GOD and THE EVIL ALTRUISM DOCTRINE are CO-DEPENDENT
Altruism is the doctrine that you should do all you can for others but not for
your own sake and do all you can to avoid taking any pleasure in what you do.
That is the only way to be sure altruism really is altruism. Christianity
advocates altruism towards God alone. The Church has the habit of advocating
altruism towards others but that is a popular use of the word. Technically,
altruism in the true and accurate sense is to be directed towards 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 12:29-31,
King James Bible).
Jesus said that we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength
(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.
Altruism is the doctrine that we must do good and not care if we get a benefit
from it or not. Others matter and I don't. This doctrine is called good even
though it is strange to say that treating yourself as a means to serve others is
good. The doctrine is both good and evil at best. It is good in that others get
helped but bad in the way it degrades you. But in terms of motivation it is
totally bad. If altruism is good, then you should help others in the hope that
they will become altruists too. So as you help people you really want them to
degrade themselves with the doctrine. So your help is not help.
Morality is said to be dependent on God's authority. Religion often says there
is no right and wrong unless there is a God to sanction it. However, God must be
opposed to right and wrong when the evil doctrine of altruism is true if there
is a God. God implies altruism for he says all I do should be done for his sake
only.
If I should not put myself first then it does not matter if God commands
altruism or not. Altruism is still true.
When religion tells you that God loves you it means that God wants you to be
self-sacrificing for love is not looking for happiness but is sacrifice. Jesus
said nobody should be praised for loving those who love them meaning that real
goodness is sacrifice. It is said that you value a person more if you give up
happiness for them and religion says that persons are more valuable than
happiness. So God’s love is frightening.
Religionists want people to be obligated to love God and the less religious of
them want people obligated to love others. This shows that their ultimate motive
is to use religion to achieve power.
According to God, who said it through Moses and Jesus in the Bible, you must
love your neighbour as yourself. Since love is sacrifice, then loving your
neighbour as yourself means you encourage your neighbour to sacrifice for God as
much as you do not that you seek pleasure and happiness for your neighbour as
yourself. That is why Jesus said the great commandment to love God alone was
like the one to love the neighbour as oneself and John in the First Epistle of
John in God’s word, the Bible, said that both loves go together and you cannot
have one without the other. It is a terrible sacrifice to transfer all your
natural feelings to God so that you can love him and to put him before yourself
and be willing to suffer horribly if it is his will so loving your neighbour
cannot be pleasant either. The two are alike in their horrific demands.
It is a sin to help your neighbour when you could be encouraging him to do
selfless good instead. To be happy when your Christian wife is kind to you is
foolish for she is only doing it to please God and not you for she believes in
Jesus’ commandment to love God with all our being and that God is owed all that
love. If she really cares for you even a bit then she regards caring as sin and
she believes that she cannot love you or God with sin in her heart so she cannot
win unless she becomes an Atheist. If God’s will was that she should not do good
for her husband she would not be doing it so she does not care for him at all.
She loves him in the sense that she treats him as God wants him to be treated
which is not loving him at all. The Christian law of love is so horrible that it
would make you anti-social.
The Bible never says that I must love myself in the sense that it clearly
approves of this love. We always love ourselves in some way though it is
distorted in the case of the person with low self-esteem. Jesus may have the
thought in mind: “It is not a sin to love yourself because you cannot help it.
But if the nearest you can get to getting rid of this love is by distorting it
then do so.”
Jesus had a different meaning for love than we generally have there is no reason
to believe that he tolerated self-love even when he said we must love our
neighbour as ourselves. Love, in his book, meant doing the will of God be it bad
or good for you and trusting him even to the extreme of being willing to die for
his revelation even if death was the end or the gateway to Hell for having the
wrong beliefs. There is nothing reasonable or pleasant in this “love”. To love
God means doing God’s will without reserve and without hesitation and to love
your neighbour means, “Do what God wants you to do to them” and is not about
affection towards them for themselves.
When God made us, he made us to choose between self and him and consequently
hopes that we will choose to do what is painful and reject the self. Naturally,
God will make a truck load of moral rules just for the sake of testing us to
make sure everybody is faced with the struggle all the time for real right and
wrong will not be enough. Rejecting the self would be a 24/7 struggle so
inventing the rules would help us. This idea ensures that religion will be
divisive and refuse to listen to reason. It would be dangerous to suffer for a
test when it could be that the religion is wrong and God does not want you to do
that test at all. Some God cults order women to let men they find repellent
ravish them.
A doctrine about how we should behave is worthless without a reason why we
should do what it says. Doing anything because you just suppose it is right is
evil for you are just guessing and need not be. You are doing it because you
suppose it is right and not because you think it is right. Ignorance is no
excuse for there are plenty of books and teachers to guide you.
If we should be selfless as a moral duty, there is no reason why we should be
unless there is a God. We need the God theory to be able to give an excuse for
believing in selflessness and declaring it an obligation. We cannot consider
selflessness good because it makes us happy indirectly for that would make it to
be really hidden self-centredness. Selflessness is good because it does not help
us. We cannot consider it to be good because it helps others. If it is good to
help others then why is it bad to be a taker but good to be a giver as the
philosophy replies? Others need to give. Selflessness implies you must help
others for it is about sacrificing yourself. It is the sacrifice not the helping
that it is about. And we are forbidden to help others for it pleases ourselves
by making us feel good. St Paul said that Jesus said that it is more blessed to
give than to receive.
