BLOCKS TO THE LOVING OF GOD

Jesus never said we must love ourselves.  He only pointed to how we already do that.  The problem is that is all we might do so we need to get the focus on our neighbour instead and love him the way we love ourselves.  You are to transplant your self-love on to your neighbour.  He said all love is God's and so we are to love God with all our heart, soul and being.  Because God wants to be loved in the form of doing his will for others it is really only God who is valued and loved ultimately.

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. We cannot insist that we get the infinite blessings of being valued infinitely. The notion of God infinitely loving us 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 he cares 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 10:13). You haven’t true love for God at all when you claim you love him and love something else as well.
 
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 entity 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. Loving God cannot mean we love ourselves alone. That is like saying black is white.
 
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 and only 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 God is not a human being. 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 forever. They are separate from God and so can't ever 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. The evil of failing to see how sin offends God would be a worse one than neglecting a person to love God. The believers claim they can accuse sin of being infinitely and unimaginably bad and yet they say they can love the sinner. 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 according to scripture-based religion.
 
The problem with such attitudes as that you should love God alone is that you end up making people think you care about them when it is mainly or all about God. It is unnatural and can lead to severe psychological problems. It demands doing goodness for the sake of obedience and not for the sake of those in need. We all know believers with a callous righteousness.
 
Another problem is that it will result in a crippling guilt. Nobody can manage to love God first in their hearts or with all their hearts - if you did you would choose to suffer the greatest torment forever because he needed you to do it.
 
It is only by offering yourself and even your entire happiness up as a sacrifice that you can be confident you are putting God first. You consent to God destroying you or your happiness if he needs to. Your belief becomes an act of violence against yourself. That might be violence that you think is justified but it is still violence.

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 suppose 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. It is lazy to take your morals from authority instead simply seeing that the authority is right and obeying it because of that.

If God deserves all love then the only sin that matters is refusing to grant it to him.  The ultimate sin is telling God that you do not care that he made you for a life purpose or that his son died for your sins as if you were the only sinner alive and the offer of eternal happiness. This is said to be the only real reason at the end of the day why people go to everlasting damnation.  The command then is extremely passive aggressive and threatening.  You cannot love God under threat of committing the worst sin.  That only leads to fear.  Christians are either hypocrites who do not care about God or they are damaged passive aggressive individuals if they try to care. 
 
Loving God and using people to put that love into action is abominable.  Loving God more than people is bad. Loving God not people is worse.
 
BOOKS CONSULTED

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