NOT LOVING GOD ONLY IS SUPPOSEDLY THE GREATEST SIN

 
Jesus when he was asked by a Jewish scholar, a scribe, what the greatest commandment of morality was. replied as follows.
 
“The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31, King James Bible).
 
Jesus said that the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbour as yourself. This commandment is inferior to the first which Jesus said was the greatest so loving God is more important than loving other people or yourself. He was saying that love does not start with yourself which is why psychiatry is evil and heretical for saying otherwise and any Church that gives it a hearing like the Roman Catholic Church is doing serious wrong. It starts with loving God. Psychiatry is a sin!
 
The wording of Jesus' command of love wholly for God comes from the depraved prophet Moses in Deuteronomy 6. Jesus parroted Moses.
 
God is to be loved wholly. We do not love him most and give the rest of our love to others. We must love him alone and love others for his sake. Strictly speaking, only God is ultimately loved.
 
To love God is the most important commandment. Therefore to break it is the greatest sin.
 
God is unlimitedly lovable and deserves infinite adoration so sin is to be hated unlimitedly for it is his opposite. Sin is evil that is forbidden by God. You cannot love the sinner and hate the sin. Strictly speaking, sin is not an act but a personal characteristic. For example, the rapist is a person with violence in his nature. To say hate the sin means hate the sinner. We must then love God and not people. God is entitled to all the love we have so it's not malicious. It would be more natural to love God totally than to love people if people's sins are that horrendous.
 
The more you love God the more you will hate sin. The Bible says that nobody can keep the commandment to love God completely and with all their powers. Self-love gets in the way so much. Even the greatest saint wouldn't suffer the pains of the rack for a thousand years if God asked it or required it. The love of God and neighbour cannot be identical because we are told to love God completely with all our powers but we are told to love our neighbour no more than ourselves. If our love of God gives us a repugnance for our neighbour then that is not our fault and so we are without guilt. And such repugnance is unavoidable because we see God as good but our neighbour as deceitful and sinful no matter how charming or kind he or she is. You cannot love the sinner and hate the sin and even more so if you see yourself and/or others as totally sinful. Correct Christianity teaches that human good works are dross for people just can't put God first. Their good works only look good and so displease God though God commands them for the alternative is worse. In that case, the only commandment you can strive to keep is the one to love God completely and not love your neighbour as yourself - assuming the latter means really loving the neighbour as opposed to loving the neighbour not for his sake but for God's.
 
Jesus said then that we must love our neighbour as ourselves. If we serve the needs of our neighbour for the sake of God and to please him then just as when you do good for others to benefit yourselves it is not loving them at all so it is when you do it for the Lord God. It is deceiving them, it is manipulating them.
 
If you look after your neighbour for the sake of God that implies, "Pity I have to do this but I have to please God." Your neighbour is seemingly just tolerated. This is not tolerance but being forced to put up with the person. To force a person to be tolerant is as impossible as forcing them to be loving. It cannot be done. You may manage to make them seem to be tolerant but that is all. It follows then that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as tolerance. Tolerance is just the label we put on people being unable to give free rein to their hate.
 
How do we explain Jesus telling us that we must love our neighbour? Is there a contradiction? No. Love your neighbour may mean treat your neighbour as God wills which is the good way for the sake of God. Jesus made it clear that he did not mean love in the sense of valuing the person in themselves and for themselves. That is shown by the fact that he said the commandment to love only God was the principal one and the command about loving neighbour was a secondary one. He said that the command to love neighbour is like the one to love God only meaning that it was just a way of carrying out and practicing the first. He observed that the first great commandment is the key to the interpretation of the second great commandment. Only God is to be valued in and for himself when he said God alone matters for the believer.
 
Here is a way to reconcile loving God only with the rule that we must love our neighbour as ourselves. The Bible says that God shows himself in our neighbour. He makes the neighbour and the neighbour has nothing and is nothing without God. He shows his face in others. Therefore to love your neighbour really means to love God. That is why the New Testament is able to tell you that if you don’t love your neighbour you do not love God and if you don’t love God you can’t genuinely love your neighbour.
 
Jesus wants you to live the first greatest commandment through the second. That is to say that when you look at another person or yourself you must see only God and love that so you love God by helping the other person and seeing only God – you see the image of God in that person. Each person is the image of God and that is how they are loved for what is like God in them is what is loved. That is a way the two commandments can fit together because the first one says we must love God alone and yet the second commands us to love others as ourselves.
 
