The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses

by Søren Kierkegaard

Yes, when you are surrounded by commotion or when you are immersed in diversions, this seems to be almost an exaggeration; there seems to be altogether too great a distance between loving and hating to permit someone to place them so close to one another, in a single breath, in a single thought, in two words that—without subordinate clauses, without parenthetical phrases to produce greater agreement, without even the slightest punctuation mark—follow immediately upon one another. But indeed, as a body falls with infinite speed when placed in a vacuum, so also does the silence out there with the lily and the bird, the solemn silence before God, cause these two opposites to touch and repel one another at exactly the same instant: indeed, they come into existence in the same instant—either to love or to hate.

This seems to me a hideous and wrong-headed simplification. The third way is ambivalence or unknowing. One does not hate god if they feel that entity to be a human fiction.