Lib, why do you focus so much on love and ignore all the other emotions? Where did all the other emotions come from? Did the Devil create hatred and all the other negative, destructive feelings?
I don’t know who was the first person to say “God is Love,” but how do you know this person was not speaking metaphorically?
Jab, coming from someone who didn’t know, that is a most excellent question, and one I used to ask myself. For what it’s worth, I’d like you to know that you’ve been pretty inspirational to me here lately. You’ve taught me some lessons about what comprises a good heart.
As to Love, what I learned some time ago, and what I’ll share with you now, is that the term used in the New Testament, the Love talked about by Jesus, is not the emotional kind of love, but rather a thing more akin to “charity”. The Greek word is agape (ah-GAH-pay). That’s the reason I always capitalize it in references to God’s Love, or the Love that God is. It’s not a brotherly love, or a romantic love, or an erotic love. It isn’t an emotion at all, but a metaphysical state.
I try scrupulously to avoid quoting Paul here, but he did pretty well nail Love. This is the so-called Love Chapter of the Bible, I Corinthians 13:
Thanks for the earnest inquiry, Jab. Such curiosity and respect for the knowledge and experience of others is the hallmark of the excellent scientist, the kind who doesn’t just verify the work of others but makes his own discoveries.
Oh, so NOW you tell us!! :mad: See what happens when you fail to inform people what context you are using? I’ve heard about agape before, but since you did not tell us until now, I was laboring under a conclusion made from incomplete information.
Thanks a lot, Lib. :wally
Fine, so he meant it literally. In the absence of any empirical evidence, it does not, in any way, mean that he was correct. As I told you before, just because a philosophy is inetellectually and emotionally satisfying, it does not meant that it is factually correct.
Glad to help, Jab. That’s what this board is for, fighting ignorance of such things as Greek.
And as I told you before, that is certainly an intellectually and emotionally satisfying way to look at things. 
The bit I have trouble with is “God is love”.
Well, OK, if you say so, if that’s how you like to use the term, fine.
But most people who believe and worship something they refer to as “god” do not believe themselves to be worshipping simply a synonym for a commonly experienced human emotion. God is generally referred to as some sort of entity, with all sorts of opinions and actions attributed to him.
I wonder if jhyll06 would be happy to stand up at the debate and say “I define god as being the same thing as love. I love my mum. Therefore there is such a thing as god. Thank you.”
Unarguable, but gets to the bottom of the issue about as well as saying “Aeroplanes are UFO’s, aeroplanes exist, UFO’s exist” and thereby resolving that debate as well.
Incredible. To repeat:
As to Love, what I learned some time ago, and what I’ll share with you now, is that the term used in the New Testament, the Love talked about by Jesus, is not the emotional kind of love, but rather a thing more akin to “charity”. The Greek word is agape (ah-GAH-pay). That’s the reason I always capitalize it in references to God’s Love, or the Love that God is. It’s not a brotherly love, or a romantic love, or an erotic love. It isn’t an emotion at all, but a metaphysical state.
Libertarian, I think you missed the point here. When you originally posited the idea you said
Arnold Winkelried’s point was that if “God” is the unconditional giver of life then it is also the unconditional giver of death. “God” is therefore the very source of Hate. And therefore
This does not require one to worship hate. The entity that you describe and is generally credited with inventing life and death is also the source of Love and Hate. Therefore
Must be as valid an argument as
Furthermore your original expression is flawed. You use the term god and capitalize it and thereby imply that the only possible concept of a divine being is in fact Yahweh. The correct statement would be
All Love stems from Yahweh - Love exists - therefore Yahweh exists.
I think you would have a hard time supporting this initial premise. There are many people in the world who seem to know as well as you what this Love with a capitol L thing is and yet don’t agree with you that the source of this Love is Yahweh.
I am assuming that it is Yahweh that you are referring to when you say God. If I am incorrect and it is some other deity that you mean please correct me.
Then he was mistaken. I’m glad you told me because I missed that point if in fact that was the point he was making. Life comes by His Grace; death comes by our decision.
I disagree. That’s like saying that a beacon — a source of light — is also a source of darkness.
The “deity” I refer to is the one in your heart.
From your earlier posts I had assumed that it was also the one in the Christian Bible since that is invariably the source you quote whenever questioned about the subject.
Since you only seem to credit the portions of that book that agree with your personal take on Christianity I don’t know if you adhere to the whole Yahweh created the universe thing. If you do not that is fine but if you do then I must point out that Yahweh included Hate and Death in the universe and therefore must be the ultimate source for both just as for Love/Life.
And I must restate my last point. You have now stated several times that the Christian deity that you espouse is the source of all Love. I have no problem with you following any path you like but to claim exclusivity to such a universal concept is to denigrate any path but your own. Love (upper and lower case, defined however you like) is encompassed by many paths and is not your sole property.
