So what about God?  He’s the One who designed us to be so self-serving.  Is our selfishness part of our God stamp?  Yes, it is, for God is an extremely selfish Being and everything that He does has a Self-benefiting reason behind it (see The Gift of Ego).  But unlike us, God isn’t plagued by needs which only external parties can satisfy.  We humans have a desperate need to be liked by at least some of our fellow creatures.  We need to have friends, we need emotional connection, we need mental stimulation and physical touch.  We have a long list of needs that we can’t satisfy without the help of others.  When other humans treat us badly, we try to find ways to live without them, but those ways never work out.  Our imaginary friends just aren’t as satisfying as real ones.  We try to drown out the needs of our souls by obsessing over material things, but when we come across a stranger who gives us his undivided attention, we suddenly realize how empty and unsatisfied we feel.  We need relationships with other humans.  We need a relationship with God even more, but does He need us?  No, He doesn’t.

God wants us, but He doesn’t need us, and this makes us feel very insecure in our relationships with Him.  After all, if we can’t identify some way that we’re enticing God to stay with us, what’s preventing Him from leaving us?  The truth is that nothing is keeping God from leaving us.  Because God doesn’t depend on us in anyway, He could uncreate us all at anytime and not be bothered in the slightest.  We only exist because God is choosing for us to exist, and He is only choosing for us to exist because it pleases Him to do so.  His pleasure isn’t based on the fact that He feels some desperate need to be with us.  But at the same time, His lack of need doesn’t mean His love for us is some shallow, fickle thing.

How tenacious can love be if it is not based on need?  Isn’t it our need to avoid some overwhelming sense of loss that motivates us to persevere in the midst of miserable relationships?  Whenever you see humans hanging on in the face of some intense misery, it’s because they’ve found some prize within that misery that they’ve decided they cannot live without.  Maybe he does smack her around, but at least he puts a roof over her head and provides for her material needs.  Maybe she does nag him to death, but it’s better than being alone.  Yet when we look at how God treats us, we don’t find this kind of doormat tolerance anywhere in the mix.  To God, our lives on earth are a mere blip on the eternal timeline.  That one little blip is all the time He gives us to submit to Him, and if we don’t rush to align with His demands, He hurls us into Hell (see The Illusion of God’s Long-Suffering Patience).  God’s utter lack of dependency on us is clearly communicated by the high He gets off of eternally tormenting those who defy Him (see Why God Loves Hell).  If God needed us to like Him or worship Him, as some imply that He does, Hell would not exist.