Me. I slept poorly last night, am still a little fuzzy and completely missed that. Apologies.
Our Father, Howard in Heaven.
Harold be thy name. 
As usual, Tris says it better than I could. But I will say that I don’t agree with the part of your OP that mentions an emotional investment. Love in this context is not an emotion (which changes and is temporal) but wanting good for you. God is love and is unchanging. You can say you haven’t experienced Him but perhaps you have experienced Him in the happiness you have had. One’s relationship with Him is not blocked because of sin; He’s always open to a sinner turning back to Him.
Can you really, though? If you were omnipotent- that is, if you could do utterly anything you felt like doing to keep your child from harm- would you simply refuse to act so they could “learn a lesson?” I think there are several reasons why the “loving father” metaphor breaks-down. I’m starting with the basic assumption that God is all-powerful**. Presumably, you as a human parent are not. That said…
Why do we need to learn by trial and error? I don’t think it’s a particularly good system myself. As a human parent, you can’t simply will the knowledge that “stoves can be hot” into a child. They must, to some extent, absorb that for themselves via a painful lesson. As a God-parent however, you could simply impart this knowledge via your divine magnificence. Presto! Kids come out of the womb knowing “stoves can be hot”. If medical science produced a method by which such useful facts could be safely imparted to the mind of an unborn child, would you as a parent refuse the procedure? “No doctor, I’d actually prefer my kid get burned a couple times so they learn their lesson.” :dubious:
But you might argue, “Well, I won’t always be around. Some day the kid will have to look out for himself!” Unfortunately, that rationale isn’t terribly compelling when you are dealing with an eternal, omnipresent being.
And, honestly, I have a really hard time with the argument that casts humanity as children who just haven’t developed enough to “get it” yet. “Mysterious ways”, right? If God put us together well-below the intellectual minimum system requirements for existing in His creation, he’s not much of a God. What could possibly be the point of a creation that is far too stupid to ever understand or really even intelligently identify with its creator? Suppose you had a genetic condition that guaranteed any child you had would never mentally develop beyond the age of two. Would you still want to have that kid? Or would you prefer one that eventually became as clever as you? Perhaps moreso? (And no, I’m not advocating euthanasia for the mentally disabled so please don’t even ask.)
**Or as Jon Stewart puts it, he has the “basic skill set to create an entire universe.” 
Strickly from a spiritualists view and generally accepted by most spiritualists and those who have had spiritual experiences.
There is only one kind of love, that is unconditional love, if conditions are put on love then it becomes a contract not love. Love is at once a force and a state of being that is not easy to attain in the physical world, but remains a goal for all of us. Love dispells fear, perfect love dispells all fear.
Now God is Love, that is His nature and being, He can not be anything but love. Therefor the statement “God loves” is true. When churches preach to let God into your heart, they are preaching let love into your heart. Without love everything falls apart. With love nothing is impossible.
We all have been created by God (Love) and hold love within us always. In order to feel the love and therefore understand the love of God, we must give love. In giving love the motion of the love force moves out from us to others and then back to us. The more we love the more we feel love, caring, compassion, joy, peace, and self-confidence. The more we learn to love the more love force we gather.
If you practice, in a short time you will know.
I realize this does not conform to any religious view, but then I am not a religious person.
Love
Unless you are a Christian because even though you don’t deserve it Jesus is badass enough to catch everyone falling into hell who cries our his name. It’s kind of the ultimate loophole. Though I think you really gotta mean it or some such.
One definition of love is ‘Complete understanding’, God understands you thoroughly and thereby doesn’t have the selfish conceits that cloud the minds of mortals, that causes them to get upset when their unrealistic expectations were not met. Expectations of course by definition are unrealistic if they are never met.
Yeah, I hear what you’re saying and agree. As you read I tried to invalidate that argument anyways. But my point of departure is God created me in his own image. The concept of short term pain for long term gain is self-evident in the world we inhabit. Sure, if God’s omnipotent he could have created a different world. Maybe he’s not omnipotent, or maybe a higher intelligence can grasp the longer term better than I can. Maybe, just maybe, 100 years of strife is a necessary short term cost.
I don’t believe it, but I concede a higher intelligence with greater knowledge is in a better position to make that call. However, when guiding my children though episodes of short term pain (hot stove, discipline, allowing them to solve it themselves, etc.) I make it unequivocally clear I’m with them through it and I love them. Assuming human suffering is a worthwhile temporal episode, why are the words “God loves you” so hard to understand? Why isn’t God directly demonstrating that love? Why hide behind a cloud from a pious cancer patient?
I’m drifting from an exploration of the meaning of the phrase “God loves you” into territory I’ve already stipulated, i.e. God exists. Maybe the questions are inseparable. But honestly if I as a flawed creation can easily convince my fellow human beings of my love, why is God so coy?
My interpretation as well.
Oh, is that all you wanted to know?! That’s easy! 
You see, God is simply conducting a two-thousand-or-so-year-long object permanence test on humanity. He was there for a moment and then he zipped out of view. Presumably at some point in the future He’ll reappeared, shout “Peekaboo!!”, and humanity will gurgle with delight.
