The Lie, The Truth

It is, to my mind, among the most insidious and pervasive of lies—that love is "conditional".
Everyone, to some extent, believes it.  We feel deficient and therefore unworthy of the attention we need to be happy; we try to make our most appealing features more visible to win respect—we think "If they see how talented I am, then they'll accept me!" or some such other nonsense. And then we encourage the lie when we pick and choose our friends based on trivialities:  "I can't believe he doesn't like rock'n'roll!"; "Ooh, he's so funny!"; "He'll just slow me down if I talk to him."

Many people become enslaved to the lie.  One little idea—"You must be worthwhile to be recognized"—and a thousand problems arise, starting when the basic insecurity, "I'm not good enough and I know it!" leads to a resolve to keep everyone else ignorant of the fact.  These poor souls become frustrated, trying to cover their shortcomings with excuses and prominent displays of their own merit, sometimes boasting outright, sometimes employing false modesty.  They become competitive, belittling others to raise their status.  They begin to crave recognition rather than actual love.

You see, love—being in its true state unconditional—is no respecter of persons.  It gives generously, without favoritism.  So even though love itself would make these people happier, they reject it, convinced that by submitting themselves to its authority they might lose their competitive edge.  That, and the fact that recognition (a mere substitute for love) acts more like a drug than nourishment keeps them coming back for more, with less and less satisfying results

Furthermore, they distrust anyone—especially former friends—who might see their true colors, afraid that such people will cease to be impressed by them.  It's vital to them to be thought of as important rather than to be thought of with affection.  Ambitious, insecure, and deep-down very guilty, they lose the ability to maintain healthy relationships.  Oftentimes even the most loyal and forgiving of friends are forced to separate from them.

A society based on the lie is easy to predict:  Expectation precedes generosity, ambition precludes equality, empathy is scrapped for practicality, and deceit runs rampant as people scramble to devise more and more underhanded strategies to come out on top.  It may start out fine at first:  In one instance we praise moral behavior and so believe we have encouraged morality, but in reality we may just encourage people to compete for a standard that will inevitably show them to be lacking.  . . . Of course I'm not saying we ignore or dismiss virtue, I'm just indicating how subtle the lie can be:  It is good to encourage morality, so long as we understand that no one is any less worthy of love for his or her failings.  No one is "better" or "worse" when it comes to who they are as a person.  And the people worrying anxiously over their egos need to be aware that their efforts are, blessedly, for naught.  There is love for them in abundance, if and when they are willing to accept it.

God is love.  (1 John 4:7—21)  Man's love may fail, but God loves all.  In the western world we hear it constantly, but it is nevertheless of everlasting value:  God sent His Son to die for us while we were still in sin and  completely unlovable.  (John 3:16)  He does not just love "the good people" or "the people who try to be good".  He made us all, He loves us all.  Thanks to Christ's sacrifice, any one of us can renounce our sin by simply asking for forgiveness.  We were born sinners, and so sin:  We don't happen to sin and are thus sinners.  We all need to be reborn, or ultimately spend eternity in hell.

Some have described hell as a place where people simply remained unloved; others describe it as a lake of fire.  It's both.  The bible says "there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth," (Matthew 8:12) and that there will in fact be "unquenchable fire" (Mark 9:43); fittingly, it also describes the judged being turned away from the throne and so put out of the sight of God forever, (Matthew 25:41) thus ending the grace period we spend deluded about our own worth and losing all hope of feeling God's love—but it is also a very physical, painful existence.  No one should have to go there.

You have to be remade before you can really understand, but there's no reason anyone should hang back from salvation.  It would mean nothing if God simply "let" everyone into heaven:  The quintessential feature of heaven is the chance to be close to our Creator, and we can't appreciate any of that in our current state.  And I personally think (I could be wrong; I'm in theoretical theology here) that in "transforming" humanity as a whole by Christ's sacrifice, God would need to override our will, the very thing that makes us people and thus so special to Him.  Anyway, He's God:  He is good, but He's also the Authority here.

Some readers might be annoyed that an innocent philosophical discussion turned into religious rhetoric so fast.  I can't talk about the philosophy without bringing in the whole package, though, or people might think my reasoning and my faith were at all disconnected, and I have God to thank for both.  So . . . thank you, God!