If you refuse to see the person but just look at what reminds you of God in the person and just see God’s goodness where there is bad in the person then plainly you will lose any capacity to protect yourself from evil people and will become a horrendous judge of character. If you don’t believe in judging then it only gets worse – and most Christians these days forbid judging so that they can sin without smearing their consciences. The doctrine of love God alone is such a severe and difficult and extreme and absurd idea that only people who wanted to use God to lull people into a pious dream so that they could take advantage of them could have invented it.
 
Any time we love people with ordinary human affection it is sinful. It is a sin to love your mother as your mother or your husband as your husband. Look at them and don’t see them but love God and that alone is virtue. Jesus said that anybody who prefers their father or mother to him is not worthy of him. We are doing that if we love them at all for themselves for he forbids it.
 
The commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself on the face of it seems to say that your needs are equal to those of other people. However, Jesus didn’t mean it like that for he held that you should sacrifice your happiness and welfare when your neighbours need you to. And even when they don’t. He commanded in the sermon on the mount that if an invading Roman soldier forced a Jew to carry his pack one mile the Jew should carry it another mile as well though the Jewish people were victimised by Rome. He is not endorsing self-esteem or self-love of any kind in the commandment for these would stop you and discourage you from sacrificing. Love your neighbour as yourself really means that you must love God in yourself and your neighbour for all people are made in the image of God and to respect the image is to respect God. The clue to this is from the other teachings of Christ and his assertion that the second greatest commandment was LIKE the first. It could only be like the first if it was another way of carrying out the first. It is like the first in the sense that both commandments are about loving God but in different ways.
 
The commandment of Jesus refuses to accept people as they are. It says they have no right to their own lives or to their own opinion but must live and think God’s way. Who wants to be loved like that? Nobody of course. So to love God means to value God and to love people means making them do what God wants but don’t value them. Value God not people. Just use them for his benefit.
 
We are aware that that is not loving your neighbour at all. If we repress our good feelings towards others what kind of existence will we have? We need to be cared about and appreciated, not used to score points with a thing that may not even exist!
 
According to some, Jesus’ command to love God with all your strength does not infer that love is solely emotional but an act of will that is so determined to please God that nothing can make us succumb to the temptation to reject God. It is primarily an act of will for emotional love for God however strong does not guarantee you will treat him properly. The loving act of will means you are determined to serve God at all costs. Emotions will come. They are unavoidable but they will be painful for if you want God you want to be with him properly in Heaven and it will be agony to be surrounded by people who don't love him very much or who don't love him at all. The command to love God is an invitation to severe suffering.
 
Notice that the first great commandment is a commandment. It is a moral law. We are immoral if we do not love God with all our hearts, minds and powers. He said minds. So we give our mind, our power to believe and think, to God which means we are obligated to believe in him and not only believe but believe with all our mind and work hard to be completely sure he exists. To make belief a condition for salvation and being moral like this is an outrage and a disgrace. It is the stuff bigotry and obscurantism are made of. And it is madness for we cannot be that sure God exists.
 
When the servants of God thank him for somebody’s recovery from sickness they mean, “I am not saying I feel grateful but that I approve of what you did O Lord because it was your will and I thank you because it was your will and done for your benefit and nobody else’s”. When they pray, “Give to me the joy of your salvation,” they mean, “Give to me the joy that comes as a side-effect of your salvation which I only accept to please you God and not me.” This prayer really means, “Give me the virtue of altruism – don’t let me seek or ask anything nice for myself. If you don’t want to give me happiness then don’t.” They don’t want the joy but the altruism but they have to ask for the joy because it is the same as asking for the altruism if the pair go together.
 
Only God would have the right to tell us to make him the only thing that matters so it follows that the two greatest commandments are inferring they are revelations from God and the words of God. The same must be true of the rest of the Bible which is about endorsing the proper love of God. It might endorse salvation by faith without good works in the New Testament but even this salvation is about making us grateful children of God eager to do good works in gratitude. So when the Bible is about these commandments the whole Bible is the word of God.
 
So we see then that there is no morality and the commandments need to be the word of God to have authority so you need to believe in the word of God the Bible to believe in morality. It has to be the one true word of God, the Bible. Anything else will not do.
 
Nobody agrees on what God has commanded so what happens is that when you obey God it is really what somebody tells you to believe about him that you are obeying. You are obeying human beings all along. In this light the doctrine is the most hateful abomination imaginable.