Oh, you can certainly find people who believe that Jesus is more of a judge & warrior than a lover. With some scriptural support too, like this famous quote, attributed to Jesus himself:
“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:34-39 NASB)
The Westborough baptist church mentioned above is an extreme example, but they certainly believe in this style of vengeful & jealous god.
ETA: I’m also sure that there are many Christians who can reconcile the above quote with the idea of a kind and loving savior.
Not_alice, let me also note a small but critical theological point for you.
We say Jesus is love, but not “Love is Jesus” for a reason. There is love which is perverse, twisted, and horrible - love that’s gone so bad it’s almost hate. And of course hatred itself is not so far off from love - two totalizing emotions which suffuse us and becomes part of our very identity, pushing us on to goodness we could never have imagined or draggin us down towards evil we would never have conceived otherwise.
And there is some love which may be inspired by God, but isn’t really aprt of his own nature. C. S. Lewis explored the relationship between Need and Gift love. Both are part of our human makeup, but only one is part of God’s. That does not make Need-love bad. It’s simply not specifically divine in nature. And there are many times when it’s more correct and appropriate for a human being to feel Need-love than Gift-love.
I was giving one example of the non-reflexive nature of the phrasing, perhaps not the best. The simple answer to justify their position is “That’s not love”. A more elaborate answer might be, “homosexuality is a sin, and therefore wrong, and cannot be from God. However, God (and thus Jesus) loves all sinners, so he loves homosexuals even if their love is wrong.” Or something like that.
Dude, you’re asking for a logical explanation for something that doesn’t come from logic.
I was being facetious. The nature of the Trinity is nonsensical, unless you allow that some of the words are being [del]abused[/del] used in creative ways. Once you can accept something like the Trinity, then believing that Jesus is a manifestation of pure (goodly) love while being an incarnate human and a divine being is trivial to accept.
The vast majority of Christians have heard some buzz words that they kinda understand the intent, the feeling they invoke, and repeat those buzz words to everyone else. You’re asking a deep philosophical question of what it means to be love itself, and still be something else, like a person.
I’m going to give you a definition - it’s the best one that I’ve found that seems to fit in all cases.
Love is when another person’s health and well-being become crucial to your own.*
Think about it. So, to many Christians, Jesus is about love, Jesus’s message is one of love, and Jesus cared enough about all of us to be the sacrifice for our sins. That’s why they focus on the love aspect, and why they shortcut. To them, the essence and entirety of Jesus was to teach us to give up the pointless rituals (dietary restrictions, sacrifices, etc), to move beyond retribution, to find mercy and foregiveness and love for everyone - not just family and friends, but for strangers and even our enemies. Mercy, Justice, caring, kindness, forgiveness, peace - all stem from the act of love. That’s the point, that’s the message, and that’s why they say “Jesus is love.”
That’s a very good way to put it. Thanks, I’ll probably use that.
One could argue that that isn’t “love”, it’s something else - desire, possessiveness, lust, craving, trying to fill one’s own emptiness with another, selfish craving. True love isn’t about what you want if it conflicts with the other’s desires.
Well, aside from the occasional mentally ill homeless person, only Christians seem to be in the habit of addressing me wherever I happen to be to share something irrational then. Is there a difference aside from the way they are dressed?
So when the earnest Christians preach to me that Jesus is love, that is what they mean? that si pretty much what love means to me too, and to my gay friends, some of whom are married to each other, and some who are not married at all.
yet the same earnest Christians say what those men and women experience is not love, as though they can tell when any human being gay or straight or other feels love for another human being or from another human being.
So the definition seems to not cover what they mean, or it does, but they hae some sort of love detector the rest of us don’t have, or at least one that is more accurate?
The rituals of Jews (I assume you mean Jews, since Jesus was Jewish, right?) were “pointless”? Many Jews practice the same rituals today, are they still pointless in the eyes of Christians? Is this too a core tenet of their faith, to minimize the faith of others? Is that an example of this sort of love you are speaking about?
How do we reconcile this with Christians using the very words “Jesus is love” which I myself have personally seen - in a political forum designed to persuade voters to deny civil rights to people that they are accorded precisely because they met the definition of love in their lives you listed above? Why did Christians come out against that sort of love, particularly in a secular forum, and why do they continue to do so nationwide, even worldwide?
Well, since Zen is nothing if not doctrinal and dogmatic, then why all the doctrine and dogma among Christians?
How can one person know what is in another person’s heart for a 3rd person?
The way you phrased it
“Well, since Zen is nothing if not doctrinal and dogmatic”
can be taken to mean that you are saying the Zen is doctrinal & dogmatic.
