You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do. --Anne Lamott
Divorce, fags, figs, workers of iniquity, homophobes, Lady Gaga, remarriage, Ireland, techno, furries, war, a coward, shrimp, lying lips, abortion, your outfit, bad manners, amputees, begging, Haiti, religion, complaining, Canada, haughty eyes, murmuring, anal sex, mobile homes, haters: The Internet is full of articles about things and people God hates. Some of them are tongue-in-cheek. A remarkable number are not.
Through history, the prevailing consensus on what and who God despises has drifted on the cultural currents. A seemingly continuous anchor point for Christians has been that God hates sin, although whether he hates the sinner too is contested.
Even more contested is which sins he hates. Does God really hate shellfish consumption and blend fabrics and beard trimming as much as he hates anal sex, for example? The book of Leviticus seems to say so. But most modern Christians and Jews simply can't bring themselves to care about these things, and so they find it almost impossible to believe at a gut level, that God does. A similar laissez faire attitude can be seen among young people toward homosexuality. Having been raised on Modern Family and Little Miss Sunshine and Glee, having encountered openly gay relatives and friends from childhood on, they simply can't find it in themselves to think that God cares terribly much who we love.
Half a century ago, a social psychologist named Fritz Heider made a series of observations that he distilled into what he called "balance theory." His theory is useful in thinking about why our images of God change. Heider found that positive and negative feelings in relationships need to be balanced to be stable. For example, if I love my gay brother (positive), and I worship the biblical God (positive), but the Bible says gays are an abomination (negative), then my loyalties are in conflict and so unstable. In this case, I might start feeling more negative about my brother, or I might start feeling more negative about the Bible. Either would help me resolve my conflict and create balance. Over the years, other scholars have refined Heider's theory, but the general ideas of balance and stability persist.
Think about social balance as it relates to me and a god. This is a relationship in which one party (the god) either exists exclusively in my mind or is highly ambiguous, which means I have a great deal of latitude in what I imagine his attitudes to be. In a human-to-human social relationship, I can't resolve conflict simply by adjusting another person's attitude, at least not without putting out some good arguments and evidence. But in the human-to-god equation, I can. And, in fact, adjusting a god's attitudes to fit mine may be quite a bit easier than the reverse.
At the heart of humanity is a sometimes sweet, sometimes not-so-sweet narcissism that makes it almost impossible for us to get outside ourselves. This narcissism is visible in a small child who can feel another person's distress but doesn't know quite how to respond and so offers the comfort she herself would want. A two-year-old may offer her crying mother a stuffed animal or a soggy cookie. But even adults make a similar well intentioned error. What makes you feel really loved by a partner? For some people the answer is sex. For some it is gifts. For some it is being told, "I love you." For some it is having a task or burden taken off of their shoulders. To communicate love effectively, one has to know what makes a specific recipient feel loved. But spouses often make the mistake of offering whatever they most want to receive. When a partner is feeling distant or sad, they ramp up efforts to give what they themselves would want -- and then are disappointed in the reaction.
What I'm trying to illustrate is that by default we use ourselves as the measure of the world. The Golden Rule acknowledges this: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." In other words, start with what you know -- yourself -- and imagine that others want the same (and you're likely to treat them fairly well). By contrast, the Platinum Rule, "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them," can bring us a mental screeching halt, because it asks us to step outside ourselves. That's tough. In the XTC song, "Garden of Earthly Delights," the refrain, "don't hurt nobody" is repeated, and then, just once, it is followed by "'less of course they ask you." The listener is startled and maybe laughs. Most of us don't want to get hurt, even for titillation, and so we don't expect the exception.
In a similar vein, we tend to assume that God shares our perspective and priorities. Have you ever noticed how remarkably indifferent God is to how humans treat fish? Jesus himself magically multiplied fish so they could be hoisted in nets and subjected to slow suffocation. Fish brains are very unlike ours, and the more alien a mind is, the less we are able to empathize. This may be why we concern ourselves less with the treatment of octopus than chimpanzees, even though scientists tell us that octopus are some of the most intelligent creatures on the planet. Unless we can somehow resonate with an animal's experience, meaning feel it, at least at a tentative hypothetical level, it falls outside our moral sphere -- and outside God's priorities.
Our ability to empathize with other humans, though one of our great gifts, has similar limits based on whether they are familiar or alien to us. We care about their happiness and suffering in proportion to several factors such as attachment, proximity and similarity. In other words, we care about people more if we spend time with them and they are like us -- same country, same religion, same race, same gender, more shared DNA. When other people get hurt, it hurts us less if they are more alien. Our moral outrage at a child being "collateral damage" isn't the same if they live in Iraq as it would be if the bombs fell in our neighborhood.
We relate only distantly to most people on this planet. And even though believers insist that "Jesus love the little children of the world" -- equally -- their behavior in the practice of Christian living suggest otherwise. Consider: Thoughtful people sometimes balk at football prayers, the idea that God will favor one team over another. But who balks at grace before dinner? Almost no one. And yet, those who believe God loves the children of the world equally should. If you had two children, one who had goldfish crackers and juice and cheese sticks and peaches for lunch and then an after school snack; and one who hadn't eaten since yesterday -- and then only a thin gruel -- which would you feed meat and potatoes tonight? In a less self-centric world, deities wouldn't be thanked for directing the food to American dinner tables; they would be scolded or politely declined.