…Well that, or He simply doesn’t have the decency to exist. Either way, really.
Garbage. Unconditional love - unconditional anything is insane, and conditional love is not only “real” love, it’s the only worthwhile kind. Should a wife love the husband who beats her ? Should a child love the parents who molest him ?
That’s criminal insanity. Losing all fear will get you hurt or killed; it will cause you to hurt and kill others.
Really. I hereby declare God to be Hate, that is His nature and being, He can not be anything but hate. Prove that my statement makes less sense than yours. You can’t; not only are you pulling all this out of thin air, but the entire concept is nonsensical.
:rolleyes: There’s no reason to believe God exists, and there’s no reason to believe that a hypothetical god is restricted to being “love”, even assuming that even made sense. Churches preach all sorts of things; when Reverend Phelps tells you to let God into your heart I doubt he means love. Most things work just fine without love; it may be pleasant, but it’s hardly necessary and often destructive. And PLENTY of things are impossible with love.
Of course you are religious; belief in God is a religious belief.
Der Trihs God is the only one who loves unconditionally. I think that is sort of the point of the whole story.
You can’t discern between religious and spiritual so there is nothing we can debate. I said if you want to know, practice.
Which means that lekatt is claiming that no human loves anybody ( “There is only one kind of love, that is unconditional love” ), and means that God is insane.
[hijack] I first read this as “Der Trih’s God is the only who loves unconditionally.” Then thought to myself, “Hold it, Der Trihs plays an atheist on this website! Who is this God of his?” [/hijack]
Hmmm.
First, as the unwitting provocateur of the OP, I should make clear that my comment was tongue-in-cheek, since of course Der Trihs is a person convinced that God as He is portrayed by organized religion is nonexistent, and would be evil if He did exist. Having on another site recently seen some of the hateful insanity people can come up with in the name of God, and foist upon their fellow man, I cannot blame him overmuch. It was, then, an intentionally facetious comment playing off the known board personae of DT and myself, injected for levity – though it did misfire.
However, to essay a GQ-type answer to the OP, in general people who claim to know the answers to questions of this sort maintain that (a) God’s love for man is agapetic in nature; (b) it is unconditional – except that very often this statement is immediately followed by a series of religion-based exceptions (“IF you repent of your sins [a list of which I’ll be glad to provide you]” – “provided you’re baptized, or desire baptism or are martyered” – “if you’re among the Elect” – etc.); and © His love is that of an idealized Father – never failing in love even though He may find it necessary to discipline, to warn of the consequences of but then allow foolish choices, etc. This of course presumes that one is speaking of the Christian God – I don’t propose to attempt to reflect on the feelings of G-d as seen by the Jews, the Islamic conception of Him, Brahman of the myriafold divine manifestations, the Lord of the Pagans, etc.
Please note that I am not proposing the above as a statement of fact. It is relatively close to how I believe, but I am acutely aware of the issues people may take with it, from lack of evidence for the entire proposition of Him, much less of Him as all-loving, to apparently contradictory evidence in the kindly sufferer from incurable cancer, the senseless killing, the apparent encouragement He is said to give to man’s inhumanity to man, etc. I think a list of incidents aimed at disproving God’s love by apparent evil He allows or even supposedly encourages could be the fastest-growing Pit thread in board history, and I can fully understand why.
I think He loves us enough to give us some good guidance and then let us grow up and find our own way in life, learning how to treat others as we go, ideally still in a relationship with Him, but without His forcing it and with Him always willing to welcome us if we want to get back in touch. I think he’s become the scapesgod for a lot of people’s own hatreds, and the unwillingness of others to bear responsibility for their own actions. (If you build a world with active weather systems, you will get tropical storms and you will have active volcanoes. Deciding to move into a main hurricane path because it’s so nice there the rest of the time, or growing crops in the rich volcanic soil, does not put Him at blame when you get killed by the storm surge or the eruption. Fatal illnesses and random acts of violence are a much tougher question, for which I don’t have an answer. And finally, “It says in God’s Word that we’re supposed to bash fags” deserves exactly the same response as “The little voices told me to kill, kill KILL!”)
Unconditional love is not insanity, it is the norm, it is what we are. Most people don’t know, can’t comprehend, this unconditional love because they have never experienced it. So it is understandable they will react with fear when told about it. We seem to always fear the unknown. There are two ways, in my opinion to experience it, and therefor understand and comprehend it. The first is practice it. The second is to have a spiritual experience. Since experiences of the spiritual kind can not be turned on or off at will, practice is the better path. Many times practice will eventually lead to a spiritual experience. Then, there is the moment of death when all experience God’s unconditional love.
Religion is man-made, spirituality is our birthright. It is up to us personally to seek the path of love, no one can do for us what we must do for ourselves.
You realize that you are contradicting yourself ?
And unconditional anything is still insanity.
I have always liked this column from the Master on the reasons why Christianity became so popular, in particular the following section:
I believe what Cecil is saying here regarding the propositions and worldview of Christianity is summed up neatly by the phrase “God loves you”. It is, admittedly, dangerous to interpret or paraphrase the Master in this way, but it’s my opinion nonetheless.
There is no God.
:flees: 