because these make the rule.  The command to love God as if we were sure is not God’s commandment but the Bible’s.  Belief in the commandment is actually a matter of faith in the Bible.  The only way one can be sure that one loves God alone is by suffering for him and refusing to think of a reward and the only way one can be sure the thought of the reward isn’t encouraging one is to refuse any reward.  This infers that extreme asceticism is an essential.

Even if God exists it does not follow that he wants to be loved first of all or with all our hearts either.  The teaching, “God made me to love him and to serve him and to enjoy him forever” is not for us.   Because this God invites us only to believe in him and belief is not the same as certainty he could not ask us to die for faith in him, wreck our lives for him or suffer for him.  Faith is to be made for us.  We will not make the mistake of thinking that we are made for faith.  This truth tells us that we get the best out of belief in God or something else without the fanaticism and we reach the best of our human potential.  There is no room for condemning those who do not believe in God.  God works within all who are sincere.

When Jesus taught an unloving doctrine as the centre of his theology how can we believe that God really raised him from the dead? No matter what evidence there is for the resurrection it is annulled by his doctrinal errors for Jesus said God raised him to show that his gospel was true and the resurrection is useless if we can’t trust Jesus’ teachings.

Why does unhealthy religion want us to love God in a way that technically amounts to loving God alone?

Is it because God is perfectly good? 

No.  He has all power and has no need of our devotion.   Only a being that needs our devotion can have a right to it.  Rights are based on needs. 

Is it because God has no need of our devotion that he only commands it for our sake not his own?  But then why not give us some laws for the sake of regulating society and let us worship as we please?

A God who commands that we love him in the way Jesus required people to love God is a fundamentalist god.  He has no right to command it.

It might be thought God hides himself because he wants us to help us love one another.  He does not want any special love.  In that case we would have to love God as we would love any friend but not above ourselves or others.

Self-love not God-love redeems the world!  True self-love is a beautiful kind of love that is eager to reach out to others so that all may evolve into living angels of light.  It is in giving that you receive.  It is in forgetting yourself to help others that you love yourself in the best and most glorious way possible.

The love of God with all your heart means all your emotions must be drawn only to God and fulfilled by God.  I am not allowed to love and respect myself with all my heart.  If I did that I would be a happy productive person who others would be drawn to.  Instead I am to love God with all my heart.  If I do that I will pine for him in great emotional agony.

Loving your neighbour as yourself really assumes that we love ourselves.  It does not actually say we should love ourselves.  If it did it would read, "Love yourself and your neighbour equally". 

Anyway you could not possibly be commanded to love yourself!  You will do that automatically.  Even those who hate themselves in fact love themselves by enjoying their misery.

If you fail to love yourself, you create fears.  Fear is the cause of hate.  If you create fears for yourself, how then can you avoid being afraid of others?  You will lose respect for them.  All love starts with loving yourself. 

The love of self is truly the most important and most useful love of all.

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