G-d? or Love?

[Nonson]

God is Love
Don Cupitt tells us some churches have voted out of their hymns and services words they cannot use honestly. He says Christians can worship there and say nothing untrue. What then are they "worshipping?" It seems the answer is "love."

"Love divine, all loves excelling, Joy of heaven to earth come down." Love is God, Love takes human form in Christ. Love conquers and redeems all things. There is no God but Love, and to believe in God is to believe in the divinity of Love.

But, he says, to believe in something is quite different from believing it exists. Does he mean the abstraction love cannot materialize itself in the physical form of God as most Christians want to believe. That God is, actually, a metaphor for love. Christian doctrine was considered a poetry of love and nobody disagreed until Anthony Freeman, a clergyman, said it out loud in a book God in Us and was turned out of office as a heretic. Now, it seems that it is again:

The word God doesn't designate a distinct metaphysical being; it is simply Love's name. "If you don't love, you don't know God."

Cupitt's main justification is 1 John, which says the words Love and God are convertible. So, Cupitt falls back on the authority of the bible. The truth is that whatever awful prejudices, intolerance and racism people have in their heads, if they are Christians, they will seek biblical authority for them and, because the scriptures are so intolerant themselves, they will find justification for whatever they like. People want authority and reassurance for their power and privilege.

Just look at the Christian Serbs when they were treating people of another unspeakable patriarchal religion like insects. They sing hymns to Love but power counts. Power is for its own sake, and wants more of itself. Spiritual power too accepts only what is in its own interest, and when God gives that power, then its use or abuse is justified.

Christianity is a deeply divided religion. For traditionalists of a colonial and triumphal frame of mind, God is an megalomaniac concentration of spiritual power, always seeking more. For those of the frame of mind of a martyr, God is Love, which lives by sacrificing itself.

Adelphiasophists, forced to choose, would choose the Love that Cupitt prefers as God, but Christianity is wrong-headed anyway. Cupitt says Christ is Love in human form, a silly, childish wish, divorced from the real world. And Adelphiasophists believe that the real world, not fancies, however altruistic, is prime.

It is better to adore Love than to worship a plenipotentiary in your head but Love is derived from the real world, and, despite Cupitt's pleas, even Love as a God has to have the authority of a potentate, or no Christian would be interested.

Why don't Christians forget their awful God whether transposed into Love or not, and adore Nature who plainly and obviously gave rise to all of these things? The truth is that they cannot, simply because they have too large a psychological investment in their mistaken belief, and Nature doesn't frighten them like the supernatural Godzilla they want to worship
(From the Goddess Pages)

Nonson
2.09.01