LET YOUR GOD MIND HIS OWN BUSINESS!

 

Religion says that God made us from absolutely nothing so we owe him something back.  We owe it to him to be the one who helps others.  When others suffer, we can help them and do God's work.  This assumes he is like a person enough to be owed anything back.  The only views of God worth considering make him out to be somehow non-personal.  Catholicism to be fair affirms this and says that the three persons in God, are not literal persons.  They are nothing like human beings though one of them became man.  It also assumes he wants anything back.  It assumes that we defeat God's purpose by not helping which contradicts the notion that God only allows evil as a means to do a greater good.

 

If there is a God, he must be self-sufficient. He must have no needs. He has no need for your obedience to him. Therefore it is none of his business what you do. The good or harm you do is between you and those you do it for or against.  God should be neutral about what I do.  As neutral means you care and it is cancelled out by not caring it follows that himself can only be neutral.  To care is evil for it is none of his business.  To not care is evil too in a different way.  He cannot be truly good so that is another reason for him to keep his nose out.  He cannot be anything different any more than a stone can become a human being.

 

What you do is none of God's business!

 

Forgiving is regarding an evil person as no longer evil. It involves a change of attitude towards the person. What you think of the person is not the same as what you feel towards the person. As long as you try to avoid having the bad feelings, the bad feelings do not indicate that you have failed to forgive them.
Do not follow Gods who threaten that you will not be forgiven if you fail to forgive! They are bullies! Jesus did it and so he was a bully. Nobody has the right to tell you that God will not forgive you unless you forgive. That is a denial that you have the right and dignity of a free agent. It threatens you with bad consequences if you don't forgive and tells you that you deserve alienation from God. The God of Christianity shows plenty of concern for getting you to forgive but less concern for helping you deal with the bad feelings that you may still have to contend with. This is a God of law not love.

 

If God is all-perfect and all-powerful what can there be for him to forgive? The wrongdoing didn't do him any harm.

 

When we hurt another person, we must not go to a God for forgiveness. We must go to the person. The offence is between us and the person. It's none of God's business. You don't apologise to the judge or the state for shoplifting. You apologise to those you stole from.

 

Perhaps God made the person you hurt and so you owe God an apology and have to request his forgiveness for hurting his property? An all-powerful God has to own all things because he makes them and keeps them in existence. We declare that we own ourselves for there is no God but us. We are our own God. To say we are God's property is demeaning. If God has given us the gift of life, the gift is ours and what we do with it is none of his affair.

 

We must not forgive or work for our "emotional healing of past hurts" on the basis that we hate sin and want to feel some peace. No wrongdoing is to be hated for it is not all bad. Hating it is hypocritically blinding oneself to the praiseworthy side. See wrongdoing as a form of good that falls short of how good it could be and you won't have hate to deal with or repress. The "evil" person is intending to do good but in the wrong way. Do not lose sight of that.
We must not forgive or engage in "emotional healing of past hurts" merely or mainly because some human authority or god commands it. You must do it because you freely want to. In so far as you do it for an authority or god you don’t do it for you or the person who hurt you. It’s not proper forgiveness or self-adjustment no matter how it feels. Nobody can make you see that you would be advised to forgive and heal the hurt of the hurt of the past, but yourself.

Nobody has the right to command it not even God. You cannot forgive or work to gain "emotional healing of past hurts" unless you see yourself as your God and that there is no other God over your life with whom you have to do.

 

We must forgive and accept "emotional healing of past hurts"  simply because it is good and because we want to. In other words, we do them because we are good. We perform them for we want to show that we are good by nature.

 

Sin is purely a religious and nonsensical concept

 

Sin is doing what is forbidden by the law of God. It is a religious concept. The idea of a ruler God suggests that you must look at your sins, confess them, regret them and repent them and try to avoid sin in the future. And he is the one that you direct all that at. Never do it. Instead of repenting your sins, look at your strengths and enjoy them and appreciate them. With all that encouragement, many of your flaws will vanish. You will find that you soon no longer need to try to improve for you are getting better and better all the time. The doctrine of sin is about creating the harmful belief that there is something wrong with you. Abandon it. Recognise that it is none of God's business what you do. So you can't think in terms of sin. Instead of calling something a sin call it doing unfair harm or misplaced good.

 

If I do wrong and God is worried about it, he has the power to fix it and bring good out of it. It does him no harm for he is all-powerful. It does not affect his happiness for he is perfect. Therefore it is none of his affair.

 

It is none of my business what God thinks of me. I can't make up God's mind for him therefore I must not do myself the injustice of worrying about what he thinks. It is none of my business what others think of me for the same reason. People think what they think - it is their right.

 

In normal ordinary secular life, there is enough that we are led to think we "should" or "shouldn't" do without adding religious authority figures into the mess to consider what they think we should or shouldn't do. Take God. God refuses to see that when we make up our own minds and nobody else can do it for us that it is none of his business what we think of him. Our thoughts are not hurting him. If he chooses to get upset about what we think then that is his problem. We didn't give him the power to get upset. He makes himself upset - we didn't do it for him. People and religions who tell us that we must worship God - that is, think he is wonderful - are out of line. If God is offended when we insult him, then he is unjustly blaming us when it is his own fault that he is upset! True self-esteem always involves asserting yourself even at the expense of God and religion.

