Are you God fearing or God loving?

[MysticPhD]

Originally Posted by Boxcar Overkill

I actually feel sad for people who go through this - having gone through it myself. (although to a much lessor extent than Mother T.) But I can empathise with a Christian who wonders why they don't have the personal relationship with God others are claiming.

I likewise feel a tremendous sadness for the situation . . . largely created by the very thing that has proved to be so important to the advancement of civilization and quality of life . . . education (of the left brain variety). We have produced an imbalance in perception and function by largely focusing on left brain learning and discipline. Right brain learning and discipline is virtually nonexistent in Western society . . . except for the "Arts."

The Eastern meditative practices and techniques producing a disciplined withdrawal from our sensory system to enable perception and reception of reality from a different perspective can provide the necessary counterpoint and re-balance the effects of this Western bias. But it is simply not done and it is not easy or quick. We engage in decades of "learning and emphasis of the left brain variety. It would be necessary to do the same with the right brain to avoid the deficit Mother Teresa and others experience. (Our uneducated ancestors had no such problem.)

[Thomas R.]

Originally Posted by Boxcar Overkill

I think there is a strong motive for Christians (and other religious people) to claim they love God.

But they don't really love God. They try to, and they think they are supposed to. But there is a wide gap between how they describe their personal relationship with God, and the reality, which is a very distant impersonal relationship. A lot of people fake it though.

Mother Teresa is the best example. She pretend all those years to have a personal, loving relationship with God. But secretly, she admitted hypocracy to her confessor. In reality, she never had a personal relationship with God at all - She felt nothing. Check out some of the quotes from her letters, published after her death:

"I am told God lives in me -- and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul,"

As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak

"Where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. Love -- the word -- it brings nothing,"

"I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she wrote to her confessor. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy."

Periods of doubt and despair are a normal part of many people's lives. I'd assume even atheists have periods where they lose their love/passion for life or art or humanity or justice or peace or nature or what have you.

I remember a line in a Billie Holiday song, "Fine and Mellow" I think, that talked about love being "like a faucet it turns off and on, when you think it's on baby it's turned off and gone." And for years that stuck with me as being almost exactly how I felt about it. I'd still go to Church but it was "off and gone." Possibly I could've just declared myself atheist at that point, but I'm glad I didn't. And eventually it more-or-less turned back on again. (And yes I'm aware "Fine and Mellow" is about a dysfunctional and abusive relationship so you don't have to score that point with me. I just liked the line because it fit the mood that an emotional connection can simply turn off and on, also because water is significant in many religions and lastly because I like Holiday's voice)

And maybe this is all rather bizarre to you, but I imagine an atheist lawyer who loses his faith in justice can regain it again. Or an atheist soldier can fall in and out of love with America. That it's not a tangible thing you can put in your house doesn't automatically make it meaningless, unreal, or silly.