Once upon a time it was asked among the members of our beautiful shining hilltop gauntlet outpost … I digress …
What is love? Do we love something in the other(s) that makes them lovable to us (even if we never loved before), or is it something in us that makes us a loving person (no matter the qualities of the other)?
Which is the correct question:
What’s not to love about the other?
Why are they such a loving person to everyone?
What does love look like?
Treating the other person as self, regardless of how it makes you feel, though good feelings may result or be always present.
Denying that each valuer is intrinsically valuable (an end in itself) and in need of connections based on that knowledge, and instead showing preference to others with common affiliations.
What if the only way to unlock our development is to acknowledge we have the same deepest needs, and seek to meet others’ needs who are likewise seeking?
I mean. If they’re not seeking… that would be consent violation… wouldn’t it. If you isolated from others because you concluded no one was seeking…would you pray for God to send you a seeker who won’t write you off as not seeking?
ok wait. Glittery stuff is not necessarily gold, but even gold is not necessarily gold, depending on whatever gold is supposed to mean in this context. He who gets the gold yada yada yada …not what we’re talking about. Just in case that needed to be stated, and also this: there is no “deserving“ self=other love (not to be conflated with sex). [Pretty sure we understand what I mean by love governs all the kinds of loves and not just the ones (not necessarily) involving sex.]
The point is… boundaries do not mean goal posts towards deserving… or whatever. I am under the weather & my words are discombobulated.
Having grown up in a strictly JW household,
Love was basically God’s commandment, and if you don’t obey,
you get killed, eventually.
Fear of God, mixed with “love” of God,
was the basis for love itself, at that time.
That form of love was corrupt.
When I got rid of that corruption,
i was left with appreciation.
Appreciation is the good kind of love.
You can appreciate someone or something,
without having to sacrifice things.
I think there are many loves and feelings.
But the positive feelings we can have,
even when they can be highjacked by religion,
they still can exist once you get out of that religion.
JWs you grew up with said they were going to kill you if you didn’t love as God commanded? That sounds pretty extreme. How specific were the commands? Was there a timeline to the “eventually”? That sounds more extreme than any JWs’ experience I’ve heard about. I agree that would definitely be corrupt. The worst I heard was they can’t drink caffein or get blood transfusions, and they get excluded from their church super easy. But the church (not JW) I mostly grew up in was legalistic in other ways.
So once you got free of legalism, which has folks sacrificing things not every (honest) Christian (or muslim, or Jew, or abstinent atheist, etc) sacrifices, like some or all of these: caffein or alcohol (smoking, etc), certain types of health care, sexual relationships before/outside (God-defined) marriage (or even certain practices within marriage), dancing, death metal (etc)… then instead of saying NO… you focused on good, excellent things you appreciate.
I agree we can leave legalism behind — including the sort some atheists proffer, that shames you if you don’t line up with them politically, in your health habits, and so forth. Yeahhh that’s just leftover internalized fundie-ism. Can see it a mile away.
But the Golden Rule love that treats self as other is in every major culture (incl. religion) in history. It transcends worldview, so you don’t have to leave it behind when you paradigm shift.
But I think it does do more than appreciate the other. There is a certain level of respect there, though maybe the respect is based on the appreciation. I think that is the sort of respect (for God) that is not corrupt, because “Perfect love casts out fear.”
But I also think that when evil people (not beyond redemption) harm others unchecked, the good people (none being perfect) who are helpless to stop it do appreciate when someone loving steps in who is scary enough to put an end to it… no? That’s a good scary, I think. The kind God is.
They didn’t threaten to kill me.
The threat was that God would kill me or exclude me from the resurrection.
The golden rule has to do with propriety between selves.
Each person has or is a self.
The self wants mutual things and is willing to do things to get those things.
If self wasn’t real, then the golden rule wouldn’t work.
I think self is a real thing.
Yes, the golden rule acknowledges the selfness of the other (and otherness of the self), and so does not use the other as a means to “get those things” unless “those things” are opportunities to treat the other as self, and self as other.
I’m glad you understand that.
A good God would not willy-nilly kill someone who didn’t need to be stopped from gross violations of self=other.
Also, everyone is getting resurrected. It’s just not necessarily going to be to an awesome situation. They’re going to think it’s awesome, though. They’ve been choosing it their whole life. Anyway, we will all be salted with fire. The Lord disciplines those he loves.
Jesus: I didn’t come to break the law. I came to uphold it (to the Jews)
Jews: the wage of sin is death.
I don’t care about the Bible anymore.
It’s not a book containing truth.
The Greek translation doesn’t even use the term Eros once in the Bible …. Their term for romantic love, instead, love in the Bible translates similar to agape. Though…. God (a man). Hands women put like candy to the corrupt humans.
It’s extremely clear if you read the Bible page to page that sex is sin. Only fallen angels have sex. (Old Testament). Remember Jesus again? “I didn’t come to break the law, I came to uphold it”
Let’s look closer…. “What you do unto the least of you, you do unto me”. That’s means Jesus has all the sex.
That would make Jesus a fallen angel. Jesus does everything being done.
The question here is that someone allows sin to occur when they are all of is and came here to be perfect like his father in heaven is perfect.
I want to add to this post. “Be fruitful and multiply”
We all know god can make humans at will without sperm or eggs. People who have sex, are the unfaithful…. Taken by the fallen angels.
Be fruitful means be as god (no sex), and god seeing our faith will multiply us…. Make new people out of mud sculptures and breathe air into their nostrils to give them life.
Jesus came to fulfill the law & the prophets in his life, death, and resurrection; the law & prophets are summed up in & boil down to the Golden Rule. Agape is love at its fullest, according to the context/type of relationship, not every one of which is sexual. Perfect means merciful.
You don’t have to believe God sculpted us from mud, or even voided, formless “waters” preceding the LIGHT!!!. Stardust, pale blue dot, meat machine, monkeys (er… primates)… silicon… same same. It’s all “stuff” we try to reverse engineer like a bunch o’ monkeys writing Shakespeare.
By the way …can you imagine if Jesus came to earth as a woman? The feminists (including those who identify as men) would still be pissed off that it was a female God made go through all that crap. Don’t you think slut-shamed Mary’s labor pains & watching her perfect son be publicly rejected & crucified were enough, Ecmandu? Have some compassion.
As a cigarette smoker I have no choice but to violate a rabid anti smokers consent. The rabid anti smokers is violating the consent of all cigarette smokers.
Is that your point?
I’m well aware that NOBODY has a choice not to violate at least someone’s consent!!!
That’s the whole point of the law.
To put God on the stand.
I can go into great detail about playacting universes and hyperdimensional mirror realities.
Both are possible.
It is impossible for us to be posting if we never existed.
That’s impossible.
Hyperdimensional mirror realities and play acting realities are not only possible, but feasible.
He wasn’t playacting you/us when he died in your/our place, like the puppets in What About Bob, and I get that you’re saying you didn’t want horrible things to happen to him. And if you think there is no one who needs to know they are loved despite their crap, it is understandable that his demonstration of it makes no sense to you.
If you were God & wanted to communicate the same, do you think anyone would understand you, everyone would misunderstand you, or only some would understand? Would that stop you from communicating it? Would you just make a bunch of rainbows instead?