If God appeared to you and asked you to suffer excruciatingly forever just to
save two strangers from this torment, would you do it? You certainly would not
though it is easy to kid yourself that you would when you know there is no
chance that God will appear with such an offer. Yet you know one person
suffering this torment is better than two suffering it and you won’t do what
altruism says is the right thing. It follows then that the good you do is done
more because it suits you than for any real concern for good. In other words,
you are an egoist. This shows what is really in the gut instinct of the
believer. They put themselves before any god. Altruism with a limit
is not altruism. To be able to do 100 good deeds and limit them to 99
shows you want good to be what you want it to be and that is more important to
you than what good actually is. Same principle.
A thought, if a priest gives his life for a layman to live he is an altruistic saint. But is he really when he refused to live to bring people to God?
Belief in God says that if you think you love God and
others only if you love yourself first then you turn God and others into
afterthoughts and props for your self love. So it says that you must start
not with self-love or even collective self-love. Self-love as in a group loving
itself happens too. It demands that you start with loving God for God is
infinitely perfect and deserving of all love. Belief in God is harmful and there
is no point in worrying about God if you cannot do that. Jesus said we must
start with loving God with all our powers. This error proved he was not the
infallible prophet he said he was and it plainly sanctions altruism and opposes
egoism and egotism.
Making a law of altruism presupposes that there is a God of absolute perfection
and goodness and holiness who must come first for he would do infinite good for
you. Altruism that puts people first is fake for it can only be concerned and
directed towards God.
BOOKS CONSULTED
A CATECHISM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE, CTS, London, 1985
A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, VOL 6, PART II, KANT, Frederick Copleston SJ,
Doubleday/Image, New York 1964
AQUINAS, FC Copleston, Penguin Books, London, 1991
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin, London, 1990
BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, Association for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge,
Dublin, 1960
CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, Veritas, London, 1995
CHARITY, MEDITATIONS FOR A MONTH, Richard F Clarke SJ, Catholic Truth Society,
London, 1973
CHRISTIANITY FOR THE TOUGH-MINDED, Edited by John Warwick Montgomery, Bethany
Fellowship, Minnesota, 1973
CRISIS OF MORAL AUTHORITY, Don Cupitt, SCM Press, London, 1995
EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT, VOL 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha, Scripture Press
Foundation, Bucks, 1995
ECUMENICAL JIHAD, Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1996
GOD IS NOT GREAT, THE CASE AGAINST RELIGION, Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic
Books, London, 2007
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,
East Sussex, 1995
HONEST TO GOD, John AT Robinson, SCM, London, 1963
HOW DOES GOD LOVE ME? Radio Bible Class, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1986
IN DEFENCE OF THE FAITH, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1996
MADAME GUYON, MARTYR OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, Phyllis Thompson, Hodder & Stoughton,
London, 1986
MORAL PHILOSOPHY, Joseph Rickaby SJ, Stonyhurst Philosophy Series, Longmans
Green and Co, London, 1912
OXFORD DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY, Simon Blackburn, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1996
PRACTICAL ETHICS, Peter Singer, Cambridge University Press, England, 1994
PSYCHOLOGY, George A Miller, Penguin, London, 1991
RADIO REPLIES, 1, Frs Rumble & Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul, Minnesota,
1938
RADIO REPLIES, 2, Frs Rumble & Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul, Minnesota,
1940
RADIO REPLIES, 3, Frs Rumble & Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul, Minnesota,
1942
REASON AND BELIEF, Brand Blanschard, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1974
REASONS FOR HOPE, Ed Jeffrey A Mirus, Christendom College Press, Virginia, 1982
THE ATONEMENT: MYSTERY OF RECONCILIATION, Kevin McNamara, Archbishop of Dublin,
Veritas, Dublin, 1987
SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD, Jonathan Edwards, Sword of the Lord,
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, undated
THE BIBLE TELLS US SO, R B Kuiper, The Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1978
THE BRIEF OF ST ANTHONY OF PADUA (Vol 44, No 4)
THE CASE FOR FAITH, Lee Strobel, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2000
The Future of Atheism, Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett, SPCK, London , 2008
THE GREAT MEANS OF SALVATION AND OF PERFECTION, St Alphonsus De Ligouri,
Redemptorist Fathers, Brooklyn, 1988
THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, Thomas A Kempis, Translated by Ronald Knox and Michael
Oakley, Universe, Burns & Oates, London, 1963
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING, Fulton J Sheen, Image Books, New York, 1979
THE NEW WALK, Captain Reginald Wallis, The Christian Press, Pembridge Villas,
England, undated
THE PRACTICE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOD, Brother Lawrence, Hodder & Stoughton,
London, 1981
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, CS Lewis, Fontana, London, 1972
THE PUZZLE OF GOD, Peter Vardy, Collins, London, 1990
THE SATANIC BIBLE, Anton Szandor LaVey, Avon Books, New York, 1969
THE SPIRITUAL GUIDE, Michael Molinos, Christian Books, Gardiner Maine, 1982
THE STUDENT’S CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns & Oates, London,
1961
UNBLIND FAITH, Michael J Langford, SCM, London, 1982
