Love me or else (Where is it now?)

by hyjyljyj , Thursday, December 13, 2012, 17:11 (4149 days ago)
edited by unknown, Thursday, December 13, 2012, 17:22

Re: Where is it now?-Religion is no help at all. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart," commands Jesus (Matthew 22, 37). "Fear God," says Peter, his disciple (1st Epistle General, 2, 17). Can we love what we fear? Imagine being told by your father: "Love me, or I'll beat you to a pulp."-And that fragment of utter brilliance constitutes virtually the most concise expression possible of the utter failure of Christianity and Abrahamic religion in general. -Alan Watts also has exposited eloquently (how else would he do it) at length on the utter absurdity of being commanded, in ANY context, "Thou shalt love." Love by its nature MUST come from within, and is completely deaf to any form of external bullying, whether from a dusty book of poems and fables with pages too easily ripped or an ancient guy in a rolling plexiglas box wearing what appear to be a white bathrobe and huge pointy hat. As soon as you ORDER me to love this or that, I become fundamentally unable to do so. I can fear it, all right, which seems to be a fairly suitable substitute for love, to religionists. But for me to love someone or something that continuously dangles my own infintely torturous and perpetual blood-drenched demise over my troubled head, would demonstrate pretty low self-esteem on my part; rather, I curse it, saying "God Damocles! For the love of...You,...get OFF me already!" Otherwise, I am perfectly indistinguishable from Winston Smith being forced to love Big Brother, a horrible kind of impure, ill-gotten, mandated love conveyed in the final and most blood-chilling sentence of the entire terrifying tome. And that's supposed to make me feel all warm and fuzzy?-Moreover, the case is never adequately advanced as to why I even OUGHT to love something or someone so routinely depicted as petty, narcissistic, vindictive and rigidly domineering as Big Br--oops, I mean God. Not to mention murderous, but there is that, too. Why bother to create us and then threaten us all day, every day till we're dead? Guess we'll never know.