Yes, you read that correctly. This is an article by someone who believes in God and Jesus Christ and wishes to follow them that is going to argue against love. Of course, there is a catch. It is not real love I am arguing against but the fake variety that would actually establish the kingdom of Satan in this world.
Love is a spiritual thing. It must be because it is based on the reality of the individual and in strict materialism there is no room for a true individual. What might seem to be an individual is just the product of many mechanical forces. There is no intrinsic centre, nothing which cannot be reduced to mindless matter. Therefore, love should be directed towards the spiritual fulfillment of the human being; that is to say, his or her spiritual good and development. (If you love someone, you wish them well. Parents who love their children want to help them grow not self-indulgently keep them as infants.) This does not preclude other sorts of good but the spiritual always has prior claim and is the directed end. Anything that works against the spiritual must be specifically rejected. However, love in the modern world has been weaponised to turn against itself. This has been done by making it relate to the earthly man and his fulfillment and protection. Love is now concerned with material well-being and avoidance of material suffering to the detriment of spiritual good. To give an extreme analogy, this is like loving a cancer as it eats into a person's body. I am not comparing the earthly man and his physical self to a cancer but if you give love to and support the lesser at the expense of the greater, body as opposed to soul, you are effectively attacking the greater. Those useless clergymen who put social justice at the front of their agenda and parrot worldly concerns about equality and saving lives above all else clearly have no idea of true spiritual values because if they did they could not possibly aid and support a worldly agenda as they do. For them the earthly man has become the soul and religion just means making this man better, more 'loving' on a horizontal this worldly level. Their concerns are indistinguishable from those of a secular person. They have reduced spirituality to social matters and politics just as Judas did. True spirituality, as anyone should know, is about being born again into an entirely new being. Not just believing a different thing but being a different thing. The old self is not destroyed but it is transformed not simply changed.
Ultimately, all love must be love of God. If you love your neighbour it is precisely because you see God in him, and if you really do see God in him and your love is not just words then you wish to do whatever is necessary to bring God out into greater expression in his life. Supporting him as a worldly being will not do that which is why both John the Baptist and Jesus called on people to repent. If you don't repent of your worldly ways and attachments you are rejecting God, and if you are supported in that lack of repentance then the one doing the supporting is also rejecting God.
It's very simple. Either you believe the spiritual is just an extension of the material as most contemporary Christians and their leaders seem to do, something that has been brought out and made clear by their response to the coronavirus panic, or you realise that the spiritual is a higher and totally different reality. One that is only known by seeing yourself as a new being with new priorities. This means that love directed towards things in the unredeemed, material world in their unredeemed and material state is actually directed against love in the spiritual world. The first commandment is to love God. If you don't first of all love God and what he stands for, what he is, then loving your neighbour is actually anti-spiritual for you are directing love to the world using that word to mean fallen man and his concerns. Christians who are confused about this, as many of them seem to be because of, let's face it, spiritual ignorance are supporting evil, much as that might shock them.
I attack misdirected love which is love used as a weapon against the spiritual and a means of separating men and women from their true life in God. Needless to say, real love which is love grounded in God cannot be used like this but the idea of love can be and it has been corrupted. Reject this false earthly love and know that the only true love comes from above. Perhaps the rhyme isn't just coincidence.
@William "If you don't first of all love God and what he stands for, what he is, then loving your neighbour is actually anti-spiritual for you are directing love to the world using that word to mean fallen man and his concerns"
ReplyDeleteThat's well said.
I *thought* you might be going to talk about the way that - since the 1960s - love has become a euphemism for sex. The process can be seen in the career of the Beatles; especially in their later years with Love, Love, Love' and 'All you need is Love' - there is a conflation of love with sex such that it implies that if only people had more sex with more people, it would make have a better world... It's hard to realise that this was put forward in a 'serious' way by mainstream pop culture in the 1960s right through at least until the middle 70s.
But you had something deeper to say!
Nowadays, after decades of obfuscation, it has become difficult for people to recognize Love as being about more than an emotion - and a very temporary and labile one at that. This is why I try to expand it to mean 'aligned with' or 'allied with' God's plans and purposes in this world - and the next... On God's side.
But I think this is becoming much clearer, month by month. The two sides in the spiritual war are becoming very distinct, and the need to choose (or else by default choose evil) is more obvious... What makes it less obvious is that the two sides are very different in size.
The fewness of people on God's side is something that mainstream Christians at present find it hard to acknowledge - especially considering that So Many of their own co-religionists (and especially leaders) have chosen the side of Satan (whether actively, or more often by default).
"The fewness of people on God's side is something that mainstream Christians at present find it hard to acknowledge - especially considering that So Many of their own co-religionists (and especially leaders) have chosen the side of Satan (whether actively, or more often by default)."
ReplyDeleteIf people don't make a positive and whole-hearted choice for God and fully follow up on that they will fall into Satan's camp whether they mean to or not. That's what is happening today.
Well put.
ReplyDeleteLeftists have inverted the true Christian meaning of love and have used it as a battering ram against Christians for at least a century or more. More recently, it is so-called Christians who are more prone to wield it against other Christians, mostly to belittle, shame, or control those who are not onboard with the global materialist agenda.
Yes, it's as though people talk about light but deny the reality of the sun. The resultant light is a dim thing indeed.
ReplyDelete