That is what Zeriel takes issue with.
As to why conservative Christians profess that “God/Jesus is Love” & yet deny that love between gay people, it’s a differentiation between “love” and “sex”. In the traditonal Judeo-Christian understanding, a man can love his best male buddy or a woman can love her best girlfriend the same way anyone can love their blood relatives or children or animals, with utter devotion to their well-being & happiness, but not with sex. One can totally disagree with this, but is it really that difficult to understand?
yes duh, I totally messed that up - I meant “Zen is nothing if not not dogmatic”.
Well, yeah. On a few counts.
One, are you saying that Christian doctrine on this is the same as, or even comes from Jewish doctrine? I am skeptical, because the reasons usually (maybe always) given by Christians are from the New Testament which are of no import to Jews whatsoever.
Two, you seem to be saying that love to Christians necessarily involves sex between a married man and a woman. I have never heard that before. If anything, the love thay is being preached as equivalent to Jesus seems more universal, not less. Otherwise, why wouldn’t “Jesus is love” come laden with exceptions. People never ask if I might be among the exceptions for whom Jesus is not love before telling me he is. that is my experience, YMMV.
Three, such exclusions as you state seems an odd thing to have as a consequence of the core tenet of faith to me. Why is it necessary to be exclusive?
Four, all that aside, why does it follow that a consequence of a core tenet of faith ought be applied to secular practices under the color of law?
That’s tricky. The definition I supplied is one that I have found to be the best representation of what “love” is. However, there is much ambiguity over the word, where it can be used as a synonym for sex, or is sometimes confused with lust, or selfish emotions like possessiveness. But to me, those are not love, they are desire for the person intertwined with other motivations/needs.
In common usage, there is more than one kind of love. (I actually had a Sunday School lesson about this, not that I remember all the details.) There’s a distinction between the love of a parent to a child vs romantic love. To me, what is termed “romantic love” can be thought of as love with another element added to it - call it “love+”. Love+ includes the emotional connection that my definition of love describes, but adds the elements of physical attraction and sex.
So when Christians refer to “Jesus is love”, they are almost certainly not talking about love+, but just love. And when they turn and run down homosexuality, they are deriding the “+” element of the involvement, the sexual desire turned “unnatural”. They are reacting negatively to something they do not understand.
Yes, most Christians today would characterize the rituals and practices of Jews as “pointless”. The message of the New Testament and Jesus was that those rituals may have served a purpose, but are no longer necessary to have proper relationship with God. What is important is taking Jesus “into your heart” and accepting him blah blah blah, so you no longer need to worry about dietary restrictions, sacrifices, etc. Of course, they substitute their own rituals that they think are important (baptism, communion), so the more things change…
Is minimizing others a core tenet of their faith? Well, if their faith is the truth, the correct path to God, then certainly it makes sense to dismiss alternatives that are wrong. To most Christians, Jews are wrong - they didn’t get on board with God 2.0, the Messiah, and the new covenant, so they’re still stuck in the dark ages, as it were. Similarly, most Christians are somewhat dismissive of (if not outright hostile toward) other christian denominations. Does that make it a “Core tenet”?
As for Christians’ ability to profess Jesus’s love and Jesus’s pure example and simultaneously run down other religions, homosexuals, atheists, monkeys, whatever, they might say that Jesus is the perfect example to which they unsuccessfully strive, but others might say that they are either bad at emulating Jesus or that they are hypocrits.
[del]Because they’re evil?[/del] As I said above, they are differentiating between “love” and “love+”, and are rejecting the “+”.
Ultimately, we’re all guessing. But those guesses can be evaluated based upon careful definitions. Unfortunately, the word “love” doesn’t usually have a careful definition, and means multiple things. Any time a word can mean many things, ambiguity breeds confusion. (He said “breeds” - heh heh.) If you set up your careful definitions where the romantic element is an add-on to the regular “love” that applies to parents, children, siblings, pets, etc, then you have a bit better of a framework from which to work. YMMV, IANA_, take two and call me in the morning.
You referring to the “Judeo-Christian” remark? That was a typical comment used to combine the Hebrew-Christian connection and refer to the mutual God that the two religions share. There is a basis of Judaism in Christianity - the lauding of the Ten Commandments being one strong point, also lots of sunday school lessons from the Old Testament. A lot of the rejection of homosexuality comes from the Old Testament rather than the New.
“Because it is right and good and we own the definition of marriage and stop injecting your secularism into my Christianity - God is the god of everything, so he’s naturally the god of the U.S., too, and you non-Christians should just suck it up - We own the country, it’s ours!”