And I disagree with your analogy. It is more like saying the sun is the source of both life giving light and warmth but also harmful radiation. When you only have one source then everything must come from that source. To only recognize the parts you like is a form of denial.
I think you’re stuck in a sort of comparative religion vortex. Jesus is not a Christian. I quote Him because I trust Him. I don’t claim to be privvy to anything special, as His message is simple enough to be understood by children. I feel a much closer spiritual kinship to the loving atheist, like Gaudere, than I do to the cold activist “Christian”.
“Many will call me ‘Lord’ saying, ‘Did we not do mighty miracles in your name?’ And I will say, 'Get away from me, you evildoers! I never knew you!” — Jesus
Though I understand your sun analogy, it doesn’t describe the God I worship. He is Perfectly Good. He gives off no “harmful radiation”. Death is a choice, freely taken, to turn away from His Love.
You dishonor my father, who definitely did not choose to die. He most definitely wanted to live far beyond his 52 years. It was not his fault he had a stroke.
You further dishonor all those others who died who wished to live.
Hmmm…
Allow me a few assertions on a more generally accepted view of God (by theists, that is – David or Czarcasm will be along with a wisecrack about how “generally accepted” it is if I don’t caveat it!).
First, in very general terms, God is seen is some sort of entity ontologically prior to the physical universe. Without getting into philosophical gibberish, read that as “outranking,” “superior to,” “there first,” and a few other choice terms that are incorrect synonyms but partial approximations.
Second, God is seen as the creator of “good” things but only indirectly of “evil” things. The analogy here, which keeps offending people, is that without light, there can be no shadow. Gloom, yes, but no shadow. So it would be accurate to say that a lamp creates shadows, but more valid to say it creates light, and the shadows are created by the absence of the light. Now run this into an ethics scenario, and God creates good, evil being the result of the absence of good. (And for “light” to be meaningful, there must be darkness to contrast with it; for “good” to be meaningful, evil must exist.)
Saying “God is love” is not creating an equivalence but an attribution of characterization to Him – His spiritual presence is such that the term love (in the agape sense) is the preeminent characteristic one notes.
I will grant that the numerous objections raised as to why this world is as it is, when such a loving God could do something else, have some strong negatives on that imagery. All I can do is say that those who have known Him fairly unanimously characterize Him in that way, although some of them go on to ascribe to Him some apparently highly unloving deeds.
And Lib. is precisely on target as regards the theological explication of God’s love here: Never an emotion, but a state of willed caring and self-sacrificing compassion.
That’s the title line from a song by Don Francisco, which is well worth the listening to (as is the album it’s found on).
Well two points. Firstly, I don’t think that what you say here makes much difference. To rephrase myself to take account of your above comment: "But most people who believe and worship something they refer to as “god” do not believe themselves to be worshipping simply a synonym for “a metaphysical state, a thing more akin to “charity””. My point still holds, even if you change what you mean by love (Love) slightly. YOU may only mean thatby “God/Love”, but that doesn’t alter my point, which was talking about “most people”, not you.
Secondly, I think that you are (and I say this with respect, you are clearly a polite and rational person) performing a slight verbal sleight of hand. You are substituting a commonly used word “love” for a difficult concept that you call “Love” but using the former to get agreement with the “God is Love, Love exists, God exists” progression.
If you say instead “God is a metaphysical state more akin to charity, a metaphysical state more akin to charity exists, therefore God exists” then I think you lost me, and most people, along while back along the way.
Jab:
The fact that you made this statement, “You dishonor my father, who definitely did not choose to die. He most definitely wanted to live far beyond his 52 years. It was not his fault he had a stroke,” immediately after quoting (!) the definition of death, “Death is a choice, freely taken, to turn away from His Love,” means you somehow skipped over something.
Your father has a loving heart. He is not dead. He is alive.
The so-called death that is cellular decay is trivial. The so-called life that is cellular reproduction is equally trivial. True Life and death are spiritual, not physical.
New Testament Greek uses different words for different kinds of love. English does not. If I am to write in English, I must use its vocabulary and clarify where necessary. If the board were composed of an unchanging set of users, then the many prior explanations I’ve given of Agape Love would have sufficed. As it is, the arrival of new people necessitates explaining it again. This is not verbal sleight of hand, but rather is easily understood in context by those willing to understand. The “-” symbol in math means three different things: negation, subtraction, and inversion. No one pretends confusion among these. -(2) - 5 = -7.
God is Love, but God is not exclusively Love, though Love is the foundation of all that God is. Further, you may believe (as many do) that various loves exist, but not the kind of Love that God is. Arnold’s syllogism holds only when Love is the Giving of Life, the ultimate charitable act.
(Since I have no other name for the god you revere I will continue to say Yahweh since it is just too confusing to refer to a particular entity with a generic noun.)
