On Unconditional Love, Part II: God

In Part I, I quoted an excerpt about love from John Galt's radio speech in Atlas Shrugged. It got me thinking about the fallacy of what we are told is "unconditional love" and how to reconcile that with what I've been taught and what I know about God.

In reality, even God - the ultimate, oft-cited example of unconditional love - sets conditions: you are saved if you repent and amend your life. If. That's a condition, folks. If you persist in a life of evil, corruption, depravity against your neighbor, against yourself (which are the equivalent of acting against God), the all-loving and all-powerful God will not save you. He's pretty clear on that. Even if those who preach in His name are muddy about it to save your "feelings."

The most evil thing a priest, rabbi, preacher, or any other "man (or woman) of the cloth" can do is mislead you. And every time they re-set the objective moral standards - the Morality of Life - to make you feel good about your bad choices - the Morality of Death - they mislead you.

There are many motives for that: their need to fill the pews, which in turn fills their coffers with donations; their warped personal morality converted into tolerance of yours; their misunderstanding of God, focusing on His benevolence but ignoring His justice.

Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged, did not believe in God. I do. She postulates that faith is a weakness, an excuse for the weakness of man. I say faith is the primordial source of strength. It's what you do with that strength that makes the difference.

Faith as permission for you to violate your moral code in a way that ultimately injures you (even if you don't think so at the moment) is not faith. Belief that "someone" will take care you no matter what foolishness you perpetrate, is not faith. A creed that others should live and toil to support your choices, no matter how irresponsible and self-destructive, is not faith.

Faith is believing - knowing - that what you may not understand right now will ultimately become clear -- not by accident, but because you apply yourself to its understanding. Because you forge ahead despite the disapproval of other, lesser beings around you who lack your ambition, your strength, your vision, your will, your conviction. Your faith.

"Blind faith" is a tool of the Morality of Death. It manipulates you to abandon what you know from the sum total of your knowledge, your aspirations, your experiences and your observations, in favor of what another tells you is true. Blind faith relies on accepting contradictions.

Based on my study, my observations, experiences, analysis, and synthesis of all those sources of knowledge, it is my conclusion that God is the well-spring of uncontradicted objective moral standards, the objective truth, man's essential foundation, the external standard not just for your survival but for your fulfillment and happiness. The Morality of the Living. It is up to man's rational mind to recognize the benefits of this morality and use his free will to pursue it. A well-developed conscience contributes to the well-developed consciousness, and vice versa. They are intertwined. Not the same - by any means - but interrelated. Faith is not a compromise of the mind, it is its reinforcement, its encouragement, its inspiration.

The greatest fulfillment for "being human" comes from living the Morality of Life, making the right (and so often difficult) choices, to choose life over death. That sounds like an easy choice, a "no-brainer" - life over death. There is no such thing as a no-brainer. Everything requires conscious evaluation of whether it is good or bad (evil). Objective moral standards are essential for survival and the only way to achieve happiness. And they are actually quite selfish. More on that in Part III.

God has set standards and expectations for our behavior - what will bring us life and happiness - even if we are free to choose or reject them. He is very clear that He is willing to forgive our lapses along the way - providing we recognize the lapses as deviations from the standards, with no expectation to permanently substitute the strengths of the standards with the weakness of our lapses. Failure to meet the goal is not a failure of the existence of the goal. Nor is it justification to change the goal. It is a reason to start again, choosing a different method, a different path, to achieve the objectively righteous goal. Or to accept the consequences.

Too many clergy today are, in fact, willing to substitute compromised standards and preach them as moral perfection to console the sheep's conscience - their corrupted conscience. Every compromise corrupts the next moral choice, making it easier to corrupt the next moral choice, and so on, until the moral code is not only amoral, it is immoral. Immorality means there are no consequences, everything is relative.

Umm... no it's not. God's "unconditional" love is only unconditional if you adhere to the Morality of Life. He gives it freely. Not because He wants to bend and twist you into obedience, but because it brings you the most fulfilling happiness. That is His love.

God is patient - and generous with His patience - but He is also just. Justice demands discernment of right and wrong, and embracing right and rejecting wrong. That means His standards - the same standards that nourish and protect the inalienable rights bestowed on you at birth - demand you cultivate self-respect through your thoughtful, deliberate work and achievement. Yes, "inalienable" rights of the individual are under attack. Unthinkable! But you know they are, even  if you refuse to acknowledge that reality. Those who reject God's Morality of Life - maybe it's even you - are the ones who destroy that which is rightfully yours by birth. Ironically, it takes work to keep inalienable rights inalienable.

God demonstrates what love is through the Morality of Life: love is valuing your achievement as an individual, acknowledging your imperfection but overcoming it to fulfill your potential, honoring the architect by constructing, sharing, appreciating and respecting yourself and others.

Deliberate and persistent violation and stubborn rejection of the Morality of Life, blind faith and immersion - revelry - in the Morality of Death, leads to God's shrug. He does not "punish" you, or destroy you, or commit you to damnation. You punish yourself, destroy your own spirit, condemn your eternally joyous soul to eternal despair solely by the choices you make.

God's love is not unconditional. Like everything else you achieve, it's up to you to earn it.

Part I: Unconditional Love
Part III: Selfishness