If the Holy Bible proves anything at all, it proves that the Christian God has a blood-lust like no other God in history. From Abraham to Jesus to the end times to eternal hell, the Christian God loves suffering even more than, or at least as much as, said God loves Himself. And if everything from the genocides in the Old Testament and God killing everyone on the planet with a flood, to Jesus being tortured and murdered (rather than the devil, who is the guilty one) and the fiery end of the world followed by the never ending fires of hell, are not enough to convince you that Christianity is really an addiction to violence masquerading as "love," just consider the psychotic rantings of a Catholic priest trying to convince his faithful flock that murder and mutilation - which he calls "punishment" - are proof of just how much his "God" is pure love.
In an article published on https://catholicexchange.com/gods-punishment-is-just-restorative-and-medicinal/, Fr. Emmet Carter uses pure rhetoric to disguise from himself his own lust for violence, by presenting such violence as a "love of God." He starts his word salad of pure rhetoric like this:
"The human heart seeks for love. It is an urge so universal, so profound, so all–absorbing that we must trace its origin to the Creator of man."
Notice here that Carter, like all "believers" in their own brand of "God" idea, never ever feels any need to prove this completely unverifiable claim. This is typical double standard worship. Such "believers" not only insist instead that anyone who questions the veracity of such a claim must provide evidence to substantiate their doubts - even as they NEVER provide any verifiable evidence to support their own claims - but then only ever reject or reinterpret any and all scientific evidence that both disproves the need for such a claim and even shows how such an unsubstantiated "belief" can be harmful. But being a Catholic priest, who assumes his own "beliefs" are as infallible as his religion assures him his own salvation requires him to accept, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised.
I have a brother who claims his own belief in God is evidenced by the fact that some bodies of saints do not decompose after they die, for example. Um, okay, this could be interpreted as evidence of a God that uses such "miracles" to indirectly (but never directly) show He "exists," but clearly - this could be the result of any number of other things as well, things that are even as mysterious to us as "God," but not for my brother of course. Nope! It's proof of God, and his brand of God, and no one else's! Ugh!
Emmet continues:
"Again we must recall those words so full of significance and consequence, “Let us make man to our image and likeness.”
If this same claim was attributed to any other God besides the Christian God, it would be seen as pure Narcissism. But when the Christian God makes such a claim, its something completely different. Talk about a miracle of rhetoric! Emmet then continues with such a word salad of double standards...
"From all eternity God contemplates Himself and in that timeless intellectual act generates His Idea of Himself, the Word, the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. And the Father and the Son in their mutual knowledge are locked in the mutual embrace whence proceeds the Spirit, the personalized Love of God."
In other words God is in love with himself, and that love only increases the more said God thinks about how Godly He is. Said God is also "locked in the mutual embrace" of his love for himself (which is basically the same thing as Emmett being "locked in the mutual embrace" he has for his own infallible ideas).
Emmet continues:
"In creating man to His own image and likeness God makes man a being with powers of intellectual knowledge and spiritual love. In raising man to the supernatural order God places those powers on a new level, gives them a new direction, a new objective, a new participation, namely, the ability now to share in the very knowledge and love that God has of Himself in the eternal processes of the Trinity."
So, God only "raises man to the supernatural order" for no other reason than so that we can love God? Why? Isn't God's infinite love for Himself enough love? This is like the sun feeling the need to "raise" our awareness of itself because it wants us - indeed, needs us - to light a candle. And anyone who dares to suggest this is silly deserves to be burned alive!
Notice too that in this description, Emmett is basically saying that humans are created for the purpose of loving God on the same level God loves himself, even though, since we are flawed and finite humans only, doing such a thing is completely and utterly impossible. And this is made especially impossible because, not only are we woefully limited in our abilities, but because said God limits us from knowing him, not through direct scientific study that allows us to slowly improve our understanding through trial and error, but through faith, which threatens punishment to anyone who questions the "infallibility" of a Church that not only changed its mind about torturing and killing witches and heretics, but even hid its own child abuse for decades.
Emmett then explains that:
"The essence of mortal sin is that we choose something other than God, forbidden to us here and now, and prefer it to God. This is an act of love. We place a higher value on a creature than we do on God. We love that creature more. But God by nature must love Himself supremely, above all else. As a result, when we raise a creature above God in our scale of values, we have ceased to be Godlike."
God "must" love Himself above all else? Then why bother sacrificing himself for our benefit, as the Christian story would have us believe?
And what is the so-called "creature" Emmett is referring to here? Is it ourselves, who are, like Jesus, allegedly made in the image and likeness of God, but in the flesh? God, after all, is wholly immaterial, and only Jesus is physical. So, is it a mortal sin for us to love ourselves as much as God loves Himself, when doing so is to strive to be like the very God we are said to be made in the image and likeness of? Indeed, why are we "intelligently designed" by such a God to love ourselves as "Creatures" more than we love the God who designed us in such a way?
Then Emmett clearly contradicts himself, saying:
"The secret, then, of our truest, deepest, only perfect love is in being
Godlike. And as the second great commandment is like unto the first, it
is also the standard, the norm, and the criterion of our
love for our fellow men."
Wait, what? The second commandment says "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above." Not only is this exactly what God allegedly did by making us in his own image, but also, if we paint a portrait or take a picture of ourselves, how then are we not making a "graven image" of something "in heaven above," if we are indeed made in the image and "likeness" of a God "that is in heaven above"?
Also, isn't to be "Godlike" to love ourselves above all else, as said "God" loves himself? And if we "love" something more than we love ourselves, like if we love God more than we love ourselves, doesn't that mean we are then NOT being Godlike? Worse still, while Emmett suggests we should NEVER love ourselves as much as God does (which we are incapable of doing because we are not gods ourselves), we must use our ability to direct all of our love to "our fellow men," who are all the very "creatures" Emmett tells us we cannot love MORE than God, lest we deserve eternal tortures for loving "our fellow men" more than we love the God who created us in his own image and likeness, the same God that designed us with a predisposition to love ourselves above all else, the same way God "must" love himself above all else. Yes, this is perfectly clear. Not.
Having muddied the unholy waters of his pure rhetoric to look like wine, Emmett then goes on to revel in how violence - which he calls "punishment" - is a beautiful gift that proves God loves us. Hell as such is simply proof, from this perspective, that God's love is eternal. And because it is, so should our suffering be, even though God could more easily allow us to cease to exist, rather than keeping us alive, for all eternity, to suffer, so we can experience His eternal love, but for no "good" reason whatsoever, other than that such a God "must" let us suffer so, and is apparently both powerless to stop it (so much for being "all powerful") and indifferent to that eternal suffering anyway ( so much for being "all loving" or all good).
In the next installment, we will look at how Emmett's reasoning is the same used by Inquisitors who tortured and burned witches and heretics alike, and all to prove that their "God" (which is their own ideas, and have never been proven to be anything else) is "pure love" (which they have only for their ideals, and no one, and nothing else). Scary stuff.
Comments
Post a Comment