GOD COMMANDING LOVE OF NEIGHBOUR IGNORES THAT YOU CANNOT COMMAND LOVE

 

For most people and in Bible times as in all times, people wanted direct direction.  There was no time to be an amateur theologian.  People preferred commands for suggestions and general advice were too hard and time-consuming to apply and think about.

 

Incredibly some Christians when told that you cannot really command love and goodness for they need to arise from generosity not out of obedience to anybody's law will tell you that God was right to command for direct direction was needed.  But you can have direct direction without a command!  Why not just firmly say what needs to be done without cloaking in in commanding language?  And if God meant "direction direction" when he used the word command that is not the clarity that is needed at all.  He was lying then.  Why attach punishment to the commands if they were not about being commands but direction?

 

A command can be direct direction as well.  But a command cannot only be direct direction. 

 

The Bible says that God commanded us to love neighbour as oneself but the commandment makes no sense if there is a God.  Is God commanding it to pressure us to accept it and is that pressure needed because it is stupid?

God in the Old Testament says you must love your neighbour as yourself. It is not given as a central commandment. In fact, it is mentioned the once and not even stressed. You could easily miss it if you read the whole Law of God - the first five Bible books.

 

And there is no warning what happens if you break it.  Why are there penalties laid out if you have gay sex or sex with a menstruating woman but none for the love commandment?  The answer is that it is not really a command at all.  It is probably just a recommendation. 

 

It is not taken seriously by the Torah or its God in any sense.

Jesus claimed that the two greatest commandments were to love God totally and to love your neighbour as yourself. In fact, he didn't have the intellectual honesty to admit that the Torah only makes the commandment to love God with the whole being the supreme one.  The love of neighbour one is far down the scale as we have seen.

Jesus said, "A new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you" (John 13:34). This, it appears, is not the same commandment as love your neighbour as yourself.

It must be a tougher one.  But he calls it a new commandment.  Believers argue that when God told us to adore and love him alone to love our neighbour he was asking us to be his love for the neighbour.  It asks you not to value the neighbour as a person in a humanitarian sense but to make it all about God. It is really just co-operating with God you have here as opposed to you loving your neighbour as and end in herself.  If that is what it means then it is not a new commandment.

What about the following thought? Loving neighbour as yourself seems to mean that you love your neighbour and yourself in that order. In theory, you can love your neighbour as yourself while still putting your neighbour first. You treat the neighbour as you would want to treat yourself. Theologians say this is the same as love your neighbour as yourself but it is clarified better. Love your neighbour as yourself tells you to give the love you give or would give yourself to your neighbour.  If so then it does not mean you may love yourself. Indeed it forbids it. It is a mistake then to imagine that love your neighbour as yourself implies you must love yourself.

Jesus and the Church commanded love of neighbour as oneself. To them you are a bad person if you don't keep it. Thus the lack of love for your neighbour makes you in a sense as bad as a rapist or murderer.  This is unloving extremist and hypocritical doctrine.

If love your neighbour as yourself made sense and is a commandment then why did God and Moses and Jesus make a commandment of it? If reason commands something, God should be defending reason and not treading on its toes by commanding what it says. You don’t command what commands itself but you draw attention to it and work for its observance. To give a commandment where you need to give light, encouragement and advice is an act of violence and intolerance. When God commanded that we are to love God not only most but totally and to love our neighbour as ourselves he was making evil and authoritarianism the basis of his moral system. But that is not a moral system but a caricature. God is saying it is right to interfere in matters that do not concern one. He is stealing authority from reason. He wants us to be more worried about breaking the commandments because he gave them when we should be more worried about breaking the dictates of reason. He opposes reason. He opposes being sensible. And in return for us going along with it, he gives us the rewards of being hypocrites and fools.

It would be bad and vicious and hypocritical enough if the command to love neighbour as oneself were simply advice but to make a command of it and an obligation is to double the badness. It is trying to force people to love.

The Church will say, "If you feel a great dislike for somebody do you expect us to command you to ignore them when they need help?" No. Saying we should not be commanded by God or anybody to love does not mean we want to be commanded not to love. We ask them not to pretend that commanding love is something a loving person would do. If everybody disliked you and endured you to do good deeds for you it would destroy you. You need to be liked and you see and feel that loving is a kind of liking. You can't enjoy or feel good if people who hate you give you a gift unless you think their feelings have changed. Their bad feelings towards you can be a source of fear for you. You know they can erupt under pressure and harm you.

Authority is not a good thing. It is a necessary evil at best. God stands for unnecessary authority. That is the kind he has. God is necessarily unnecessary authority. Authority is about telling you what to do no matter what you think. That is what it is for. If you know what to do then you do not need authority. Therefore when God has taken this authority what he has done is tell us that we need him to tell us what good and evil are. This is very dangerous for the Muslim fanatics believe he has told them to kill and millions of other examples could be thought of.

Love your neighbour as yourself is nasty but its being a law makes it more vicious. Laws are not laws unless they imply threats if you don't comply. A law that does not wish evil on you if you refuse to comply is not a command or law.

