Because God is the Creator, and our loving parents, God has ensured that we innately have everything we need in terms of understanding God and our proper relationship with God.
(If this was not innate, then it could not be depended-upon; and obviously God wants to Make Sure that every one of their children will come into this world equipped with everything required for attaining salvation and theosis.)
Therefore; we have innately the true "archetype" of God; and that archetype is "good parents".
We already-know (and not from experience, but from-within, because it is built-in) what is the ideal of Good Parents - and that this is the nature of God.
This naturally and spontaneously leads to a relationship with God that is based upon Love and Trust.
But many children develop and mature and will choose their beliefs about God (or that God is not real) and the relationship with God. And many children grow in social situations that actively encourage (and incentivize) children and adolescents to change, and often invert, their innate knowledge.
Thus our innate understanding of the Creator God as Good Parents is usurped by one, or several, other archetype/s: Such as God the King, God the Judge, God the Totalitarian Tyrant, and/or God the Deity of philosophical abstractions.
These other kinds of not-parental God do not lead to a relationship of Love and Trust; but to very different attitudes. If God is King then we feel like subjects. If God is Judge we feel like defendants. If God is a Totalitarian Tyrant our attitude is one of superstitious and fear-based propitiation.
And if God is an abstract deity known philosophically; then God Just Is, Creation Just Is, and our life Just Is, and the attitude is one of fatalism.
When we move away from our innate and archetypal understanding, we lose the ability to experience a relationship with God.
The non-parental Gods are not personally, individually, knowable nor understandable; therefore they all open a path for human exploitation; for instance by individuals or groups claiming special expertise to know what God demands from each us.
Furthermore, in moving away from what is spontaneous and intuitive, the alternatives feel arbitrary and incoherent; therefore belief often becomes a mixture of mutual contradictions - as when people strive to combined God and Judge or King with God as Heavenly Father; or when they strive to comprehend how God the Totalitarian Tyrant can also "love" us.
Such contradictions lead to abstract solutions that conceal their own incoherence behind incomprehension.
So that the proper way to "love" an incomprehensible God; necessarily becomes a special, abstract and incomprehensible kind of "love" - that is then stated to be superior to the interpersonal love of parents that we all innately do understand.
We are born into this world with an understanding of the nature of God the Creator, and our properly loving and trusting relationship with Heavenly Parents.
We find ourselves very far away from this reality - far away in several possible directions, and perhaps confusingly alternating between them.
Our task is - by conscious choice - to return to that original knowledge.
i confess that for myself, and since i became convinced God existed, at about twelve or thirteen, i always mostly regarded God as creator, taking that to be his primary attribute and defining point. God as artist, essentially. of course Parenthood is a form of creativity and artistry as well, which is why I had no problem accepting God as Father later on. yet at the same time, for me the God as Parent came from the Goddess side, the Mother, and more specifically, Mary.
ReplyDelete@Laeth - What strikes me forcibly is that, *as well as* the innate - but simple, and not very specific - intuitions with which we are born (which we, presumably, carry through from pre-mortal spirit life) - the simple primary truths are set out in the Fourth Gospel, in greater detail.
ReplyDeleteIt was apparently a major task of the past (nearly) 2000 years to obfuscate the clarity and specificity of the Fourth Gospel - by a massive range of strategies from monotheistic and abstract philosophical assumptions; through a dual process of totalizing and (somehow, also) averaging the Books of the whole Bible (or the New Testament); to destructive assumptions of dating and authorship; and a determination to read the Gospel as either "poetic" (merely) or as Neo-Platonic (when it is almost the exact opposite)!
Any stick is (apparently) good enough to beat the life out of the Fourth Gospel. And multiple sticks have in fact been used, sometimes simultaneously!
Ultimately; very early on the decision was made to *use* Christianity as a mode of this-worldly and multi-level *government* - from the family and village, through the nation, up to the Empire.
Christianity was made into Christendom *primarily* and essentially, until most people believed that the personal relationship of each individual person with God is (as good as) irrelevant - at best an optional extra.