That love has never actually literally moved a mountain.
What I mean by that is that there is absolutely no evidence for Love having any sort of physical character apart from if you’re talking about chemicals released into your bloody stream when you are in love.
Yeah, but it’s moved me. not that i’m as big as a mountain, but i don’t know…i’ve done some INCREDIBLEY stupid stupid things that i can swear it’s because i was in love at the time. my gut reaction is that love is a force. but, Guest, to answer you’re uncle’s rants, it is undoubtly a force created/perpetuated by humans. love would not exist if there wasn’t people on this earth. by the standard definition of what is a God suppose to be (i.e. more powerful then men) love cannot = god
If love is between two people how can it have anything to do with god, unless that god exists on pantheistic terms?
Haven’t we all, sigh.
They ( your family) are saying that with out humans a form of “love” as we humans understand it would exist. I do not think it would.
Love, Compassion, Lust. all human ideas to explain human emotions. Animals have no compassion for each other nor other animals. A mother may care for her children but is that not instinct? Perhaps english has combined wrong words. There is Care for, I may take care of something but i may not care if it existed.
So i say that love is just a form of communication between people. It is also part of my hard wired instincts and my drives & wants.
BluTGI,
I agree, but more to the point - a word is not an idea, we attribute ideas to words. There’s an important difference there. Secondly, I also agree that we invented to words to articulate our emotions to ourselves, hence human ideas explaining human emotions - but, just because we invent a language (s) to help explain our feelings/emotions to each other, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t something else out there that has the same feelings/emotions (ie. animals).
BluTGI stated:
Maybe you could further elucidate upon the above quote, for as it stands now I must humbly disagree with it. I have seen animals defend each other, support each other, have compassion for each other, are loyal to each other, play with each other, and even pout, ignore, and stay away from each other when one knows they have done something wrong or when one of them is in a bad mood. I can say I have seen this in both dogs and cats. To clarify my disagreance with your quote, let me expound upon what I am trying to say. I may be wrong about animals being able to feel and experience all of the above, hence I am not saying you are wrong. All I am saying is that I am not convinced that it is as clear cut as ANIMALS HAVE NO COMPASSION FOR EACH OTHER. Furthermore, we just don’t know about animals emotions enough to investigate imperically whether animals have emotions or not, nor can we investigate whether their emotions are like or different from ours. From what I have seen and experienced (which could be faulty) I am of the opinion that animals do have emotions much like if not exactly like ours.
BluTGI stated:
I think I see what you are saying, but in order to make your statements more vivid, you should really elaborate on them. Especially when talking about a topic such as love, which is so confusing and ambiguous that people have spent entire life times trying to articulate it and failed. Many of us get stuck in trying to decipher the myriad degrees of love, depths, and kinds of love (love for a pet, love for parents, and love for a significant other, and so on). If you have a view point on all of these, I would love to hear it. If love is communication than its one of the greatest miscommunications in the world.
What’s your take?
Isn’t this religious love different to interpersonal love? I think its supposed to be a love for life and the world and all of god’s creations really. And if you believe in God, you can have a love for Him and all his creations. Like an omnipotent love.
I think that love = god is an absurd attitude. I mean if you’re religious you love god, but there are so many kinds of love and they don’t have any religious background, so it must not be. Although love can influence a person to do extra ordinary things!
I believe Don Cupitt deal with this idea in his book Sea of Faith. It’s an anti-realist perception of God which is a far cry from classical theist view of God of the God of the philosophers yet I’m not sure we can rule it out straight away as invalid or totally unconnected.
Some of you are saying love isn’t God because you can have love without God but you are just saying something is true because that’s what you believe. That’s not an argument but an assertion of faith or belief. You have to provide arguments if you want to prove a point.
Still, i’m not an expert on Cupitt but I know he writes about God=love
I would say that god=love is a fair estimation of the truth since reality is not perfect.
'ello all,
I think, in general, non-Christians have a limited understanding of the Christian “love”. The word “love”, in its Christian form, has a meaning beyond that warm fuzzy “feeling” (although it can be a part of it). It is also about caring and even, at times, putting up with people and treating everyone with kindness and respect (in a “loving” way). In its most powerful manifestation, love takes form of self-sacrifice in place of others, as demonstrated by Jesus Christ who, Christians believe, died to pay for the price of our “sins”, which is eternal death.
I admire the simplicity in your logic. First of all, you conclude that it is entirely of human origin, probably based on the evidence present in the biological functions of our bodies. I would argue that this is only one side of the coin - it doesn’t prove the non-existance of the other side! Secondly, you conclude (based on the above assumptions) that love would therefore not exist without people. Basically, you’re saying that it would be unobservable in our part without our own existence, through which God supposedly manifests himself. This sounds fairly obvious. Again, it doesn’t disprove the existence of a greater spiritual force from which “love” flows into us. The final statement relies on the above two statements which are, as I have hopefully demonstrated, logical fallacies. Unfortunately, double negatives here don’t produce a positive. 
