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As we said before, gaining knowledge about God is a whole different deal than learning about other humans. In this world, knowledge is a commodity that we buy and sell. It’s ammunition that we use to gain power for ourselves and trash others. But because knowledge is so readily accessible, we’ve learned to treat it as a cheap and common thing. We’re used to feeling entitled to it, and we’re used to flaunting it like gaudy jewelry just to draw attention to ourselves.

Consider how often you see people broadcasting intimate facts about someone else just to draw attention to themselves. Gossip rags delight in posting pictures of celebrities sobbing or making out just so the rags will sell more copies. With the introduction of forums like Facebook and Twitter, we’ve seen the value of private information drop even lower. It used to be that couples went on their honeymoons to get away from others and share secret, intimate moments in the bedroom. Now people bring their phones with them and take pornographic photos of themselves making out with their spouses. Pregnant mothers post pictures of themselves in the nude just before giving birth so we can all see the size of their stomachs. When loved ones are ill, we photograph them sitting in hospital beds and invite the whole world to gawk at them. People can’t share secrets or sincere compliments anymore without some concern that what they said will end up pasted on the internet. “My husband said the sweetest thing to me in bed the other day.” Really? Since when are bedroom conversations supposed to be broadcast to the whole world? Did you even bother to ask for your friend’s permission before you repeated what she said to you to an audience of strangers?

Now in the Church, we find a similarly nauseating show of people broadcasting their personal conversations with God just as a means to draw attention to themselves. Pompous prophets crank out the books and blogs in which they give us all a blow-by-blow description of the night Jesus materialized in their bedroom and told them how impressed He was with them. Many fat-headed pastors just can’t wait to get onstage Sunday morning and tell us all about the conversation they had with God at breakfast. Prayer warriors are always going on about who said what in the prayer closet. Healers are known for flaunting the secret insights they claim God has given them. Christian musicians turn their personal prayers to God into songs for us all to sing. And then there are all of the untitled masses who are always competing with each other to come up with the best “God said something to me” story. It’s really quite repulsive, the way we’re treating our personal exchanges with God so cheaply. And as long as we’re only interested in God talking so that we can have new material to boast about, we can be sure that He’s never going to invite us to really know Him.

God doesn’t view Himself as our toy. He doesn’t share information with us to entertain us or to help us exalt ourselves in this world. To know God is a priceless privilege, not a right. When we reject this, He begins taking back any knowledge that He shared with us and we drift into ignorance without even realizing what’s happening.

When you’re attempting to relate to the Beings who made you, you are relating to three Beings who consider Themselves to be the most magnificent, fascinating, and desirable Beings in existence. To say that They are “egotistical” is a major understatement. There is no limit to how highly our Gods think of Themselves, and understanding this about Them is critical for anyone who wants to approach Them correctly. We are not dealing with our equals–we are dealing with Beings who infinitely outrank us, and who say that we ought to consider ourselves humbly honored by any invitation to know Them better.

In mainstream Christianity, you simply aren’t going to be taught to treat your Gods with the level of respect that They want. The purpose of our site is to help souls understand what cherishing, honoring, and respecting God means. Cultivating the four soul attitudes that we’re always talking about is vital to you approaching your Creators in a way that They will be receptive to. As we often say, our Gods delight in sharing insights about Themselves with souls who are treasuring Them above all else. But learning about God requires a very different approach than learning about people. With God, we ask our questions, but then we must learn to respectfully wait for Him to bring us answers in His own time. We can’t take an entitled attitude with Him, for there are going to be many questions that He refuses to answer. If we cherish any insights He is willing to share and if we treat those things as the sacred treasures that they are, then He will be pleased to share more with us. But if we treat the knowledge of God as a cheap, expendable thing which we can use to promote ourselves–or if we try to find ways to go around God and unearth secrets about Him without His help, then we will learn the hard way just how foolish it is for specks like us to scoff at the concept of treating our Creators with respect.

