Attributing sinister motives to God (and others): False moralities a kind of sinful pleasure

"As Christians we must understand that when the world shouts its morality at us and insists we are not good Christians unless we fall in line behind it as it pursues its endless and ever-shifting sequence of causes, we must remember that this is just what the world does, that people need to be saved from the world's false moralities as much as they do from its sinful pleasures. And this precisely because the pursuit of false moralities is a kind of sinful pleasure."

Moses recalls the reason Israel at first refused to enter the Promised Land: "It was because the LORD hated us that he brought us out of Egypt to hand us over to the Amorites to be wiped out." (Deut 1:27). Attributing sinister motives on God is one of humanity's oldest pastimes. For that generation of Israelites it meant they all died in the desert.

In our time we often hear that there is no such thing as a "privileged" narrative. Actually to whatever extent narratives are true they are also more inherently privileged than false ones, simply because of their rootedness in reality, and essential quality false narratives lack. (And anyhow, how often have we seen the claim that there are no privileged narratives being used as a means of privileging narratives that would not otherwise be taken seriously?)

The whole pitch of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was the same. "God doesn't want you to eat that fruit," the Serpent had told Eve, "because he doesn't want you to enjoy the benefits you would get from it. He's selfish and wants to keep Wisdom to himself! He doesn't want you to 'be all you can be'!"

In the story the Serpent cast itself  in the role of the self-righteous advocate of human freedom and advancement. Of the fearless speaker of truth to power. This delusional pretension very naturally follows falsely attributing sinister motives upon perfectly good intentions, whether we are speaking of God's good intentions or, really, anybody's.

The parent calls a child away from where they are playing near a door that might swing open at any minute and potentially injure the child. The child says to itself: "Mom doesn't want me to have fun. She wants me to be bored."

And so it develops from there into everything from personal philosophies to politcal platforms, because of course part and parcel of continuing in this false delusion is finding other like- minded persons in order to bolster oneself up by forming a community of attributors of sinister motives. Such communities are often conspicuous from the strangely hysterical, even fanatical sense of moral outrage towards the alleged wrongdoing of others while at the same time being completely forgiving and indulgent toward incidents of the same behavior they are falsely attributing to others actually running rampant within their community. In view of this one must be very careful not to jump on passing bandwagons filled with people who are all foaming at the mouth with moral outrage simply because they say they are going in the right direction and are fighting for a good cause.

How many millions of people, I wonder, are robbed every day of God's promised blessings because they somehow got it in their heads, somehow interpreted what God mean't for good as intended for evil. We need to ask ourselves how much have we robbed ourselves of both God's blessing and a life lived in the light of truth. As Christians we must understand that when the world shouts its morality at us and insists we are not good Christians unless we fall in line behind it as it pursues its endless and ever-shifting sequence of causes, we must remember that this is just what the world does, that people need to be saved from the world's false moralities as much as they do from its sinful pleasures. And this precisely because the perssuit of false moralities are a kind of sinful pleasure.