love

Many humans have been told that What God Wants is for love to be conditional. God has made it clear that He loves humans if they do what He wants. If they do not, humans shall know His wrath. They'll be condemned to everlasting damnation.

Some say that God acts with love when He condemns people to eternal and unending torture. With this explanation they seek to preserve the image and the notion of a loving God.

One result of this teaching: Many people are very confused about the true nature of love. Human beings "get," at some deeply intuitive level, that the imposing of unending punishment is not a loving thing to do. Yet they are told that such punishment is a demonstration of the purest and highest love. It's God's love in action.

It's not unusual for human beings to therefore be afraid of love, even as they have been made afraid of God, who is the source of love. They have been taught that God's love can turn into wrath in a flicker, producing horrifying results. This packaging of love and fear in human theology has not been without consequences in human behavior.

Earlier it was said, "Humanity's ideas about God produce humanity's ideas about life and about people." This is profoundly true, and thus, many humans are afraid of and attracted to love at the same time. Often their first thought upon moving into a closer love relationship with another is, "Now what is this person going to want, or need, or expect from me?" That is, after all, the nature of their love relationship with an all-powerful God, and they have no reason to believe it will be any different with a much weaker human being.

There is also the corollary thought that partners in a relationship have a right to expect certain things in exchange for love--that love is a give-and-take, quid pro quo proposition.

These expectations and fears undermine many love relationships at the outset.

Because love and the worst torture imaginable have been linked in the minds of humans as natural activities on the part of God, most humans believe that it's right and proper to punish other humans for their behaviors--just as God does.

In perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of this, many human beings believe that it's appropriate to kill human beings as a warning to human beings that it's inappropriate to kill human beings.

This is, many of the world's people believe, What God Wants. is this really so?

from neal'es blog