This slightly amended piece proves to me that the meaning of God is love.
Ecstatic self love to be precise.
"Love (and this is a definition) is the sum of our values, representing to us their ideal unity, their claims upon us and their creative power. Mythologically, it has been portrayed as an objective being, because ancient thought tended to personify values in the belief that important words must stand for things. ... Values do not have to be independently and objectively existent beings in order to be able to claim our allegiance. We can, after all, recognize that duty calls or that noblesse oblige without supposing that duty or noblesse are real beings. Indeed, thinking of values as objective beings out there does not help us in any way to progress towards a clearer understanding of the special part they play in our lives. We can do without that mythological notion.
...
As with values, so with love, because love's status in the language is very close to that of values. love simply is the ideal unity of all value, its claim upon us, and its creative power. (love is indeed the creator, for value indeed makes the world.) But the Platonic notion of God as an objective being, out there in a higher world, does nothing to explain the way he functions as our God, chosen by us, our religious ideal, our life-aim and the inner meaning of our identity. Just as you should not think of justice and truth as independent beings, so you should not think of God as an objectively existing superperson. That is a mythological and confusing way of thinking. The truth, we now see, is that the idea of love is imperative, not indicative. To speak of love is to speak about the moral and spiritual goals we ought to be aiming at, and about what we ought to become. The meaning of 'love' is religious, not metaphysical, even though unfortunately a deeply engrained habit of self-mystification leads most people, most of the time, radically to misconstrue the true meaning of religious language. The true love is not love as picturesque supernatural fact, but love as our religious ideal.
The view that religious belief consists in holding that a number of picturesque supernatural propositions are descriptively true is encouraged by the continuing grip on people's minds of a decadent and mystifying dogmatic theology. In effect I am arguing that for the sake of clarity it should be discarded entirely, and replaced by the practice of religion - ethics and spirituality - and the philosophy of religion. Then religion can become itself again, with a clear intellectual conscience at last.
Does this amount to saying that love is simply a humanly constructed ideal, such that when there are no human beings any longer there will be no love any longer? This question is improper, because it is framed from the obsolete realist point of view. The suggestion that the idea of love is man-made would only seem startling if we could point by contrast to something that has not been made by humans. But since our language shapes every topic raised in it, we cannot. In an innocuous sense, all our normative ideas have been posited by ourselves, including the truths of logic and mathematics as well as all our ideals and values. How else could we have acquired them? Thus love is humanly made only in the non-startling sense that everything is. That is modern anthropocentrism. But even on my account love is as real for us as anything else can be, and more primally authoritative than anything else is.
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For the Christian, this task of working out a vision of love takes the more human and concrete form of framing a personal vision of Christ, who is our own ideal alter ego, our true Self that we are to become, our religious ideal actualized in human form. But he too, as Western Christians have always known, is tragic. The image that most reminds us of him is the cross.
When we have fully accepted these ideas and have freed ourselves from nostalgia for a cosmic Father Christmas, then our faith can at last become fully human, existential, voluntary, pure, and free from superstition. To reach this goal is Christianity's destiny, now approaching.
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...all the doctrines of faith are not indicatives but symbol-clad imperatives; so that the doctrine of resurrection, for example, does not promise another life hereafter but tells us how to live now a new life that has left the fear of death behind. Rightly understood, the doctrine is not a set of supernatural facts that generate the ethic and the spirituality: the doctrine just is the ethic and the spirituality, with no gap between. "
I am with the author most of the way,although mystifying dogma should be crushed in order to produce nugget's of meta information.*Normative life * is also a nice label.