The commandment to love neighbour as yourself makes no sense which proves that it can only be justified by saying God commanded it. He knows what good is and we don’t.  He has to tell us. The commandment really shouts at us, "Be fundamentalists or else!" If you believe God says something then you have to act like you have the truth in fundamentalist fashion. You are right and everybody that disagrees with you is siding with evil and error whether they see it or not.

 

Jesus and his God want us to say in our hearts with sincerity that if God commanded something like, “Eat the first baby your wife gives birth to”, we would do it. That is what you are agreeing with when you agree with the laws of God just because of his divine authority.

The "Love your neighbour as yourself" command is remarkable in its failure to edify society as a whole. It has a deceiving attractiveness about it but people cannot be expected to take it seriously. They feel warm when they hear it but in the real world it is soon forgotten.

God commands things that don't need commanding for they command themselves.  That  he needs to command is both immoral and shows that he invents moraltiy for he has to force it.  Wemight ask if he is right to command then what is commanding himto do it?  I she really boass  Against the view that there is no law above God for then he would not be God we have the notion that God controls what morality will be and thus can allow you to call murdering babies for fun a virtue.  But there is a law that god cannot be arbritry or that God must b emorality instead of it ruling hims o it rules him after all.  The higher law is that God shall be morality.  The Christian alternative is that God is moraltiy by nature but that amounts to saying that God commands only good and his ocmmands are good for he says so.

BOOKS CONSULTED

A CATECHISM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE, CTS, London, 1985
A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, VOL 6, PART II, KANT, Frederick Copleston SJ, Doubleday/Image, New York 1964
AQUINAS, FC Copleston, Penguin Books, London, 1991
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin, London, 1990
BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, Association for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, Dublin, 1960
CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, Veritas, London, 1995
CHARITY, MEDITATIONS FOR A MONTH, Richard F Clarke SJ, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1973
CHRISTIANITY FOR THE TOUGH-MINDED, Edited by John Warwick Montgomery, Bethany Fellowship, Minnesota, 1973
CRISIS OF MORAL AUTHORITY, Don Cupitt, SCM Press, London, 1995
EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT, VOL 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha, Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995
ECUMENICAL JIHAD, Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1996
GOD IS NOT GREAT, THE CASE AGAINST RELIGION, Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books, London, 2007
THE GREAT MEANS OF SALVATION AND OF PERFECTION, St Alphonsus De Ligouri, Redemptorist Fathers, Brooklyn, 1988
HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch, East Sussex, 1995
HONEST TO GOD, John AT Robinson, SCM, London, 1963
HOW DOES GOD LOVE ME? Radio Bible Class, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1986
IN DEFENCE OF THE FAITH, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1996
MADAME GUYON, MARTYR OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, Phyllis Thompson, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1986
MORAL PHILOSOPHY, Joseph Rickaby SJ, Stonyhurst Philosophy Series, Longmans Green and Co, London, 1912
OXFORD DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY, Simon Blackburn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996
PRACTICAL ETHICS, Peter Singer, Cambridge University Press, England, 1994
PSYCHOLOGY, George A Miller, Penguin, London, 1991
RADIO REPLIES, 1, Frs Rumble & Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul, Minnesota, 1938
RADIO REPLIES, 2, Frs Rumble & Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul, Minnesota, 1940
RADIO REPLIES, 3, Frs Rumble & Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul, Minnesota, 1942
REASON AND BELIEF, Brand Blanschard, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1974
REASONS FOR HOPE, Ed Jeffrey A Mirus, Christendom College Press, Virginia, 1982
THE ATONEMENT: MYSTERY OF RECONCILIATION, Kevin McNamara, Archbishop of Dublin, Veritas, Dublin, 1987
SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD, Jonathan Edwards, Sword of the Lord, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, undated
THE BIBLE TELLS US SO, R B Kuiper, The Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1978
THE BRIEF OF ST ANTHONY OF PADUA (Vol 44, No 4)
THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE MORAL DILEMMA, G R Evans, Lion Books, Oxford, 2007
THE GREAT MEANS OF SALVATION AND OF PERFECTION, St Alphonsus De Ligouri, Redemptorist Fathers, Brooklyn, 1988
THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, Thomas A Kempis, Translated by Ronald Knox and Michael Oakley, Universe, Burns & Oates, London, 1963
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING, Fulton J Sheen, Image Books, New York, 1979
THE NEW WALK, Captain Reginald Wallis, The Christian Press, Pembridge Villas, England, undated
THE PRACTICE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOD, Brother Lawrence, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1981
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, CS Lewis, Fontana, London, 1972
THE PUZZLE OF GOD, Peter Vardy, Collins, London, 1990
THE SATANIC BIBLE, Anton Szandor LaVey, Avon Books, New York, 1969
THE SPIRITUAL GUIDE, Michael Molinos, Christian Books, Gardiner Maine, 1982  
THE STUDENT’S CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns & Oates, London, 1961
UNBLIND FAITH, Michael J Langford, SCM, London, 1982
WHAT DO EXISTENTIALISTS BELIEVE? Richard Appignanesi, Granta Books, London, 2006
WITCHCRAFT, SORCERY AND MAGIC, J B Midgley, Catholic Truth Society, London, 2006