[From "You Love God But You Hate People: Why You’re Not a Spiritual Failure"]

Can you be a devoted Christian who is greatly pleasing God if you currently loathe other humans? The modern Church, the apostle Paul, and the apostle John would all say no. God would say yes. Now let’s explain.

God has always taught that He is to be our First Priority—so much so that we should be willing to lose our relationships with other humans for the sake of honoring Him. It doesn’t always get to that point, but that is the goal. You see, God doesn’t just call us to be sort of into Him—He commands us to obsessively love Him. We are to consider Him our All-in-All, our Master, our Commander, our King. God is supposed to be the One who we are living to please. His opinion is supposed to trump all others in our minds. His approval is supposed to be everything to us.

And then there are people. How does God teach us to love people? Well, we’re supposed to be gracious, generous, merciful, and kind. But we’re also supposed to have boundaries, dole out discipline when needed, and be willing to cut ties when necessary. The kind of love that we’re supposed to be giving humans is a very different, far more limited kind of love than we’re supposed to be giving God. It’s totally inappropriate for us to obsess over humans, to pray to them, to worship them, to view ourselves as totally dependent on them, or to give them our absolute trust. We’re never supposed to give humans anything close to total submission, and yet total submission is definitely an attitude that we want to develop with God.

Now today, the Church is blowing off the difference between the kind of love you’re supposed to be giving God and the kind of love you’re supposed to be giving humans. By the time she’s teaching you to pray to human saints, worship human worship leaders, blindly trust your human teachers, and view yourself as totally dependent on a collection of Scriptures which were all written by humans, the Church is teaching you to treat humans like God’s equals. Then she vaults them even higher than God by teaching you that you need other humans to pray for you, lay hands on you, interpret God’s will for you, and spiritually intercede for you. Soon humans are our first loves in life, while God is just our last resort.

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Now if you try to share these ideas with other Christians, you’ll likely get a bunch of Scriptures thrown at you and a bunch of harsh criticism, so don’t bother. Because the Church worships the Bible, she ends up exalting all of the bad teaching in the Bible as correct. In the New Testament, we find the apostles John and Paul putting out a lot of bad teaching on the subject of loving humans. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul writes a long speech about love in which he says loving other people—not God—is all that matters (see Discernment Charts – NT Epistles: If We Don’t Love Humans, We’re Worthless). In other words, Paul teaches that our relationships with other humans are far more important than our relationships with God. This is the same Paul who once boasted that he’d volunteer to be cut off from Christ in order to see more of his fellow Jews saved. Paul was a horrible spiritual role model in many ways, yet you’ll be hard-pressed to find Christians who will admit how obnoxious much of Paul’s teaching is.

As for the apostle John—he’s another wellspring of bad theology. John not only teaches that no true Christian could even desire to sin—which is a totally ludicrous claim—but he also says that anyone who doesn’t love people cannot possibly know God. Well, suppose Brianna was to measure the quality of her friends by the gifts they brought her. How well would that external judgment system work? Not well at all, for the people who brought Brianna the best gifts cared about her the least, whereas the woman who didn’t bring any gifts loved Brianna deeply. When we try to assess people’s heart attitudes by their external actions, we always end up drawing wrong conclusions about them. Happily, God doesn’t fall into this trap. Unlike humans, God is able to see your true intentions towards Him, so He never misjudges you.

Sincerely devoted Christians come in a wide variety of packages—some of which are very rude, hostile, and even hateful towards their fellow humans. But because God sees into our hearts, He never rejects those who sincerely care about Him, nor is He fooled by any of our pretenses. God knows who is for Him and who isn’t. He knows who really cares about Him, and who doesn’t. As a Christian who is currently stuck in a place of intensely disliking other humans, you need to stop obsessing over the things that don’t matter. Look inward, not outward. Think about your soul attitude towards God, not your feelings towards other humans. When you know that underneath all of the hostility, you really do want to please God, then you need to stand on that. Don’t expect other Christians to understand your true feelings about God, because they won’t. But God does understand, and His opinion is the only one that counts.