I’m 38, not a young man. And I notice you’re still trying to avoid answering me by insulting me.
First, I don’t do “polite” very well. Second, when someone else acts insulting, condescending and manipulative, I don’t even try.
Not the same thing at all. The word “love” has a strong emotional value for many people; the only plausible reason for using that particular word is to capitalize on that emotion. Like I just said, I regard it as manipulative. If he’d said “I defined X as the facilitation of goodness”, it would be an example of what you just said; “love” is not.
You don’t wait until then to not try. In this case you started off not trying. Since you recognize your struggle with “polite” you should also be realistic on what type of response you are likely to get from your less than polite posts.
Were I to speak of Love, I would expect an understanding by the greater body of human beings that I speak not of casual matters of taste, or preference, nor even of the passion of human lust. Love has a meaning to a vast number of humans that makes it a fundamental characteristic of the human experience. When someone tells me that Love cannot mean anything but lust, or preference or idle passion for pleasure, he speaks to me more of the barrenness of his own spirit than of his intellectual understanding.
Truth is an obvious thing. Is the word the same as the reality? Does the thought perceive the object, and does the expression of the thought convey the knowledge of the same object to another? To examine the meanings of “same” or “other” or “thought” or “object” does not put forth an argument, but merely changes the subject. That is competitive braying, not argument.
Truth and Love are not opposites, nor are they aspects of some larger object. Truth is stringent, and is bound by itself, and admits of no change. Love is living, and grows. It embraces, and forgives. So truth and love are characteristics of other things. Truth can be dead. Love lives. Though truth cannot destroy love, love can overwhelm truth, making it trivial. Love does not abandon truth, but neither is it enslaved by it. Not every truth must be spoken, nor is understanding required of love.
Lies are more than the absence of truth. A lie is the joining of an anti-truth, and anti-love. For a lie is message. A hate filled message, meant to deceive. Hatred is more than just the absence of love. Hatred is a message as well. I cannot hate what I do not know. I cannot lie, unless I know the truth.
Tris
" DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic." ~ Ambrose Bierce ~
Spoken truth can change,( One can discribe a tree at different times of the year and be telling the truth, but the whole truth is a different matter.) but Truth cannot be slain. Truth is all that is. If Love is absent the truth remains. Truth in it’s entirety cannot be obliterated. For what ever was left would be the truth. Truth can never be falseified but Love can be. One can say something is true but saying doesn’t make it so; Truth stands alone.
Love may make the truth be bearable, but Truth is not always what one wants to hear, or have, some times people would rather not know the truth.
One can be decieved and think they know the truth, be wrong, and still not be lying; just mis-informed.
I can see where your Love for another would forgive your Lies, but they would still be a lie and not the truth. The truth would not be dead, just hidden for the love of your daughter, The main “Truth” would be the love for your daughter,so in a sense Truth would still win out.
Um…right. In this scenario “I’m not going to tell you” is the truth. If I gave a wrong location that would be a lie. There is no obligation under some umbrella of being truthful to give this person my daughters location. Being truthful only requires an *honest *answer, not always a direct answer.
If someone asks me for the pin number to my checking account then “I’m not going to tell you” is also a truthful answer.
If someone asks me a personal question then “That’s none of your business” is an truthful answer.
Note that what you have decided, Cosmosdan, is that love is more essential than truth — which is the question of the OP. As Tris has said, love and truth are not opposites. And as Walter has said, they are not mutually exclusive. But as I have said, they are not the same. I submit that love wins out over truth, not because love is more ethical, but because it is more valuable. Nowhere does Jesus command us to tell the truth. But everywhere does He command us to love.
Well, let us both make a good example. I apologize for hurting your feelings. What might surprise you is that my own feelings are not made of stone. When I put forward a good faith argument, bothering to use standard principles of reason, I am somewhat miffed when people ignore its particulars and argue against me just because I wrote the OP. Not that you personally behaved like Der Trihs, but I hope you can understand that it is exasperating to attempt a high level discussion like this when someone attacks a definition of a Christian term that is straight out of Vine’s Expository as being somehow unusual or, worse, deceptive. As I’ve said repeatedly, if you don’t like “love” defined in this way, then use the term “X” instead of the term “love”. What I am interested in is whether the facilitation of goodness requires the existence of truth. If you prefer to frame that in terms of X requiring the existence of Y, I have no problem with that. But usage of the ordinary terms, in my opinion, facilitates the discussion and makes it easier to follow.
I don’t think sinking to another poster’s percieved level is necessarily the best course of action in GD, but that’s neither here nor there.
The point is that in the context of a debate where one starts with a specific definition, it IS the same thing. In real-life everyday discourse, I’d completely agree with you, but when one is setting up a strict philosophical argument, exact definitions are a must, and intelligent debates are expected to be able to cope with the emotional overloadings of the concept.
Additionally, Liberal indicated that that WAS his honest definition of love–that’s how he percieves it day-to-day. If you disagree, that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean he’s being dishonest or manipulative–quite the opposite, since he explictly lays out his terms up front.
Ironically, I have nothing to add to the whole debate, because I think A) Lib defines love and truth in a way that makes sense at least some of the time, and B) assuming those defintions hold, his argument is sound.
That isn’t a question; it is an accusation. There is nothing wrong with the definition. If you dismiss Vine’s, then you dismiss a major body of Christian theological expository. If you have a good reason to do so, by all means write it up.
