Ha you want factual answers, you got them. Oh we all have our own interpretations, oh my how human of us. :rolleyes:
That is not true. I have not debated if God is Love, or if that is a core belief of Christians or not. I appreciate it if you stop asserting things about me that are not the case.
My discussions in ATMB are about the moderation of the original issue and the ongoing moderation in ATMB and here. I won’t discuss it further here except to note that no one in ATMB has disputed the status of the offending factoid as a factoid, although Marley23 did later give an alternate explanation I found worthy.
The rest of it is just discussion of your actions as a mod both before and after Marley23 came along to clear up the first point.
Thanks to the rest of you for keeping it mostly on topic as requested in the OP anyway, I hope it holds, since the mods of this forum appear to be united with Colibri in refusing my simple request to close the thread.
“Jesus is love”? What the hell does that even mean?
Jesus died for nothing. People are horrible creeps and most Christians are hypocrites.
To a lot of Christians, Jesus isn’t Love so much as SALVATION.
Some would pick Mercy, or some theory of Social Justice, or Hope.
But Salvation is the big one.
Except for the fact that they’ll readily reject any other statement in the Bible that they don’t particular care about. But hey, it’s religion, so we should just give them a pass.
Hell if I know - but according to Colibri, it is the core tenet of faith for many Christians.
I have heard it so often repeated by Christians, that I thought it universal, even if I don’t know precisely what they mean by it depsite my willingness to ask simple rational questions of them.
So the thing that struck me as interesting about Colibri’s assertion was to the “Jesus is loe” part, I have heard that a zillion time. It was the many part, meaning many Christians believe something other than that. I wondered what.
While we are on the topic, and this thread having gone off the rails in post 24 and 26, I might as well ask these too:
1 - Is “Jesus is Love” (or “God is love”) reflexive? IOW, is it equally correct to say “Love is Jesus”, e.g. I don’t really hear that, but as a Christian, if it did, would the meaning be the same? If not, how would it be different, and if so, why does one form predominate in the vernacular? Is it the same in all languages?
2 - In “Jesus is love”, are we using the dictionary definitions? Especially for “is” and “love”, as commonly understood? if not, then what definition is in use, and why was the word “love” chosen to be a placeholder for a concept that was outside the dictionary in the first place? Was it a PR decision?
3 - For languages where the Western concept of “love” doesn’t exist, and/or the verb “to be” is of a completely different nature? How is it expressed? For instance, Japanese has both of those cases I believe. Likely many of the languages the Bible has been translated to have these issues, so are English and small handful of languages more like the exception than the rule?
Note that these questions are still designed to not engender a debate, but rather to shed light on particular facets of a very complex subject. While we are not far off the rails yet, can we steer back there, and keep focused on the questions at hand as though this is GQ even though it is in fact GD?
Thanks from the OP for the efforts and answers so far!
I think the whole eternal damnation fire thingee for not believing his story kind of ruined the “Jesus is love”, for me, anyway. At least when Jehovah had you dead, he only killed you once, and none of this eternal hell-fire business.
Oh, and I didn’t particular like the way he talked to his mother.
Love is another term for all that is good, Jesus again is the personification of love. So it is easy to say Jesus is love, when love is all that is good.
It’d be kinda nice if the Love God would cut us some slack and stop having us all born sinful for something Adam and Eve did 6,000 years ago. Talk about holding a grudge.
Jesus was certainly “something” other than love. For one thing Christian theology holds that he was fully human, so he was flesh and bone, blood and meat and all that. Also, while I’m not a Christian, I’m pretty sure God contains more attributes than just love.
Ever see Time Bandits? When God blows up Evil and leaves chunks of pure evil lying around? Like that, except it’s love instead of evil. When Jesus shows up again, forget crucifixion; this time, let’s blow him up and harvest all those chunks of love!
In another thread the OP said this:
not_alice:
I have lived in the South for 67 years and that has never happened to me – ever. And I live about five miles from the Southern Baptist Convention. I’ve never had a Christian tell me that their “core belief” is that “Jesus is love” even in church.
Well, the “core belief” bit is a paraphrase of what Colibri said that pricked my ears.
