TALK OF GOD'S LOVE CAN BE A WEAPON AGAINST YOU
Even a very good person can hate a person who is righteous in a way they do not like. Or they can be tempted to. One righteous person can fear the righteous ways of another.
No matter if you are a nun who gave her life in service, or a monk, you can swear how much you love Jesus and that could change after a half an hour of his company in a coffee shop. This fact does not inspire confidence in anybody's relationship with God. It is only a roundabout way of having a relationship with yourself. You are too embarrassed to admit you are doing this anyway. If you think God is with you, you still have no right to expect me to agree with you.
These things show that individuals want an invisible God who supposedly works in the inner parts of the very self for it protects something. The privacy gives a cover. For what? If this God devotion is about what you want to think, the devotion is really about devotion to your values that you are pretending are God's. You are externalising your concerns. You are projecting. It is hard if not impossible for you to see this as nobody can make it clear to you. They cannot see and you may take advantage of that. Plus what is private may stop you learning from yourself. A person who spends a day alone on the beach does not know what he might have learned for and about himself that day if he had went with friends with coffee. You already have an inner voice, you have inner chatter from yourself to yourself, so knowing where God would start and you start would not be achievable.
Is religious talk about how much God loves you about weaponising this love or helping you see it? As human nature is odd, it could even be both! The person may not even see that their trying to get you to experience God's love is subconsciously about something else, something darker.
You may be let down by your parent or spouse and people will tell you how much they love you. That only reminds you of how face to face in word and action they showed that.
With God it is different.
You cannot sense how he feels about you. He doesn't even have feelings for he is not a physical person. You cannot even get to know him for a few minutes at the shopping mall. God's love even if real will leave you cold. It is not harm. It is not human.
You know that we relate to things we see in others that are not there. Some of us have fantasy friends. Everybody injects fantasy to some level into how they see their loved ones.
So the effort to preach God's love without coming across as a fantasist and feeding on the fantasist side in others seems very bleak.
Religion seems to sense that. So what does it do? It tries to get you to think that all around you is a gift from God.
I'd compare that to this. Somebody telling you that negligent parent was possibly in fact spending time on sending you vibes that despite all appearances right now will do incredible things for you. So they were doing all they could after all. Do you see how horrid and smarmy this do-gooder is? Do you see the harm that would come if enough people thought like her or him?
As it is not obvious that God loves you, people could be telling you that he does to get some advantage over you. They may just want to feel holy and pious. They are doing it at your expense for they want you to think they are about you when they are not.
The paradox is how Christians want God to affirm and accept their good efforts and deny they act for a reward. In fact the praise that comes from a reward is what gives you the real reward. You know that getting the Nobel Peace Prize lands you with money and that money is not the real reward for it cannot even reverse a nail breakage you have. So God belief is inherently about the ego.
Some use God as a weapon to protect what they see as morality, or justice and respect for dignity if you prefer. They use God to emotionally blackmail you to keep his supposed rules. They tell you you are offending such a great being by ignoring or breaking them. They use the threat of divine punishment or exclusion from God's Heavenly bliss as well.
Let us look at two examples of that.
One example of this how the attempts to explain what a God of goodness has to do with keeping us moral are feeble. For example, he supposedly has mysterious complex plans so he might not even tell us in a clear way what is right and what is wrong. And its odd in Catholic circles how God can exempt you from attending Sunday Mass though normally that is a hell-deserving sin and he cannot exempt you from his ban on gay marriage.
One example of this is that you will be told that if you encourage somebody to critically rethink their faith in God, "Doing that says more about you than the other person or their faith." The same people, including Jesus Christ, know that God faith and the Abrahamic religions hold that there is only one real God to whom devotion really does bring help and protection and result in real action to change your spiritual fortunes. Those faiths implicitly say that all other gods are fakes and nothing good will come from depending on them. The doctor needs to exist. It is bad for you if she does not. If people are made to feel better for what is in fact doing nothing for them then being silent is harming them. I do not hear, "Saying people should have a real god instead of a statue is bigoted and says more about you than them" then!
The problems with faith show that religion is a placebo style mental construct. It protects you from the psychological harms you suffer when you knowingly hurt others. It is a placebo pill. This "pill" like any placebo can help or harm or both. Its effect is emotional and it can condition you to eventually stop caring who you hurt. If there is no God nurturing and guiding your faith then you don't know what it is doing to you. You may not see that without it you would have been better off over all. To your horror you may find that you have killed somebody and feel nothing.
The thought that people trying to bring you to God may be showing love to you is an unlikely one. I would say it is an impossible one. They claim to be even directing you to the love of God not their own. This is a bit extreme considering we don't have enough reason to take God seriously.
