I am in love.
Hopefully, everyone falls in love in their lifetime. Because it is the most intense human emotion, being in love can be the most wonderful and most agonizing experience imaginable. People do incredibly stupid things when they are in love. It allows a person to completely deny their own needs in favor of someone else's. True love is completely selfless. True love is illogical. Think about how you feel when you love someone. Whether it is romantic love or familial love, the seemingly inescapable feeling of love is a by-product of human beings' social nature. It binds us with every other person on the planet. To love is to truly be human.
Growing up, I was taught that God loves us. And we, as Christians, were supposed to unceasingly thank him for that fact. We are His creation after all. Almost everyone has heard "for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son." It's a favorite of Christians and almost universally across every denomination. However, unlike a large percentage of Christians, I am familiar with the book from which this quote is taken, and nothing about the character "God" it describes strikes me as loving. Even though I didn’t always see it clearly, I've always felt at least a slight discrepancy in the back of my mind with the lack of sense this statement makes.
"God loves you!" is an endearing assurance uttered by almost every Christian on a regular basis. In fact, Modern Christians trump up this aspect of their theology as a way to distinguish it from other religions and to prove that theirs is superior. However, saying that God loves you and then handing you a Bible is like saying the planets and Sun go around the Earth and then handing you Galileo’s Mechanics. Even without knowing anything about the Bible, the basic facts of Christian theology do not demonstrate that.
Let’s go back to John 3:16. I suppose sacrificing the life of someone else for the sake of another might be considered a loving act. But what did God really give up by sacrificing his son? Not a damn thing. Jesus isn’t dead and God doesn’t have to deal with the pain of losing someone he cares deeply about as so many millions of us go through every day. Jesus didn’t sacrifice anything significant either by dying “for us” because not only is he not dead, he’s the ruler of all creation! He didn’t even pay the supposed price for our sin. If the wages of sin is death, then Jesus would be in Hell being tortured forever like everyone else God has condemned! If someone made me an offer: you can be tortured and crucified and it’s a 100% guarantee that you will end world hunger - I’d take it in a heartbeat, even if I didn’t get to be God afterwards. So in trying to make us Christians feel guilty, we are sold the idea that God is giving up something incredibly dear to him when a child can figure out that He loses nothing.
Here’s a question that I’ve never in my 20 years of being a Believer gotten a satisfactory answer to: Why did Jesus have to die? Couldn’t the God that can do anything just forgive us without requiring a human sacrifice? If any Christians end up reading this I’d really like to know an answer to that question. Please leave a comment.
Would you lock your own children in the basement and torture them forever simply for not loving you back? Would you require your spouse to submit to your will every day or threaten them with punishment if they failed to do so? Would you refuse to speak to your true love directly and instead have others speak for you? The truth is that calling God’s relationship with humanity, as described in the Bible, "love" is to pervert the meaning of the word. I love my wife, Nicole. And one thing that I would never do is to constantly remind her of her unworthiness of that love. Yet, this is the basis of the Christian religion! It’s a classic pattern of paternal abuse to constantly tear the other person down so that they will feel unworthy of the little they are given. God is worse than an abusive father. He judges us guilty of a crime committed by a stranger long before you or I were born, then demands we spend our lives groveling for his love and thanking him for his mercy. We must be thankful He does not do to us what we really "deserve". God is not a loving father, He is egotistical. He is a sadist. He is a tyrant.
Love is giving of yourself completely. Love is sharing everything of yours without needing anything in return. Love is being hopelessly devoted; not demanding, on pain of eternal torture, hopeless devotion. Love does not insist upon obedience. Love is given freely; not earned. To love another is to be human. To require blind worship is to be God
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