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Friendship isn't a zero-sum game. The fact that I love one friend does not and should not take away from my other friendships. The problem comes in when a person (or a god) forces us to believe that our love is a scarce, nonrenewable resource. Friendship is an opportunity for growth, mutual gain, and renewal.
My life is mine! And if someone threatens my life, they don't love me.
For when I am weak, then I am strong.
My strength does not detract from your strength, nor does it detract from anyone else's strength. That's not how strength behaves. But in Christianity, my weakness was highly valued. My weakness was the key to God's power. And any strength I displayed was seen as a flaw in that world. I was in a zero-sum game where I had to exchange my strength for God's strength.
Again, this is not how strength behaves! God should be able to be strong without our sacrifice (unless he's some kind of strength vampire which would make sense, not in a way that actually makes sense but in a "oh, right, none of this makes sense" way).
Christianity really messed with my definitions of words. I keep repeating to myself "For when I am strong, I am strong." It seems so intuitive: x=x. But my intuition was screwed up by the twisted perception I was raised in. Now, I have better tools to feel, value, and nurture my strength. There's still a lot of room to grow, but hey, that's just what being alive is like!
I was reading today again about crab mentality, which I know you've seen a lot even if you haven't heard that term before.
Basically, it boils down to an atittude that says "if I can't have it, neither can you."
It gets its name from how crabs behave when they are in a bucket.
It's said that if you put one crab in a bucket, it can claw its way up and out pretty easily. But if you put a bunch of them in there, they start attacking each other in ways that make it extremely unlikely that anyone escapes, effectively trapping each other.