Frankly, what is surprising to me is that no one has attacked Monavis’ definition of truth — a very narrow adaptation of the Correspondence Theory of truth, which itself is not without some controversy.
I’m wondering whether he may not be mindful that the topic of the discussion is Christian theology, which it seems would be obvious from the link in the OP to a thread hosted by a seminary student, and the discussion there of Christian apologetics — not to mention the OP’s reference to God. Certainly, Christ’s [symbol]agape[/symbol] (agape) is the only sensible connotation of love to use in this context.
Have I? How so? I have admitted that under certain circimstances I might lie. The conclusion is not that love is more essential, but that I am a normal human being. In some situations I will choose fear over love. That doesn’t mean I think fear is more essential. Failing to find a way to be truthful in dealing with a situation is a failure of both love and truth IMHO. Love and truth may not be the same but in the spiritual sense that we are talking about here, I think it is impossible to have one without the other. As in hydrogen oxygen and water. Both are essential.
The act of not being true in word and deed is not a loving act, no matter what social exceptions we commonly use.
Just for reference I put truth into the keyword search of the gospels. Check out how many times Jesus says “I tell you the truth”
and these gems
John 3:21
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."
John 4:23Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."
John 8:32Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
John 16: 12"I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. 13But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.
[several times in John the Holy Spirit is refered to as the Spirit of truth.}
There’s no denying that love is essential. IMHO it is not more essential than the truth in the spiritual sense we are discussing. Although I agree with your definition of love, I don’t agree with your conclusion.
Sure, He tells the truth. He knows the truth. In fact, He IS the truth. But He does not command the truth upon us. (I’ve always wanted to open a thread discussing His moral imperative — “be perfect”. That could be an interesting discussion, if there could be some way to avoid half a page of posturing and accusations.) If you accept the definitions, but reject the conclusions, then I’d be interested in how you reconcile the reductios I gave.
Regarding why I said you’ve decided that love is more essential than truth is not because of what you fear, but because of what you value. I know that it’s difficult, and possibly even a bit anti-intuitive, but for purposes of this discussion, it is important to keep in mind that we are talking about love facilitating an aesthetic — something of value — rather than an ethic — something that is right or wrong. Goodness, it seems to me, is the aesthetic most valued by God.
Forgive my ignorance. As you’ve likely noticed I am still becoming familar with certain terms thanks to the patient assitance of folks like yourself. What exactly do you mean by reductio? Disproof? Falsification? Let me take a stab at it. from the OP
I would say in the spiritual sense truth must be more than just knowledge or facts although it is used that way within the limits of language. To worship God in truth is a state of being, that reflects in our actions. We don’t merely act loving because Jesus told us to. We* are * loving because the truth tells us that the person we are dealing with is a child of God as we are.
I understand but don’t agree with your examples. For love to become an action it must be acted upon in accordence with the truth. Otherwise it is love in word only.
In these examples the truth is the need of those recieving and the awareness of those giving. Those two truths are essential for the act of love to be completed. The reciever or the giver does not need to know the other for truth to be involved.
The truth is also that in these kinds of acts the reciever gives and the giver recieves so it is essentially people participating in one act that contains truth and love.
I get that. It is my position that goodness contains love and truth as equally essential elements
Argument by reductio is very simple, and has a long history. You almost certainly do it yourself without realizing it. The technique is to state the opposite of whatever premise you actually accept, and then prove that the restated premise is false. Since a thing cannot be both true and false, proving the opposite to be false proves your original premise to be true. Let me give you a couple of examples greatly simplified to facilitate understanding them.
Premise: Yesterday was Valentine’s Day.
Reductio: Let’s say that yesterday was not Valentine’s Day. That would mean that yesterday was not February 14. But yesterday WAS February 14th, so “yesterday was not Valentine’s Day” is false. Therefore, premise 1 is true.
“Yesterday was Valentine’s Day” and “Yesterday was not Valentine’s Day” cannot both be true. The second was proved false; therefore, the first is inescapably true.
Premise: George Bush is a tyrant.
Reductio: Suppose George Bush were not a tryant. In that case, he would not run roughshod over our liberties. But the fact is that he does indeed run roughshod over our liberties. Therefore, our reductio premise is false and our premise 2 is true.
I agree with you to a point, and I think that Tris (Triskadecamus, not Der Trihs) touched on that as well. But how do you escape the fact that you value children of God (not to mention truth)? It is because of what you value that you act lovingly, certainly not because of what you know or even because of what you believe. The person who values goodness will facilitate it because he treasures goodness. As Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.”
I don’t know what that means. Love is what love is. If a person has been edified, then he has been loved. God can use any instrument to facilitate His goodness, even evil men who lie.
Truth is a need now? Again, I don’t understand. Definitions are important here, and I wish you would state yours. We can’t just keep responding to each other while “truth” morphs into “everything that is plus everything that isn’t”.
The love is in the edification. That’s what goodness does, the effect it has — it edifies, creates, builds up. Its opposite, evil, demoralizes, destroys, tears down. The opposite of love is not hate, but sin. Love = the facilitation of goodness. Sin = the obstruction of goodness.
At some point, if you give it sufficient thought, you will realize why you defend truth so strongly. And I admire that you do. But you do because you value truth. The driving element is aesthetical, not ethical (and certainly not epistemological).
1 : I already did. Love is simply an emotion.
2 : It is purely aesthetic; that’s where the phrase “love is blind” comes from.
3 : It is characterized by feeling the emotion of love, and nothing else.
