Why does God desire our love?

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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How can God desire anything? God is supposed to be perfect and absolute, so if he desires or wants or needs something, this means he has a lack within him. If God is already absolutely perfect in himself, then he could not possibly be “added to” or have anything to “gain”, even simple happiness, from our love or worship of him. So if God cannot gain anything at all by our love and worship of him, what is the meaning of this worship, and why does God apparently desire men to worship him?

And even assuming that God can gain something by our love and worship, is God that selfish and arrogant that he would create a race of beings, humans, just for the sake of being loved? Is the eternal damnation and suffering of even one soul in hell worth creating a race of humans just so that some of these humans will end up loving and worshipping God? How needy is God, and how cruel, that he would create this world and humanity knowing (he must know this, because he is omniscent and knows everything) that some of these humans will not love and worship him, and so will spend forever suffering in torment and pain in hell? How can this “loving” God be content with this?

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The terminology is better translated as “without fault”, or “blameless”.
This was eventually translated into what is today held as, “Perfect”.

However, the original take doesn’t suggest the same concept of the complete and total number of Pi shown in a circle with the entire number in it’s measure.
It, instead, conceptually houses the idea that the circle is of quality beyond one’s own ability, and therefore incapable of being found of fault; as one has no greater capacity to establish on one’s own merit against it.

It would be as to stand in front of da Vinci (of whom has a renowned free-hand circle, of which he is reported as considering to be his personal statement of his best accomplishment) and declare his circle is perfect.

Obviously it is not in the since of the fullest and most complete circle which one can measure the complete number of Pi from.
However, by comparison to one standing in front of it, one has no basis for finding fault in his circle by one’s own merit when one cannot best his circle alone.

This is the ancient Hebraic idea of “perfect”.

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Sure, that may well be the history of the etymology of the wording, but that is not how modern-day Christians conceive of their God’s “perfection”. They think of it as “incapable of error or lack”, being perfect-in-itself, needing no improvement in any way, attaining to a maximum in all possible categories of “goodness” and “reality”.

4

Because God desires that one love oneself, because to do so in the proper way is to discover one’s identity with the divine: tat tvam asi

When one loves oneself in this way, one becomes divine, and sees everything as in a mirror, as a manifestation of divinity.

You are God, and the deepest part of you wants you to discover yourself, which is to discover love.

Love your neighbor as yourself then becomes possible.

5

^ but there’s a catch

there’s always a catch

it has rightly been said that one must lose oneself to find oneself

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So which would you bother with?
What was originally written, or what has been doctrinally extrapolated over centuries of refined theological debating?

If you want to know why God would exist as the way someone professes God to exist, why not start with having them explain how they come to the understanding that God exists in such a way?

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That would require a case-by-case analysis on a personal level of every person professing this Christian belief. I am not interested in hearing the life story of Christians, what I am interested in here is examining the common, generally-held modern Christian beliefs. Whether or not these modern beliefs are accurately derived from ancient Biblical texts is irrelevant - religions change all the time. Over history all religions tend to change, this does not mean that they are now “inaccurate” in their current form. It only means that people’s beliefs change over time, and that the more ancient and culturally out-dated some book is, the less relevant it becomes to commonly accepted religous paradigms.

As the moderator of this religion forum I would ask you to please realise that I am not interested in examining the etymology of the words that Christians use, or trying to build a personal history of why this or that Christian person or denomination deviated in such-and-such a way from a line of ancient scripture. Please confine your responses in my questions to the assumptions that I contextualize them in, unless of course you can present reason why the context of ‘common Christian belief’ that I use is significantly incorrect or inaccurate. But as I said, I grew up in some of the most popular denominations, most people I know are of one of the three “Catholic”, “Lutheren” "or “Evangelical”, and these three, in sum and where their beliefs coincide, are more or less what I am referring to here by Christian “common beliefs”. I do not think it is inaccurate for me to assume that the sum of these doctrines can be taken as the general common Christian belief, and thus far you certainly have not offered any reasons against this view. Of course I realise there will always be differences and significant outlier denominations and individuals, but those are not my concern here.

My questions here are not intended to be history lessons on where or how modern Christians deviate from “original” Christianity - please stay on topic, thanks.

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Alright, here you are then (and by the way, I feel like I’m doing your homework for you since these are just doctrinal questions and you don’t want anything but doctrinal answers)…

Catholicism holds that God doesn’t need our Love.
God granted his love to man by creating man; it was a gift from God to man.
In this perspective, God asks for man to obey the law of balance and to love God in return.
And man is given free will by God so that the Love is returned in balance to the Love God doesn’t have to give, but does, to man.
Adam jacked it up and thereby grants Original Sin and trickle that all on down from there regarding redemption vs. sin.

Lutheranism more or less holds the same concept as Catholicism, though less involved and less dramatic.

Evangelical…well…they hold a wide range of personal justifications depending on which Evangelical church you pop in on and whom in the church you ask.
But generally speaking, it will circle back around to something along the lines of God wants our Love because he wants us to be saved and loved for eternity.

Oh…and btw…I was on topic for the Religion section.
If you want only a specific theological vantage and only that, then these should be in the theology sub-forum; since that has been cleared up, I’ll go ahead and move these there.

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I dont want “only doctrinal answers”, I want rational answers based in logic or reason, not ones based in historical or etymological analysis. Do you understand the difference?

I am asking questions of these common Christian beliefs, and I would like them analyzed based on their merit, rationally and logically, based on the idea itself and regardless of historical context. I honestly cannot see how this is so hard.

