This-essay is a7909302.htm which is available at the web-site www.essayz.com. See more notes at the bottom. Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay By-Months By-Years By-Words Webs of Like-&-Un-Like ESSAYS <==> Like-&-UN-Like This-One ========================================================== %PURPOSE OF LAW 790930 The proper purpose of law is to serve God. God is Love. Love's highest desire is open and honest dialogue. It is a perversion of law for it to honor itself rather than Love. The proper purpose of law is to facilitate love by holding in check the corruption of persons by power. Abused power inhibits open and honest dialogue. Unchecked personal power tends to express personal biases, favoritisms, and dislikes in ways which inhibit dialogue. The proper role of law is to create a context in which dialogue is make more likely by inhibiting the abuse of personal power. Legalists pervert law and turn it into a tool to amplify their own power, rather than to hold loveless power in check. Those who control and interpret the law come to control the interpret the lives of people who submit to loveless laws. For this reason lovers often repudiate the laws of legalists, as did Jesus. They do not respect laws which occasion alienation, estrangement, the condition of sin. They recognize that such laws do not serve God, but the interests of the human creators of such laws. The legalists' laws are not God's laws. The first and second laws of God are laws of love, and all others flow from love. God's laws are not laws which demand conformity to prescribed life style, behavior patterns, beliefs, rituals, traditions, etc. Those who obey God's laws are not conformists, they are creative people who renew life by being in Love and acting accordingly. God's law of love does not occasion guilt the way that legalists' laws do, for guilt occasions the blockage of dialogue. Guilt is a tool of legalists in the promotion of conformity. Forgiveness is the way of love in the promotion of dialogue between different people who feel secure in trusting each other in contexts of mutual vulnerability. God's law does not occasion judgment of legalism by exposing its futility through the offering of a better alternative. Legalists who cling to their idol refuse to be in dialogue with lovers who perceive the futility of legalism. Thus legalists excommunicate themselves from lovers, including God. They refuse to accept God's unconditional acceptance and so do not enter into open and honest dialogue. The condition they choose is sin. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in www.essayz.com Search for Integrity and Honesty (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================
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