 

Sin is said to be missing the mark. But if you always hit the mark you will never learn. You will be happier if you sometimes miss. You must realise that you want to be like other people and don't want to be right all the time. In a sense you never miss the mark. You learn about yourself when you miss and you gain more happiness in the long run.

 

A law that does not pay you back for doing what it forbids is not a law at all. To assent to belief in God and sin is to call punishment on yourself and others.

 

It is a negative affirmation.

 

Know and love yourself and you will be free from the perils of the words "should" and "ought to".

 

You are not a sinner and you do not need any saviour or Church to pardon you

 

The belief that we are all sinners is false. We are perfect as we are. If you have the "imperfection" of arrogance it is a perfection that we can just change into healthy self-love. It is not a case of you becoming more perfect but of you exchanging one kind of perfection for another. If you have the imperfection of shyness, it can be good for helping you see the needs of others better. If you have the imperfection of greed, you can make it greed for doing good for others. So there are no real imperfections. There are no sins. We talk about good and good that falls short of how good it can be. But that is not accusing anybody of anything - it is observing that they are wonderful and we trust them to do greater things. We are reminding them that they can trust themselves.

 

To say we are all sinners is to accuse others of being sinners. It is saying that they certainly deserve punishment from God and may deserve to suffer for their sins in Hell or in Purgatory. This "may" is taking a negative and punitive attitude towards them.

 

What about the dead? They are not respected when you attend any service that is about atoning for their sins, doing penance for them or praying for them that they may be pardoned. On the contrary, you are denigrating them. You are lowering yourself by lowering your perception of them.

Let there be love and let it bind us all together. I am a person not a sinner. You are the same.

 

If you feel you have to care for your child 24/7 instead of trying to make time for yourself and having more freedom in looking after the child, you will begin to feel bitter and angry towards the child.

 

Having emotional needs, the need to feel appreciated and loved for example, is healthy and good. And that means it is okay to feel hurt if they are not met by others or met by God. But is it right to encourage faith in God when it leads to people feeling hurt that God has not met their needs? That would be fine if there is a God but is there? If you help others, try to feel that they owe you nothing. That way you will be happier if you get nothing back. And you will be happy if you do. And apply that rule to God if you believe.

 

We often take things personally when we should not. Somebody may be grumpy with us and we are annoyed as we think it is a reflection on us. Perhaps we should take some things personally - after all what they do to us tells us how they feel about us and we cannot act as if people mistreating us does not matter. But the reality is that taking things personally invites resentment and anger which make the problem worse. If we think God is snubbing us or not helping, imagine the damage that will do! It is so easy to think that for if God exists then we deal with him all the time for he deals with us and he knows what we deserve so he might feel he has to punish us.

 

The doctrine of loving the sinner and hating the sin as if the two are unrelated, forces us to take things personally and too personally. If you suffer maltreatment, the answer is to ask yourself if what happened says something about you, about the other person, or both. You cannot do that if you deny that sin shows what kind of person the sinner is. Trying to separate sins from sinners creates bigger problems than admitting that the sin is not a thing or just an action but a reflection on the person.

 

Somebody pushes you out of the way in a queue. You will feel awful if you reason, "That person has ill feelings for me and wants to ruin my day." You will feel less bad if you reason, "That person has ill feelings for whoever was going to be in his way. I just happened to be in the way." The emotional responses are different.

Love the sinner and hate the sin is a way of bullying a person while trying to disempower them from fighting back. You are trying to hate them sweetly so that you look good as you do bad to them while you nurse your sweet but nasty grudge. Some think love the sinner and hate the sin makes sense because, "Love the alcoholic but hate the alcoholism", makes sense. But sinner means bad person while alcoholic means ill person so the two are not the same. Love the sinner and hate the sin means more than just refusing to mistreat the sinner. You can hate the sinner and not treat her badly.

 

Christians say that love is right because God loves - it is his nature. They think this means it offends him if we fail to love so he is entitled to an apology. But he is not. And why not say love is just right and that is all there is to be said? Why we do we have to use the idea of God to justify love? That means we won't love unless we invent a justification for it. Christian love may do a good job of passing for love but it is not real love.

 

Is helping a sick baby good regardless of whether there is a God or not or what God thinks? If the answer is yes then goodness is independent of God and thus God cannot help you become good - only you can do that. Your journey to goodness is solely your own business not even God's. Instinct shouts yes at us so any attempt to say no will only make us stop finding joy in the good we do. Even if the answer is no, the no is not natural for us. And instinct is part of being good and to suppress it only makes a morality that does not agree with itself.

Realising that what you do is not even God's business is the only way to honesty and sanity.  Think in terms of, "I want to do x" not "I must do x for God wants me to."

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/can-a-loving-god-send-people-to-hell-the-craig-bradley-debate#ixzz36YBOAhUR