But yeah, as a non-Christian, wherever I have lived, but especially now that I live in ultra-red, ultra Bible Belt Central Valley California, when contacted by Christians in evangelizing mode, their opening (and usually closing) gambit has some variation on this theme of Jesus/God is love. Sometimes it might be that, or sometimes it might be
evangelizer: "Jesus loves you. "
not_alice: :dubious:
evangelizer: “Jesus is love”
sometimes it is slightly different, along the lines of “Jesus died for your sins because he loves you”, then follow as above 
Nonetheless, until Colibri became so fanatical about it that he shuffled more than one thread when I asked him to explain, it never really occurred to me to characterize those particular words as the core tenet of faith for many Christians, but having had it pointed out, it makes sense that it is, even if the words themselves don’t make sense to me.
Twisted mind that I have, I was less interested in that, as it seems settled, than in what the rest of Christians believe Jesus is, if not love. I am curious as to the amount and types of divergence to be found here.
And how will we blow him up?
I always thought the way was to wish that he had a heart.
But anyway, back to him being love. Is he a love golem? Or would he be a love elemental? Is there a Dr Love somewhere who brought him to life in his basement laboratory? Of love?
As the OP, can I ask that we keep the focus directly on the question of what Jesus is to some Christians for whom he is not “love”?
I know that this is GD, but I originally posted in GQ and did want to keep as focused as possible. The nature of Jesus’s “love” aspect is not really the question we are discussing. It’s his “not-love” aspect that I want to hear about, particularly from Christians themselves.
Thanks!
The expression typically progresses “Jesus is love”, because they are trying to make a point about the nature of Jesus, not the nature of love. To reverse the terms in English is to define “love” as “Jesus”, which is the opposite of the point.
It’s like saying “a rueben is a sandwich” vs “a sandwich is a rueben”. The first is telling something about the nature of a rueben, namely that it is of the class of things “sandwich”. To reverse it is to declare that a sandwich is of the class of things “rueben”. You can see how it is not reflexive.
The intent generally is to use the words as commonly understood. The point is to declare that Jesus (and also God) is the pure essence of love, that despite our flaws and errors, he loves us, and everyone else. Guess what? Jesus loved Hitler. Yeah, Hitler was a vile, evil, noxious, cruel, racist bastard, but he was still human, and Jesus still loved him. Jesus died for Hitler’s sins, too.
What is confusing is to think how Jesus could be the pure essence of love, and something else as well. But this is a religion that says that Jesus is simultaneously God incarnate in human form, God’s son, and the eternal form of that human after being resurrected in flesh. If they can accept God is his own son, then accepting Jesus as pure love and also something else is child’s play.
Jesus is a lot of things. He’s God incarnate in human form. He is God’s son (is that like a DNA transfer, or what?). He is a teacher and a healer and the example we all should follow. He is the way, the truth, and the light (whatever that means). He is the sacrifice that suffered and paid some metaphysical “price” that somehow has to be paid so that we do not have to pay ourselves if we simply vote “Oh, yeah, I’m with him.” (The metaphysical equivalent of a tax credit, or “I gave at the office.”) He is the Word of God, the Word with God, and God.
All of which makes absolute sense or no sense at all, and is equally as baffling as saying “Jesus is love”.
OK, that sort of makes sense at first glance. Thanks!
But then are you saying that the interpretation is that Jesus is a kind of love, but not all love is Jesus? That is not something inherently obvious in “Jesus is love” as compared to “bananas are fruit”. And it is not what I think is coming across either when people say it. When they elaborate they tend to imply some kinds of other love are godly and some are not, such as that within a heterosexual marriage, and that outside such a sanctioned relationship.
Loves us as we love each other, as it is commonly understood? To be frank, I have seen many people preach “Jesus is love” in one breath while preaching against the love two adults have for each other in the next. The irony would be entertaining were it not that they were working t use that, effectively as it turns out, to restrict the existing civil rights of some people on the basis of their love as it is commonly understood.
How do Christians reconcile that?
Actually the Trinity part doesn’t really confuse me or particularly concern me.
Accepting it, or acting on it, is child’s play?
Why the focus on the love aspect of it though? Colibri suggested it was the core tenet of faith for some, but not all Christians. Why “Jesus is love” and not, the apparently more accurate: “Jesus is, among other things, love”? There is an abundance of emphasis among evangelizers on this particular point - if it is a distortion of what they believe, then why use the simple sentence structure at all?
So now you are saying, no snark intended, that Jesus is no different than a Zen Koan?
Jesus is the great divider and fire bringer.
(Luke 12:49-53)
Is that a core tenet of your (or someone else’s) faith? Is it in adddition to Jesus being love, or as a replacement?