Love is the situation that exists when another person's happiness is essential to your own. I love my wife, thus I cannot be happy when she is miserable.
The nebulous feeling that most human beings have for God cannot be called 'love' in any meaningful sense ('slavish adoration manifesting as quivering fear' comes closer, I think). Taking the Bible at its word that God has emotional states, the notion that the happiness of God can in any wise affect my own is ludicrous on the face of it. Similarly, there isn't anything I can do to increase or decrease the happiness of an all-powerful, pan-existent Being - if God has emotions, he must logically have all of them, running at full capacity all of the time (how it is possible for a supreme being to be supremely happy and supremely sad at the same time is a topic for another thread).
So, when a believer says, 'I love God', the statement is semantically null. Most likely, they mean (though they may not realize it) that they love the idea of God, which is rather a different kettle.
Boru
The nebulous feeling that most human beings have for God cannot be called 'love' in any meaningful sense ('slavish adoration manifesting as quivering fear' comes closer, I think). Taking the Bible at its word that God has emotional states, the notion that the happiness of God can in any wise affect my own is ludicrous on the face of it. Similarly, there isn't anything I can do to increase or decrease the happiness of an all-powerful, pan-existent Being - if God has emotions, he must logically have all of them, running at full capacity all of the time (how it is possible for a supreme being to be supremely happy and supremely sad at the same time is a topic for another thread).
So, when a believer says, 'I love God', the statement is semantically null. Most likely, they mean (though they may not realize it) that they love the idea of God, which is rather a different kettle.
Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson
