Friday, May 8, 2009

Godly Love and Godly Hate

God the Unconditional Lover is another nonexistent deity. Many non-thinkers trying to push their own social agenda again try to stop rational thought by invoking emotional responses with stupid questions like "what would Jesus do?" as though the answer is invariably "hug the ax murderer a little tighter." Hogwash. "When we love we're inviting the Spirit of God into our souls and when we hate we're expelling His Spirit from us." As a generalization, wrong.

Love does not equal good and hate does not equal bad. If our culture can convince us that love defines good (godly, righteous, virtuous, etc.) and then our culture redefines love (can we say 'hippie') then our culture has successfully blinded us from our fundamental understanding of what is good and why. And life becomes an aimless journey without meaning and without a destination (can we say 'Albert Camus').

David Call has summarized the skewed perspective as the preaching of Jesus, love and service. Any good principle out of context becomes a dangerous one. You start reasoning in reverse; your conclusions become your premises and when you find the original premises to be inconsistent (due to incorrect perspective) you choose to stop thinking. For instance, service is good only insofar as it increases the well-being and happiness of the doer of the service. The purpose, or final cause, of the service is to increase the happiness of the doer. The other good effects of acting on good principles are collateral damage. But if this perspective were lost and we started to believe service were good, period, then we would find ourselves serving 18 hours per day and still not feeling like we were doing enough; we would serve ourselves into perpetual misery. And the word 'good' has lost all relevant meaning to the individual.

In all true principles, the context that makes the principles true is that of primacy. The self has primacy over others. Reason has primacy over faith. Reality has primacy over God. Happiness has primacy over duty. And so on. Primacy doesn't mean that one is better than the other or anything like that. It simply means that one principle is dependent on another. The house of truth is a house of order. Primacy connects all true principles in a web of truth that shows how true principles are true and helps us understand the applications of true principles to ourselves.

God is love. As a generalization, false. If that were true in general, there would not be two separate words for the one concept. God and love are two words manifesting two different entities. In a particular and specific context, such as the one implied by John, saying God is love sheds light on both of the principles involved, love expands our understanding of God, and God expands our understanding of love. Context is obviously important, else it would be a circular and meaningless mental exercise like standing in a bucket and trying to lift the bucket.

God is hate. This is also true in some circumstances. God abhors unhappiness and misery. God hates falsehoods. We should be preaching godly hatred as much as we preach godly love. In a more generalized form, they are one and the same idea. Like the north pole of a magnet surely must always attract all magnetic south poles and repel all magnetic north poles, the nature of God is such that all principles of goodness, joy, honor, integrity and such are attracted to him and all principles of falsehood, misery, cowardice, compulsion, and so on are repelled from him. There are no magnetic north poles that attract south poles but do not repel north poles or vice versa. Same with godly love and godly hate. They are two sides of the same coin.

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