Well, you're the ones presenting a demanding God who insists that we follow and worship Him. I think that God is too small. A transcendent God would not care one way or the other. After all, God is God whether we recognize it or not.
God only cares that we worship him, because a) that's what wewere made to do,
So you worship a being that put you here solely for the purpose of being worshipped? That doesn't make sense.
and b) that's the only thing that will fulfill us and make us happy.
Ultimately, yes. And that is the point. God does not want us to be miserable; God's plan is for us to live in joy, peace, harmony, abundance.
God alone must be worshiped, because God is *the only thing worth worshiping*.
I experience God more than I worship God. It's a subtle difference, but a significant one.
God is all there is. There can't be anything else.
they are in one of two states: in allegiance to God, or separated from Him forever.
If God is Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, then it is not possible to be separated from God. The bigtgest sin is the illusion of separation.
Here's the train of logic that leads to where orthodox Christianity sits. God is sovereign over all things. Christ is the son of God.
And if God made us, so are we.
Keep in mind that the "demanding" God seems so to outsiders, less so the deeper you get into the mystery of Christianity. I agree, for example, about God's transcendance, but he *does* care whether we worship Him or not, not so much for His own glory (God is perfectly humble, ironically!) but because He loves us with a passion that is deeper than any love even between a mother and child or husband and wife. But your last statement is dead on. My apologies that I thought you were arguing otherwise.
I experience God more than I worship God. It's a subtle difference, but a significant one.
Ok. But here's what I wonder. God is so full of life and love, so glorious, so great and terrible, so powerful, so infinite, that it would be unthinkable to experience Him and not worship Him. I suspect if we scratched beneath the surface level of how you "experience" God, you might well be closer to the worship camp than you expect. To me, even if God had done nothing else but form this stunningly gorgeous world, He would be worthy of us falling on our faces before Him.
If God is Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, then it is not possible to be separated from God. The bigtgest sin is the illusion of separation.
Of course in a sense you're 100% right. It *is* impossible ultimately, particularly since every instant we are being held in existence solely due to His Will. If He were to separate Himself from us absolutely, we vanish--because there is nothing we have that does not take its origin and source from Him. "Apart from Me, you are nothing"
But to tweak your last statement, that's indeed what sin is--it is a separation (and illusory in a certain very limited sense that we've touched on above), but it is willed nonetheless! Creatures like men retain free will, and thus they are free to will a "separation" which is both impossible and futile. They can ignore God, spit upon God, despise God, and proclaim their total independence from Him, but yet their very existence continues to depend on Him. That is the bitter irony of Hell: the damned know that what they seek is utterly impossible, but yet they will it anyway. If we couldn't choose to do that, silly as it is, we wouldn't really have any free will to speak of would we?
Christ is the Son of God. And if God made us, so are we.
I certainly understand what you're saying and believed that very thing myself up until a few years ago. But since then I've come to understand that Christianity is a great deal more specific about the nature of Christ than just a vague "sonship". When Christianity says "Son of God" it means more than just Christ taking His origin from God. We profess in the Creed that Christ was *begotten of the Father* and *of the same substance of God*--that he shared the fullness of the divine nature. The difference between God creating us and begetting Christ can be analogized as the difference between a man carving a statue and having a son. The statue and the son both came from the man--but only one of them shared his nature. We are the statues of God, formed from the slime of the earth--Christ is His only-begotten Son hypostatically joined to a human nature.
More later if I can. I'm enjoying this exchange (as you can tell by my longwindedness) :)