A FATHER IS SOMEONE who loves you because you are his, only because you are his, who knows the worst about you (because knowing he loves you, you tell him everything), and who loves you the more because you need to be loved the more, being simple enough to know what you are in yourself.
A father is someone who is “conceited” enough to believe you are the best child in the whole world, not because you have done great things, but just because you are his, only because you are his. And this is why he never tries to use you to show off with and doesn’t get upset by your failures. That is why you can do anything he wishes because he only wants what you can do. In a word, a father is someone who belongs to God and that is why you know you belong to God too, because you belong to your father.
When you have a father like that, it becomes possible to believe in a God who loves you only because you are His—and that makes you rightly independent of your human father and an equal with him.
What is a Father?
--Contributed anonymously
Not everyone, and perhaps nowadays few anymore
can say he or she has had a father--or a father surrogate-- anything like the father described in the lines that follow.
But anyone who has is blessed indeed, for the
way we see God the Father is only too often
a function of the kind of earthly
father we have had.
Why Are Some People Atheists?
v v v
THE PSYCHOLOGIST PAUL VITZ, commenting on the "widespread assumption throughout much of our intellectual community that belief in God is based on all kinds of irrational, immature needs and wishes," has a telling way of turning the tables on intellectuals who think that "atheism or skepticism [in contrast] flows from a rational, grown-up. non-nonsense view of things as they actually are."
In his book, Faith of the Fatherless, Vitz attributes the atheirism and skepticism of figures like Nietzsche, Hume, Schopenhauer, Hobbes, Voltaire, H.G. Well's, Freud, and Sartre to the fact that, "in every case we find a weak, dead, or abusive father." In the case of Freud, he was ashamed of his father for indifference and weakness in failing to stand up to anti-semitic taunts, and even accused him of sexual perversion. Not inconsequentuially, Freud placed "hatred of the father as the center of his psychology." Generalizing, Vitz suggests that rather than theism being a project of irrational need and desire, atheism is a projection of a mind that, for one reason or another, disdains and rejects their human father.
Below are two limericks that make the point poetically, contributed anonymously.
There was a young man named Freud,
Whose spiritual life was destroyed
By the thought of a father
Who didn't even bother
To let himself be annoyed.
:
An elegant playboy named Sartre
Who said, "Pray what's the use of a pater?
It's true that you need one
If only to seed one,
But I'd rather have a self-starter