If you feel that my asking a question of a specific religious belief, and critiquing it based on reason and logic, is something that needs to be in the Theological Discussions forum, then by all means move it there. I dont see it, myself, because I am not confining the answers to my questions to doctrine, but am looking into the rational and logical basis of these ideas as ideas, and trying to see if there are any rational solutions to the logical contradictions or flaws in the beliefs themselves. I was under the impression that Theological Discussions was for assuming that the religion in question was true, which is not something I am doing here – whether or not the religion or belief is true in reality doesnt matter to me here. What matters is the idea itself, its logic and reasonability. To me, that is a general philosophical critique, it just so happens that the idea being so critiqued is a religious one.

So I see no reason why you moved these topics of mine, other than that you seem hell-bent on shifting the goalposts on me and trying to demonstrate that I am an idiot for asking these questions. So by all means, make your point, move my topics without asking me, and despite the fact that I am not confining myself to doctrinal anwers as you supposed but in fact am doing just the opposite of this – it is of course within your power as a moderator to use this leverage of yours to your advantage argumentatively, if you desire to do so, and if you desire to ignore my requests that these religious beliefs be critiqued rationally and logically based on the idea itself, rather than based on their historical and doctrinal accuracy or inaccuracy.

You repeatedly ignore the intention of my posts, try to twist my words against me, try to shift the goalposts on me, try to imply that I am a moron for wasting my time here, take our your frustration with some other poster, whom I do not even know, on me, and then just move my posts without even asking me and despite that they do not conform to the requirements of the Theological Discussions subforum. What a splendid display of moderating. Thank you for that. I will certainly make sure not to post in the religion forum again.

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You don’t want me to work out anything to explain how these beliefs came to be.
You don’t want a doctrinal belief.
You want critique of Catholic, Lutheran, Evangelical doctrinal beliefs.
You want logical reasoning, but you won’t accept the Catholic, Lutheran, or Evangelical logic or reasoning.

Sounds to me like you don’t want a conversation at all; seems like you just want someone to try to prove you wrong in some way you expect them to so you can show how wrong they are in their classic folly, and so far it seems that when someone takes an angle at this outside of it, you don’t appreciate the boundaries being over-stepped.

Alright, whatever, we’ll just saddle up and do you a favor so you can feel happy about your capacity to notice logical fallacies with religious doctrines held by random people of which are not present on this forum.

Um…Why does God desire our Love?
Because God isn’t perfect.

But then again, wait…Can you even prove me there is a God in which I could declare perfect in the first place?
What is God?
Who is God?
When did God become?
Can you prove any of this before we get to the part where we run into any possible issue of God’s desires?

Is this outside the scope of the Catholic, Lutheran, and Evangelical (common beliefs, I believe you refereed to these as) doctrines and therefore not on point with your interest?
But I thought we weren’t discussing only doctrinal positions, posits, and answers?

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Apparently you don’t want mine. I can only counter your arguments so fast, but I’ve answered three or four of your questions already to no response. There’s something to be said for finishing what’s on your plate before you go for seconds, and it would be a bit of a shame if you came away from this feeling as though nobody was ‘able’ to answer your questions, which for the most part have been pretty elementary…though you’re doing better than Mutcer.

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Hello Last Man:

— And even assuming that God can gain something by our love and worship, is God that selfish and arrogant that he would create a race of beings, humans, just for the sake of being loved?
O- What if it was a creative expression? Nothing about it needs to be selfish or arrogant, for it would be from His fullness rather than His apparent lack that we owe our existence. Yet love IS a thing that is desirable. Don’t YOU want to be loved by your children? You have any?
Now, what lack does this love of theirs suffice? The lack that their very existence creates. For we can already be in loving relationships with our mates, our family etc, so it is not that we could lack love, but THE love of our children. So our existence is not a rational methodology of create man-so-that-they-worship-my-insecure-God/Ego, but a creative flow from the infinite God.
That flow created an uncertain factor (love) and thus a sort of lack, but not a true lack, for our existence is His existence, our soul, our “anima” His “pneuma”. There is no lack for God is all in all. But there is love and love is desirable. The process is describable as the creative process of a painter. The painting is an expression of himself, the painter, but that painting is lovable to him (thus an apparent lack grows) by it’s uniqueness and loved by it’s uniqueness. This uniqueness is the uncertainty of true creativity. A true work of art is beautiful and lovable by the measure of it’s unlikelyhood (the less likely a reproduction, the more valuable it is). I doubt that anyone could reproduce an original work of art in every detail, just as I doubt that I will be repeated. My body could be cloned, but not the “I”, not the inner life because of the inherent uncertainty (freewill/imagination) of it. So, the painter is attracted to his work and yet he is still in his work.

— Is the eternal damnation and suffering of even one soul in hell worth creating a race of humans just so that some of these humans will end up loving and worshipping God?
O- Worth? Is it worth to kill a cow to have a nice steak? Was it worth Gillespie facial deformation that we may enjoy his excellent trumpet? It is a matter of opinion.

— How needy is God, and how cruel, that he would create this world and humanity knowing (he must know this, because he is omniscent and knows everything) that some of these humans will not love and worship him, and so will spend forever suffering in torment and pain in hell?
O- Can you prove to me that God knows everything?

13

God’s perfections are perfect benevolence, omniscience, and omnipotence except in so far as he is necessarily benevolent and therfore can’t be non-benevolent.

Perfect benevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience makes hell impossible. The doctrine of hell is a theological scandal. Such false belief is easily explainable in terms of the prejudices of human beings.

Perfect benevolence is not an imperfection because it is a “lack”. Rather, it is the perfect “lack” to have. No single being could be perfect without it. It is the perfect relation of the perfect single spirit being to all other spirit beings.