JESUS BY COMMANDING US TO GIVE ALL TO GOD

WAS TRYING TO STEAL OUR VERY BEING

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.  Moses was in revelations told by his god that he was the centre of the world.  It is no surprise that Moses with his attitude to God's all demanding love was virtually running a blood thirsty cult.  Women and gays died and the blood ran.
 
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.