"Jesus loves the little children." "His eye is on the sparrow." "Ask and ye shall receive." These soothing verbal mantras work their magic because what is really at stake for each individual believer is a vortex of well-being that centers on him or her, thinning as it reaches beyond family, friends, countrymen and co-religionists to a hazy netherland of alien cultures and creatures. Unfortunately, those of us who lack person-gods have little cause to be smug. The vortex is the same; we merely lack the validation that comes from a deity sharing our personal priorities. Only a mindful commitment to compassionate living can carry us through life in a manner that draws the world into the self -- whether or not that self includes some concept of God.
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light, (Revised ed of The Dark Side) and the founder of Wisdom Commons. This is Part Eight in a series, "God's Emotions: Why the Biblical God is so Very Human." Parts 1-7 are available at this website or at Tarico's blog, Away Point.
Follow Valerie Tarico on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ValerieTarico
Are we hardwired for God? | Books | guardian.co.uk
Valerie Tarico: Psychology of God: Do Christians Believe God Has ...
Yes and some of them also have trouble recognizing reality, sarcasm, mockery, irony, or even their own hypocrisy.
commonly accepted except among the unbelievers. God is not foolish. God knows the hearts of all people. Without Him, a person cannot truly live a righteous life. This heresy that God
loves everyone is a lie! God loves those who pursue righteousness, but He takes no delight in the suffering of the damned. The Devil and his demons torment the lost.
God is love.
Which is apparently beyond the understanding of your version of a deity.................
The sad fallacy here, is that Love is a kind of permissiveness. Which it is not. Just as members of a large and beloved family can be punish, and that severely, does not abrogate the genuine affection for that family, just for some members of it.
If God did not possess all of the emotions ascribed to Him the Bible, then He would not a moral agent and thus would be unworthy of our worship.
Therefore, if God feels emotionally...say...angry He might not punish us, because mercy would rejoice over judgment. But were He to feel wrath, this would be vengenge mixed with hatred, which His attribute of Justice and righteousness would demand punishment of the offender.
And that learning...too, to speak appropriately about God was well nigh impossible, as attempts to define God using the language of philosophical universals were already proved to be a rationalistic mistake. of which modernists have failed to take notice.
Which is just why we have this very recent disease of mistaking the unobserved for the nonexistent: but some are plagued the even worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.
Since the word "God" is really not a word for anything, the reason why it still continues to resonate so strongly must be the fact keeping the word in play, is what it means to be human.
This, in one sense, make for the impossibility of atheism ( materialism: squeezing the world into crisp,commoditised ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies and prepackaged narratives), because the trouble is, that resolutely sustaining this conviction requires too much hard work, not a little training, not to mention a powerful mental asceticism the sheer scope of which would be beyond self-annihilation.
This contingency is easy to see.
With the invention of the telescope, Europeans became rapidly aware that the Universe was immeasurably more immense than they ever dreamed. This prompted the Philosopher Blaise Pascal to say: Le silence eternal de ces espaces infinies m'ef fraie; The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrified me".Notice it wasn't simply the size of the universe which frightened him, but its silence.
The acceptance of our radical (dependent ) contingency, unnerving in itself, is also acknowledging our ( ongoing, utter) vulnerability. And so much so did human kind deem it utterly reasonable, that learning to use the word God is a matter of discovering, that our absolutely dependence, as creatures, was in the mystery of God, that nobody thought to write it down. It was perfectly reasonable.
Then "reasonable" men came along declaring that there was no such object in the category called "God".
They founded a rationalist "fundamentalist" doctrine which claimed that all belief in a God was an imaginary personal projection originating from "within", when there is not a human in the world who could testify any but that this happened from "without".
I've occasionally been angry at characters in fiction before - but only insomuch as I became annoyed with the author/artist/programmer's direction. And I never stay mad for long becuase I know I can always write or draw something of my own. Would seem a waste of energy to be angry at something you don't believe exists in the reality that you share.
Would make more sense to me if you said you were angry with people who believed in something you found to be fiction, were angry that people disagreed with you. At least you'd be angry at real people for real reasons.
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
Basically, a scientific explaintion for such things as why "a million deaths is just a statistic" and so forth. Puts forth that it's actually impossible for the human brain to care about more than a set number of people at a time and those "too alien" to us. There's even a little bit in the article about how ancient religious writers seemed to try to override this instinct with the idea of a God that's personal "what you do to another person, you do to me" and such. It's a completely secular article written with a lot of snark, so people fearing "religious stuff" just because of that one bit need not fear. Plus it comes with lots of pictures of chimps. Just thought I'd share the article.
"God Cares About What I care About", and the sparrow sings of the 'Messiah' that comes after each millennium. Since their are 'twelve' signs in the zodiac, people forget about Melchizedec etc etc etc. Was he not known as the 'prince of peace' etc etc etc. Can you hear the sparrow sing this symmetry? Let us not be Neophyte anymore, but wear the diadem of knowledge, yes?
Science tells us that it takes (26000) years to go around the zodiac, now divide that by twelve. Is that about (2100) years? What other metaphor's do we need dear sparrow, birds falling from the sky or fish dieing? Can anyone hear the 'sparrow' sing, beside G-D? :)