NEEDING GOD IS DANGEROUS
 
Religion urges us to fall in love with God. But it cannot be proved that a God worthy of this lives. There is no greater cruelty than encouraging people to love a being that may be a fantasy.
 
The Christian version of God states that God is all-good and therefore all-attractive. Thus we must need him and nothing fulfils us unless we find him. God deserves all the love there is. Thus the Church and the God concept COMMAND us to need God. Many of us do not need God. Most of the people that ever lived were happy to pray to statues and had no time for God. No truly good person commands people to need anything. That is saying, "A need is something that is essential to your wellbeing. You will suffer if it is unmet." It is a pity we have needs. It makes us vulnerable. So to invent needs for us is cruel. To command us to have a need aside from the things that we need to stay alive is astronomically cruel.
 
The Church says that God has put a need for him inside all of us. That follows from the doctrine that God is completely good and that he has created all things and done so for himself. But if it is the good you want you don’t really want him. The Church says then that he is his goodness so to want goodness is the same thing as wanting him which doesn’t really make any sense. A man can want his wife’s beauty and though her beauty is her to love her beauty is not the same as loving her. Jesus said there is no greater love than giving your life – all you have – for your friends. The Church says that the purest love seeks nothing in return. “To pardon rather than be pardoned, love rather than be loved”, as the awful prayer of St Francis of Assisi puts it.” Therefore to love God as Jesus commanded you have to love God alone as if he had no good points at all. You would have to love him even if he were bad. But then why God alone and not somebody else? Why not your mother or your spouse? It would make more sense to love your mother or your spouse for at least you can see and hear them. Why not yourself? No they want us to love God instead for no sensible reason meaning that we should let God and his emissaries run our lives. The fact that we are to love God alone proves just how perverse and malign Christian – or any God-centred - morality is despite its outward appearance. God is arbitrarily chosen for conferring all love on which means that there is no morality (or right and wrong) if this should be done because morality is supposed to be right and you cannot arbitrarily make anything right. Morality and arbitrary don’t mix. The God doctrine denies that morality, or right and wrong, exists.

If God is a need then he is the most important need of all for he is supreme good and our creator. It follows then that secularism and atheism are endangering that need and must be regarded as being opposed to human rights and worthy of suppression. Rights are based on needs not wants. I may want a child but that does not give me a right to have one. I need food so I have a right to food. I don't have a right to have a child for I have no need to.
 
Now back to the doctrine that God put the need for him in us. Why did he do it? For our good? For his? Or for both? It is not for our good for if he made us see the need for happiness and how to get it better there would be no need for him to interfere or get involved. There would be no need for us to need him. He created a need where there should be none and since love respects freedom above all else it is unmistakeably true that God does not care about us when he constricted our freedom by making us need him. So he put the need in us for his good alone (further implying that nothing and nobody matters but him – what a callous monster!). And he does not need us to need and worship and work for him for he is almighty and perfect and self-sufficient. You cannot be a perfect being without being self-sufficient. So he just wants us to adore him though he does not need that adoration. A person who has to work for a God who does not need it, is just a slave even if he does get rewards. What benefit would the rewards be when you have not really achieved anything? How can you achieve anything or feel you have achieved, by loving a God who does not need you or your love?
 
Jesus declared in the John gospel that his disciples are not servants or slaves for they know the master’s business. A slave can know his master’s business and still be a slave so that was another of Jesus’ many peccadilloes. Jesus was saying the disciples knew God's ways so they were not slaves. But we know there was a lot they did not know. They preached a God of mystery. Jesus was lying.
 
Though Jesus said we must be perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect, he emptied this adage of any meaning whatsoever when he emphasised our overwhelming and eternal dependence on God. To be perfect is to be self-sufficient but when God’s help is what makes a person good according to the Christian gospel it is obvious that we are never perfect in ourselves. We only act that way for we have the props. The need for God is created by the Church and it is created for its own benefit and not ours or God’s.