Well I understand that for you “turning away” from Yahweh is death but you must realize that that is not a universally accepted definition. Or are you indeed under the impression that “The Libertarian Faith” ™ that you espouse is the only valid path for any human being who wishes enlightenment? (And since you seem to be the only one on this path what does that say about the rest of the universe?)
For me life IS. Death is just a sleep before life returns like the sun in spring. The concept of your everlasting DEATH is absolutely alien to me. Nothing ends. Nothing begins.
I feel that for a human to see the cosmos as a series of linear events is horribly limiting and potentially harmful. Reality is circular not straight line. Death, whether organic or spiritual, should be seen as a learning experience not a termination of some arbitrary series of events.
And love or Love is also a human thing. There may or may not be things apart from man but there is nothing beyond man. Each of us is capable of agape not because some mystical ether breathed agape into us but because we each have the potential to reach a level of understanding where agape is the natural result.
I am in no way denying the validity you see in your path. I am just trying to point out that other humans have equally acceptable explanations for the effect that you observe in the universe. You seem to suggest that the rest of us owe everything to the god you have created and that our own perceptions of reality are in error. How is that better than the “cold” Christians that you refer to? It is enough for me that you perceive the absolute through a cultural and personal lens that varies a great deal from mine. There is after all no ONE TRUE PATH. You say you have a personal faith but you pass that personal faith as if it were a universal truth and not just Libertarian’s truth.
And I say “god you have created” intentionally because I have never heard anyone else speak of such a being as you seem to worship
Good heavens. I couldn’t be more remiss than to leave such an impression. Either my expository skills are greatly lacking (which I willingly concede) or else your inference is born of an abridgement taken from this isolated context of a particular small attribute set with respect to my beliefs. Whichever, I’m glad you make the points you do so I can set the record straight.
I am describing here merely my subjective experience with God, and I gladly concede that your experience will be different. You cannot experience my consciousness, nor I yours. Each is a closed frame of reference with respect to the other. It is a given, as far as I’m concerned, that the One And The Same God will manifest to every person differently. Love is one among the many attributes of God, the one that matters most to me because it serves as a reasonable basis for all His other attributes: Goodness, Tolerance, Forgiveness, and the like. I do not believe that Love precludes anger, for example, but I do believe that it precludes hate.
I have no interest in any pissing contest. I don’t contend that my God is better than yours. And perhaps most importantly, I do not believe that you need experience God in the same way I do in order to validate your own ablatively separate experience. But what I do believe is that when we all see Him fully, we will all realize that, all along, He was the same Love Whom we all adored. You call Him Yahweh; I call Him Love. These labels will be meaningless when we go home.
In fact, I believe that it is possible that a person may deny the very existence of God, based on his own personal experience, and yet recognize Him upon beginning his new Life. That’s why I say that Gaudere, an avowed atheist, is in heaven. She has a loving heart, and despite her lack of faith in Him, she will recognize Him once she sees Him as That Which has lived in her heart all along.
For me, it all comes down to this. When we take on our new Life, unencumbered by the amoral material context of this trivial universe, we will all encounter a Perfectly Loving Being. There will be those of us who run to Him, recognizing whatever we called whatever we treasured our whole lives. And there will be those who run away, terrified of what they always feared, the one Entity that is a Threat to their worship of evil, hate, and murder. He will not judge us; we will judge ourselves. Death is merely the decision we make to turn away from the Giver of Life. It is not the end of our existence, but merely the end of our charade. We will go on with that which we have freely chosen: His absence.
I hope that clears things up. I do not believe that a person must voice a belief that Jesus is God. I am confident enough that, upon seeing Him, they will not begrudge His Godness, but rather, will rejoice just as Love rejoices in Love. The reason I have chosen Jesus as my “spokesperson”, so to speak, is that I find His comprehension and explanation to be so incredibly clear. Toward the judgement I just described, He says, “Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”
That’s how I see it too. Whether they’ve called Him Yahweh, the Goddess Hafta, Allah, or the Great Nothing is irrelevant. What is revelant is whether they will accept His Love whenever they finally see it.
You do realize, don’t you, that there is no good evidence for reincarnation?
Too bad. We have limits whether we like it or not. Our biggest limitation is our mortality. Once you’re dead, it’s over, it’s finished, the story is written, THE END, and there is no sequel.
Jab:
Are those subjective observations or objective declarations? If the former, have a nice day; if the latter, I’d be interested in seeing your proof.
I can’t logically prove my existence to you (or so you say) so any attempt to prove anything else would be a waste of time.
**
So who said anything about reincarnation. You put WAY too much emphasis on the individual.
The sequels are born every day. Again,you put WAY too much emphasis on the individual.
Q: What happens after we die?
A: Life goes on.