I am not going to profess to know what the nature of love is, but I do know that love isn’t always ain’t all that. Love gets people in trouble every day. Love can be blind AND stupid. And love, just like all emotions, is fundamentally physiological. Take away oxytocin and you have a psychopath. Does that mean God is oxytocin?
Equating God with love is a cop-out. It’s like saying “two legs bad, four legs good” and pretending you’ve said something profound.
It’s okay with me if you do that. As for a definition, use what definition you like. I’d think caring for the well-being of others is a good start.
Tina Turner is the author of “Love is nothing but a second hand emotion.” Therefore, Tina Turner is God. Therefore, Ike Turner, slapped God around and is the Devil. Accordingly, Ike Turner rules in Hell!
You should try it sometime. It’s a lot better than ham.
I think there is an alternative. I remember years ago someone saying, if there was no universe and then God created it, what did he create it from?
As a part of or an extension of himself, or I could say ourselves. It occurs to me that iof there is something more, some higher consciousness, we are, and have always been a part of it. The problem is we see oursleves separate and oprerate under that false assumption, and that affects everything.
Jesus used the analogy of the human body, and the different parts arguing over who was best or more valuable, when the real point is that we all fair better when we recognize our very real interdependent connection.
So it’s not so much that God is a seperate being, out there somewhere, that doesn’t really interact with us, but that we are already a part of the whole, and it is in exploring and acting on that truth that we may experience “god”
Having had powerful spiritual experiences myself I understand how someone might experience those highs and think of it as confirmation of a supreme being apart from ourselves, who blesses and punishes but IMO, if it’s more that just a chemical reaction in the brain, it’s more likely that we have just had a moment of clarity where we became more aware of our connection to the greater whole.
When we allow anger and hatred, jealously and greed, to fester and grow we are engaged in creating a certain reality. When we try hard within oursleves to foster compassion , forgiveness and kindness, we can create a different and better reality.
One benifit is not needing any dogma or doctrine to operate that way. There is no external being requiring something of us. We just need to wake up from our illusion of separatness and live according to the reality of our interdependence.
In that sense we are co creators of this reality, and really need to do a better job in what we create.
The trick being to define love and know what it is. In my experience part of the human condition is laboring under a mislabeling of our emotions , especially love.
Deisre can be mistaken for love. Dependency can be mistaken for love. Security can be mistken for love. etc etc.
I agree with Czarcasm. If the goal is to define and understand love, we don’t necessarily need a God, to do that.
That’s like claiming that since I extend into the third dimension, I’m infinitely tall. And it has nothing to do with any afterlife, anyway. Time is a dimension, but that doesn’t change the fact that everything has a beginning and ending.
But that’s not love. Love is about considering someone more important than anyone else; love is about not caring about others at least as much as it’s about caring about someone.
And “God is love” is just silly; there’s nothing especially profound about love, and it isn’t an entity. You might as well claim that God is vanilla pudding.
No one can KNOW anything about God, it is Belief ,what is Known can be proven, and all that was ever written, taught, read, or thought about God, is from the mind of another human. We take the word of another Human, no matter what one believes. There is nothing wrong with Belief, but until it can be proven it is just that.
If you read John 10 you will see that Jesus agreed with the Psalmist,“I said you are gods and son’s of the most high”. It looks to me that Jesus felt we were all a part of a greater whole.
Isn’t the teachings of Yeshua Ben Youseph what some one else wrote that he said ? And wasn’t He also a human being, (even if his divinity wasn’t proven)?
I was watching an episode of “Beyond the Wormhole” and they had a scientist on who thought we were living in an artificial world, similar to the one in the movie “The Matrix”. I myself find the idea far fetched, but it does set up a scenario where things that science tells us, such as the age of the universe, would have no meaning at all. I think that is the most rational way for a person of faith to view the cosmos.
The common cultural construct aspect is interesting, especially in terms of an “afterlife”. In a sense that “you” are just a minor part of a much larger construct which is the “idea” of you.
What’s more rational: To believe a Creator has always existed or that the Universe without a creator has always existed? I find it hard to understand how anyone can say there is no Creator (which would have to always have existed, an eternal Being) but believe the Universe has always existed. You can’t say “Well I don’t believe the universe has always existed (in one form or another)”. Something cannot come from nothing.
You can argue/debate the nature of that Creator. But how you can deny one doesn’t exist is quite perplexing. And if you say well whomever/whatever created our universe hasn’t always existed then you go back to something coming from nothing. Because if that creator was created then by who?
It can’t be “turtles all the way down”. There most certainly is a Creator.
Personally when I see so much Biblical prophecy being fulfilled… Well, my beliefs are obvious from that one statement. I’ll leave you to decide for yourself because I can’t convince you to believe in my Creator. But to deny one exists is quite “ignorant”.
