You must love God the most

A friend of a friend commented recently that her son keeps telling her he loves her "more than God". She is trying to stop him from saying this. I guess it is heresy. Rather upsetting from your five year old.

It struck me that you are not going to get very far telling your five year old to love someone they've never seen, more than you. I mean, kids really love their mothers, even lousy ones. Their love is enormous, boundless, fathomless, fierce. It's hard to hold someone else up and say, "Hey, love him more!"

I feel a little bit sad for the kid being told to love someone. Love, by definition, must flow naturally. It's a bit like being told to kiss your grandmother when you don't want to. Only, you *can* kiss someone unwillingly and out of duty. You can't really love someone unwillingly and out of duty.

I wonder if this mummy also tells her child that she loves God more than she loves him. That would be hard for a child to understand. But this is what God demands: if you doubt me at all on that, you really need to go and re-read the part about Abraham and Isaac.

If I was raising my child as a Christian, I hope it would be all about joy and spontaneity and free choice, not about telling them who they must love, and in what order. I would present God's love as a love freely given, and which he hopes you will, in time, choose freely to return. (Of course, provided you don't die first - don't take too long about it.) But I have a dilemma here, because I think that this boy, who is already outwitting his mother's moral teachings, might be well on the way to a healthy, happy atheism, whereas a child raised in a subtler, kinder, more palatable religion, will take longer to spot the cracks in the wall. And I do think that the longer it takes you to shake off religion, the more painful it is. So much of your life is already invested in it.

Anyway, I don't try to get people to question their faith unless they actively approach me on the subject, so it's not like I actually plan to do anything here. I'm just musing. I actually remember my mother telling me I should love God the most. I think it bothered me a little, but basically I just ignored her. Deep down inside, there was a little bit of cognitive dissonance starting right there. Which didn't really stop until I become an atheist.

I think that's really the best thing about atheism. No more cognitive dissonance! It doesn't really work as a slogan, though, does it?