AM,
I think I was being a bit confusing, as usual, with my last post where I said that some religions believe in a distant God and some believe in one that isn't. It seems to me that you thought that I was saying that only Christianity teaches that God loves us. You interpreted my words "distant" and "close" to mean "unloving" and "loving" and thats perfectly understandable way to interpret these words. But I didn't mean them in that way.
I never meant to say that no other religion teaches that God loves us. I know for a fact that all religions teach that God loves us or that God is Love in addition to teaching the same code of morality as all the rest. I should have been careful to say that while all religions teach that God loves us, we disagree on the nature of that love and on how God expresses this love to us.
And there are basically two sides to the argument about the nature of God's love and all the religions take one side or the other. One side says that God loves us from a distance, from outside human reality and the other says that God loves us from up close in perfect intimacy from within human reality. In the simplest terms, the religions differ on where God and his Love are "located" (if I may use such a word about God) and how it reaches us. For me, Bahais and Muslims, since they share a concept of God, are good examples of the side that says that God is located in a completely separate place from his creation and so he sends us His love (which is just one of His aspects), like a package, from outside our reality. Christians, on the other hand, are a good example of a religion that takes the side that God coexists with his creation and therefore His Love (which is the same as saying God Himself) can literally "live" inside of us as a natural partner to our souls and personalities.
But thats just a general description of the difference between these three religions. In a specific way Bahai's and Muslims and Christians differ in the following way. Bahais and Muslims deny that God could ever or would ever come close enough to us to live as one of us or to live with us inside our bodies. Christians on the other hand, testify that God Himself not only did come to live with us but also that he still does. I believe that this important difference forms a chasm between us which results in a major difference in how we understand God's Love and that this has major implications in how we experience that Love in this life and in how our lives turn out in the end.
But let me focus on just one of these implications, since just one is actually more than enough to talk about.
The reason why Bahais and Muslims believe that God could never come to visit us or live with us is because they believe that God is so great that if God were to become a part of us that would compromise his complete separation from us and that would mean that his greatness would be compromised. And God's greatness cannot in any way be compromised or the whole universal order would fall apart. For Bahais and Muslims, God's greatness is dependent on Him being completely separate which means that there can be no mingling between Him and His Creation. If we go by their theology, this means then that they believe that there can be no direct experience of God in this life. This necessarily includes experiencing God's love. A Bahai can therefore only believe that God loves them. In other words, according to their beliefs any love that a Bahai feels in their hearts has no other origin than from their own hearts. They believe that they feel only their own love for God which comes in response to hearing and believing the news from a prophet intermediary that God loves them. This, of course, is a powerful feeling of love which is exactly like the love we feel for our earthly loved ones when they say they love us or when they send us flowers. And Bahais and Muslims are very happy and content to feel this love for God. I know for a fact that they are in no way miserable people for believing that God cannot live within them. It seems to them that feeling their own love for God is quite enough for a happy life and no more is needed. They look around themselves and count their blessings and are content. All of this happens just like their holy books say it should work.
But having only a belief that God loves you is a whole different thing from claiming to be a witness that God came to visit us in person long ago and that he now literally dwells in the hearts of Christians in the form of His Love for us. Just feeling love for God is a whole different thing from claiming, as we Christians do, that we can enter into union with the Love that God Himself feels for us and so we can be with God in this life not just in the next. Most people, especially bahais and Muslims think we are crazy or exagerating or just hoplessly confused as to the real situation to believe these things. And I agree. We would be completely crazy if we just believed this stuff was true just because some told us it was true or if we thought that it agreed with common sense. But thats how we are different from them. We don't just believe it because someone told us it was true. We don't believe it because it made a lot of common sense to us from the start. Christians testify that we have experienced a Love of an order beyond any Love that we have ever known or could ever imagine or comprehend from the pages of a book. It is a Love that is far beyond the beautiful sentiment that we feel for our families and our spouses and even far beyond just feeling strong love for God in our hearts. It is a love thats so powerful that its been known to force people to their feet. It is a love so demanding and insistent that once we feel it we can never rest until we love others in the same radical way. Most of all, this is the Love that we are taught about in the Life and death of Jesus. It comes to us in exactly the way he told us it would. It comes to us if we follow his commands as they are written in the Bible. And according to it, his commands to us went far beyond exhortations to follow the law with good intentions.
(Sorry I am going to have to break this one off at this point because its getting way too long. On to the next post)