I think this is an over simplification, combined with a misunderstanding of the concept of Christian love. If God did indeed create all human beings, it makes sense that we would all be capable of love, as it would be a matter beyond the “religious” boundaries. Plus, if God is the objective Truth, it would make sense that he is manifested in various settings, albeit in incomplete forms (and no, I’m not saying that the Christian God is a pantheistic God. A Christian would say that the Christian God is the only “complete” Truth, whereas there are parts of that Truth in every belief - so pantheism in the eye of a Christian, by this definition, is a reflection of this truth).
TTM
If god is omnibenevolent while being at the same time goodness, truth and love then it’s plain that the good and right thing to do (as accounts of god’s behaviour show us) is to project upon the world through your actions what you are, i.e. to obey your own will to power.
I don’t quite catch the logic in your statement. Are you suggesting that the best possible action you can take is to ignore your interdependence on your fellow human beings and try to be the king of the hill, while trying to kick off the others in the process? What do you gain from that? Inflation of pride, and destruction of our society. Whooee, let’s try and reasess that one, shall we? 
You’d do well to note that Nietzsche was a very proud and “hard” person. I wouldn’t place my future, or the possible eternal life, on the beliefs of such an unstable person.
TTM
TMM, i’m bashful that you admire my simplicity, but i will still clarify my position.
i’m working from the assumption that god does not exist. i’m not going to debate this here, so let’s accept that god does exist. if so, then that means that an entity must be ominopetent (all powerful and all knowing). my assumption is that love is a feeling, or an emotion, that humans feel. the emotional state of god is arguable, i’m not going to touch that, but it is certain that a human can certainly feel love towards a god. so a human gives god love – how this love is created is irrelevant. thus, love can be a part of god, but love cannot be entirely god. hence god cannot = love but love can = god. simply because a=b doesn’t mean b=a.
now to your post:
even with my limited non-christian understanding, this assumption of love still fits with my arguement.
right, i did assume that, but my above arguement is willing to accept the idea that god creates love. still doesn’t mean that god is only love.
one last thing, about your neitzsche reference to grave disorder, i don’t think gd is basing his life on that philosopher. i agree with your general statement, however,
and would even go so far as to say that i wouldn’t place my future in anyone’s hands but my own.
“I don’t quite catch the logic in your statement. Are you suggesting that the best possible action you can take is to ignore your interdependence on your fellow human beings and try to be the king of the hill, while trying to kick off the others in the process? What do you gain from that? Inflation of pride, and destruction of our society. Whooee, let’s try and reasess that one, shall we?”
I’m not advocating what I said, I’m saying that it can be considered moral by christians because their model for perfection is egoistic in he/she/it’s projection of it’s own favoured values on the world.
#1 god is love
#2 love is blind
therefore god is blind.
You ask for an argument, against the assumption that god=love.
First you must ask what or Who god is
God is many things, and all things, not one, and only one thing.
Love is a part of god, the part he chose to express in word to his son.
Mat17:5 This is my son whom I love
Love is the Feeling, he wanted us to express, above all others
The order God, me, you
Can I love you , without loving me first?
Can I love me , with out recieving the love from god first?
God is love
What the f*#k is that s&!t??!!
Any of you who know me know that, even being the devout Catholic that I am, I hate that bullcrap!!!
You don’t need Nietzsche, you can look at St. Thomas Aquinas to disprove that. Lets look at it logically and objectivly.
God = love. God is love. That means he is absolutely and completely love. His being and His essence are both 100% love. That means he has no other attributes. God can’t be just, man (the incarnation), omnipotent, etc because he is love and love is his entire being. Do you see how absurd the statement of “God is love” is? One might say that I’m taking it to an extreme, but that statement already is an extreme.
Yes, Love is an attribute of love. Yes God’s love is different from interpersonal love. Yes, you have to experiance His love for yourself to truely understand what God is about (not what god is), but the topic here is to disprove God=love.
This isn’t about the nature or essence of God, nor is it the essence or nature of love. It’s whether or not God=Love.
We can argue about semantics all we want. Each word is subject to personal interpretation. We can’t agree on definition of God, so what’s the point of associating it with another word we can’t agree on.
Pretty pointless I say.
I don’t agree with you. Being the supreme Catholic that you are, I’m sure you’ve read thousands of times saint John’s first letter. Let me remind you a little bit of chapter four (most precisely, 1Jn 4,16):
“God is love
and anyone who lives in love lives in God,
and God lives in him.”
So how can you manage to deny something straight out of the Bible and still say you are as catholic as the pope himself?
(I’m kidding a little, but I do think it points out a serious thing. I’m an attempt of a catholic myself -I try hard to be one-, and the above is the only ‘definition’ of God that I’ve found in the New Testament. It’s the only thing I’m sure of, because)
it’s true that we can’t get to an agreement on what the word ‘God’ means. It’s even ridiculous to try. But I know one thing: If it weren’t for God’s love passed on to me by other people, I’d already be dead. So I’m quite sure he exists and he’s full of love. That I can’t even think to be false. It’s more obvious to me than ‘I think therefore I am’.
“God is love”, whatever it means, is necesarily a christian principle.
I think we can discuss primarily what that sentence is trying to say, before we start saying what we think about it: ¿Is it a definition? ¿Is it the statement of a characteristic of God? ¿Is it a statement about the way God treats saint John and his pals?
We should try to understand as precisely as we can, and then start talknig.
I dunno. It’s just my view.
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