"Everything your heart experiences about God tells you that God is good. Everything your teachers teach you about God tells you God is bad. Your heart tells you God is to be loved without fear. Your teachers tell you God is to be feared, for He is a vengeful God. You are to live in fear of God's wrath, they say. You are to tremble in His presence. Your whole life through you are to fear the judgement of the Lord. For the lord is "just," you are told. And God knows, you will be in trouble when you confront the terrible justice of the Lord. You are, therefore, to be "obedient" to God's commands. Or else.Above all, you are not to ask such logical questions as, "if God wanted strict obedience to His Laws, why did He create the possibility of those Laws being violated?" Ah, your teachers tell you--because God wanted you to have "free choice." Yet what kind of choice is free when to choose one thing over the other brings condemnation? How is "free will" free when it is not your will, but someone else's, which must be done? Those who teach you this would make a hypocrite of God.
You are told that God is forgiveness, and compassion--yet if you do not ask for this forgiveness in the "right way," if you do not "come to God" properly, your plea will not be heard, your cry will go unheeded. Even this would not be so bad if there were only one proper way, but there are as many "proper ways" being taught as there are teachers to teach them.
Most of you, therefore, spend the bulk of your adult life searching for the "right" way to worship, to obey, and to serve God. The irony of all this is that I do not want your worship, I do not need your obedience, and it is not necessary for you to serve Me.
These behaviors are the behaviors historically demanded of their subjects by monarchs--usually ego-maniacal, insecure, tyrannical monarchs at that. They're not Godly demands in any sense--and it seems remarkable that the world hasn't by now concluded that the demands are counterfeit, having nothing to do with the needs or desires of Deity.
Deity has no needs. All That is exactly that: all that is. It therefore wants, or lacks, nothing--by definition.
If you choose to believe in a God who somehow needs something--and has such hurt feelings if He doesn't get it that He punishes those from whom He expected to receive it--then you choose to believe in a God much smaller than I. You truly are Children of a Lesser God."
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