THE CHRISTIAN FAITH SAYS GOD GIVES YOU THE GRACE TO LOVE HIM
PERFECTLY
Charity holds that love is doing good to others because it pleases God and not
yourself or them. It is allegedly a supernatural gift from God. Actually it is a
vice for it puts a concept, God, before people and the one person you are more
sure exists than any other, yourself. Religion says we must abandon our own
opinions and feelings and agree with whatever God says. But it is human opinion
that God has spoken and nobody agrees on what he said, and the experts differ.
What is loved is not God but an idol made out of human opinion and pride and
arrogance. It’s all selfish.
There is no point in believing in God unless you are going to put him first or
make him the only concern so the God concept is intrinsically sinister.
Misanthropism must have something to do with it which explains why believers of
God have been so eager to shed the blood of heretics or have been at least
delighted when their rivals in religion were slaughtered.
The Shema, the two foundational commandments, was first taught by Moses as a
revelation from God and reaffirmed as such by the notorious Jesus Christ. The
Shema commands that we love God as Lord totally and our neighbour as ourselves.
Jesus preached Theofascism (unjustly devaluing people for the sake of God) when
he told us to love God with all our powers meaning any good we do should be done
for God’s sake alone. He said that this was the most important.
The command he said was the second most important is the commandment to love
your neighbour as yourself. Its inferior importance indicates that human welfare
comes second to God (and religious dogma). God being almighty does not need to
be looked after and people do which makes this particularly despicable. Jesus'
teaching about love of neighbour reflects this Theofascism too for it draws its
authority from God. Love of neighbour is not commanded because it is sensible
but because God wants us to do it. Moreover, by doing it we put him first.
How could Jesus and God tell us to love God totally or to love only God and then
contradict this by saying we must love neighbour as ourselves too? Jesus himself
had defined love as doing. For him serving our neighbour while thinking only of
God and not him is love. He said we must love God with all our hearts meaning we
must direct our feelings toward God and not others. There is then no
contradiction.
We know by reason we cannot love anybody we meet as ourselves so the rule
results in the destruction of self-esteem which brings out unsocial acts. To
help a person just to please God is to insult and declare that person worthless.
It is very mercenary. You love yourself in others because you can only love in
others what you love in yourself. That is the meaning of the psychology dictum
that you can’t love others unless you love yourself and in so far as you love
yourself. The rule love your neighbour as yourself is harmful and destructive
and produces anger for you can’t do it for nature decrees you shall love your
neighbour through yourself not as yourself.
Jesus in Matthew 10:37 says that whoever prefers a parent or a child to him is
unworthy of him. He condemned it as a sin. If you would defy God to save your
child's life then it's a sin. If you are mad at God because your daddy died
horribly that is a sin. You are preferring daddy to God. If the Catholic
tolerates their child's refusal to go to Mass that is a sin. Preferring means
that if there is a contradiction between your devotion to a relative and God
then you choose God.
Charity seems impossible if it is true there is nothing in us that really
wants God. The total depravity doctrine stands for the idea not that man
is as dangerous as can be but that man does nothing good or bad with real
sincere and good intentions and so man can do nothing that pleases God. So it
claims that there is nothing of value to God in anything human (as taught by 1
Corinthians 3:19-23). So the doctrine does not say that we are raging monsters
but merely that we prefer our own version of good and not God's version. The
reason nothing pleases him about us is because we are by nature sinners. That is
to say that the Bible says we are not sinners because we sin but we sin because
we are sinners. This merely recognises the fact that Christian teaching says
that sin shows the kind of person you are. And it is the kind of person that you
are that is the real problem. There is no room in this doctrine for silly
notions about loving the sinner and hating the sin for there can be no
distinction made between the two. No wonder Protestant Christianity as taught by
the Reformers and even by Catholicism in the days of the Pre-Protestant St
Augustine has led to so much hatred and sectarianism and bloodshed.
The doctrine accuses the good deeds of Florence Nightingale of being as bad in
intention but not in consequence as the crimes of Nero for both were spitting
the same hate and defiance towards God. One way, Florence’s good deeds would be
more dangerous than Nero’s cruel ones for it is harder for her and nearly
impossible for others to see how bad she is so she will not realise her need for
God’s mercy. The doctrine encourages evil among those who don’t want to convert
yet. It tells you to be a Nero and not a Florence Nightingale who may help
others for their sake and not God's and therefore sin.
Total depravity was taught by Jesus Christ (Mark 10:18) and the apostles (Romans
3, 7). The apostate early Church abandoned it to suck up to the Roman Empire
until it was revived at the Protestant Reformation by Martin Luther. The
doctrine implies that you should take your lessons in faith and morals from the
God inspired scriptures and not from tradition for man preserves tradition and
man is at least secretly anti-God so it completely refutes nearly every major
doctrine of the Roman Catholic cult. Also, how could we be sure the scriptures
are God-inspired when man hates God so much and when it was man that wrote these
books? We end up enslaved to guesses. We know by experience that when we do good
we do it for what is in it for ourselves. Humanists do not see this as evil but
the Bible does – hence the doctrine of total depravity. Obviously if us
humankind are as bad as Christians would like us to think then we should live by
the rule: guilty until proven innocent!
The doctrine that human beings are universally bad and hate good though they use
it for their egotistical ends incites mistrust and hatred especially against
people who are not Christians. It also encourages people to be evil and devious
for they believe that when they are born evil they should act evil and think
evil if they can’t act evil.
What if the atheist agrees with the Bible that humankind cares about what it
wants good to be not what it is? At least he or she is not making the problem
worse by saying we have to worry about God and angels and saints and priests and
not just human beings and the animal kingdom!
The atheist would see the religionist as being worse than the humanist in terms
of loving good on her or his terms and not on its own terms.
Worship is to give honour and praise to a deity. You cannot praise somebody
without it being really about you. You judge they are to be praised and all we
do is biased in our own favour. Everything I do I do it to please myself so all
worship is a lie and a superstition. To need to do it when all you need is
yourself for you should love others because you love yourself is indicatory of a
serious neurosis.