Nobody can say it is ever good to believe in God. Those who are made happy by the belief are in delusion and to say this delusion is a good thing is to talk nonsense. These people are being used by the clergy. When you are deluded you might think your delusion is one that makes you cheery but when you are deluded you will never know if you would be happier with another delusion or none. It’s still bad. It’s still degrading. It stops you being yourself and empowering yourself. When all is said and done, the main reason religion and God thrive is because there are so many questions that people never think to ask themselves or don’t take the time to. Atheism wants people to ask themselves the questions about religion and faith that they wouldn’t normally ask and that is a vital part of the therapy the system offers. When they do that many surprises will surface. For example, the person who would insist that he or she is a 95% Catholic in outlook and faith may when he or she asks himself or herself the right questions could discover that he or she is really only 10% Catholic! The Church takes advantage of people not getting to know themselves and what they really think. It takes advantage of the human tendency to believe something because of the arguments presented while forgetting to look for and ask for missing information that would give you a totally different outlook.
 
We can be content with imperfect happiness and yet we have the Church trying to condition us to believe that we want perfect happiness and hey presto the solution for getting this happiness is God! This is a cruel set-up and shows the Church is an evil confidence trick.
 
The Christian Church opposes good and puts a clever counterfeit in its place.
 
Himmler believed he should inflict horrors on innocent people because his leader persuaded him it was best for Germany. This does not excuse what he did (page 14, Ethics: The Fundamentals) or anybody who approves of what he did. Islam and Christianity with their doctrine that certain sinners such as heretics or homosexuals will suffer in Hell forever without any hope of release just make a caricature of that principle. They approve of the horrors these sinners may face.
 
The Church says that God comes first and not only that but all we do should be entirely done for his sake. So what God thinks matters and what we think does not. But real good requires a lot of discerning what good is and doing that and trusting entirely in yourself for you have to decide for yourself what is good for you and others. So God is in opposition to goodness and therefore love. It is in opposition to difference. All are called to become clones of God for he is perfection itself. The view that God has made some people to be good at nursing and others have the talent for teaching does not refute this but actually supports it for all are made weak and are called to be perfect at everything and these talents are only encouraged for when we are weak there is no other option but to zoom in on what we are good at and develop that as a prime concern. Think of it this way. People are asked what they would have on their gravestone for an epitaph. When God comes first and loving him with all your being is the supreme law it follows that the epitaph should be, “She tried to love God”, or, “He did not try to love God.” Whatever is not best is what is wrong. Such a God cannot give meaning to life except by the craftiness of the Church which deludes people to think that they need him and which corrupts their thinking and makes their emotional needs abnormal. We need a world that celebrates diversity not one that tolerates it. God is in opposition to such celebration. Any version of God that is not is just a pile of inconsistency and not a real God.
 
I will spell out another way that God removes a sense of purpose in life. Christians say they get meaning in life from the fact that God loves them no matter what they do. So they have to pretend the shamelessly absurd lie that the sinner can be loved while their sin is hated is true. Believing that God loves us unconditionally may make us feel safer but it should not. In real life, we tend to feel safe if we prove ourselves to be worthwhile people. God’s love cannot make us feel safe without that so to derive comfort from it is indicatory of disordered self-esteem because you need the God-crutch. God’s love can ask for some horrible things so there is no sense in feeling safe with him. It would be presumptuous to feel safe.
 
 
We can be content with imperfect happiness and yet we have the Church trying to condition us to believe that we want perfect happiness and hey presto the solution for getting this happiness is God! This is a cruel set-up and shows the Church is an evil confidence trick.
 
If you err even with the best of intentions you still do harm. You harm your power to perceive the truth every time you err. You harm yourself though you feel no pain. You harm others by giving an example of error to them. To err is to take the side of error even if you never get the chance to express and live out your error. If somebody is wrong but sincere we can praise them for the sincerity but not for being wrong.

Conclusion
 
The God-belief is a danger to our standards of right and wrong. Those who say it is essential to believe in God before one can believe in any of these standards are lying for there is nothing in this book that hasn’t been constantly said to the Church by its critics over the centuries. Belief in God is bad for us therefore to promote the belief is bad. To say we must believe in God to be moral implies that the evil doctrine that "an act is never good in itself but needs a God to approve of it to make it good" is true. This is because it implies that even child rape, for instance, would be good if God allowed it. If good is independent of belief in God then no big deal should be made of God. It would mean that good is good whether there is a God or not. We have enough trouble trying to work out right and wrong without religion adding to the difficulties and making a laughing stock of our efforts.
 
 
* Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch Publications, East Sussex, 1995
 
The Future of Atheism, Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett, SPCK, London , 2008
Ethics: The Fundamentals, Julia Driver, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2007