1 John 4:8 … hating “God” by Loving GOD (03/08/15)
In the past it used to bother me quite a bit whenever a person would learn of my “avant garde” take on the Bible (admittedly quite different from their more traditional understanding of the same) and then ask me quite sincerely why it was that I hated God. I mean, the raw arrogance of this question used to be enough to get me seething …
Well I have mellowed quite a bit over the years, and such questions don’t really upset me at all any more. Indeed, I have even reached a level of humility that has allowed me to recently realize that those folks were right then, and that they are still right today — You see, I DO hate “God” … though that admission might be worthy of some explanation.
For starters, I most certainly DO hate the “God” of the Bible’s Old Testament who so frivolously advocated & encouraged genocide, infanticide, mass rape & murder … And I also most certainly DO despise the weak-willed “God” of the current Christian church — a deity who is supposedly all-Loving & all-powerful, and yet who allows billions & billions of fundamentally innocent Souls (Souls that He made error-prone in the first place) to burn in Hell forever — all for merely failing to grovel at His feet in the appropriate manner … And I also most certainly DO despise the “God” of modern-day evangelism & the New Age “mysticism” whose preachers & pundits & gurus & “masters” bathe in vast mountains of material wealth that they suck from the trembling poor & the weary downtrodden.
Yes, these versions of “God” — and all versions like them in all the religions of the world — truly are despicable imposters; silver-tongued forgeries created by the silver-lipped lusts of men both wicked & corrupt. I have no patience for their greed and I have no patience for their condemnations, and I will continue to call out their hypocrisies and denounce their evils wherever they are found — and this I will do for the rest of my days.
Of course, this fervent opposition to said “Gods” does not in any way make me an actual GOD-hater … if for no other reason than these imposters have nothing at all to do with GOD.
You see, for me (and for Jesus, and for Buddha, and for Rumi, and for Lao Tsu, and for Kahlil Gibran, and for Gandhi, and for Martin Luther King Jr, and for Peace Pilgrim, and for Kirshnamurti, and for St. Francis) GOD is LOVE — not the “love” of experienced emotion or the “love” of expressed adoration or the “love” of publicized worship, but rather LOVE the verb; the LOVE of the act of Kindness — the LOVE of the act of forgiveness — the LOVE of the act of self-sacrifice …
… the LOVE of the act of LOVE.
As such, even though my interpretations of the Bible’s texts are indeed unusual — even though they are done with LOVE and analyzed through LOVE (and thus have the “gall” to purely reflect LOVE); just because my opinions & my theories & my practices do not reflect the desires & the wishes & the beliefs of the modern Christian church & its limiting dogma, in no way makes me a “hater of God”.
Indeed (and in-deed), I have found that 1 John 4:8 is actually LITERALLY true — GOD really is LOVE … and as such, to the degree that I choose to live with LOVE, I choose to LOVE GOD as well.
Amen … Let it be so.
“Whoever does not Love does not know God, for God is LOVE.” ~ 1 John 4:8
;