Which is the definition I was using. It doesn’t matter; unconditional love towards someone by definition means that it doesn’t matter who they are or what they are like; they are just a placekeeper. That’s what unconditional means; that nothing matters.
That’s comparing apples and oranges; or, perhaps more like apples and flywheels. What similarity does racial acceptance have to do with emotions? Unlike emotional states, races are both mostly imaginary and fundamentally near identical.
Well according to the Bible it says those who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven so certainly God does not love everyone without condition.
Lack of forgiveness doesn’t imply lack of love. It’s perfectly possible to find the act of a loved one despicable. Hell, it’s perfectly possible to hate someone you love at the same time.
Anyway, as to the general topic; I really don’t think you can choose whether you love someone unconditionally or not. You can’t choose to love someone or not at all; it’s not something we get to control. The problem with unconditional love is the identification of the loved person; identification, after all, is a condition. In a sense, claiming to love someone unconditionally means that you would love a very small subset of their overall being. They could change anything about them and you’d still be in love - so what are you in love with? You cannot unconditionally love a person, because what makes up a person has conditions - and if those conditions aren’t necessary to love them, then you don’t care about that person at all.
If this was really a problem, then we would consider a person to be a separate and different person than themselves five years prior. As in, separate and different, literally. They’ve changed!
Five minutes would also be sufficient. Worse if they change their physical position!
But we as humans have gotten over this little hangup and have little problem mentally identifying people as being themselves, even when they get funny haircuts.
Not at all. Of course, people do change, and we continue to love them. But you don’t love a person for all of their person, just as you don’t love them for none of it. It’s unlikely (but possible, i’d guess) to fall out of love simply because they dye their hair, or wear a different shirt, or something like that. There are plenty of “conditions” which generally don’t matter. But there are some which do, and which stay the same, and if they don’t stay the same may well cause someone to fall out of love with them.
When you’re talking about unconditional love, there can be zero personal identification points at all. Loving someone unconditionally is literally saying, “I would love this person no matter what they were like”. In which case you don’t love that person at all, because their person could change utterly with no alteration to your feelings.
What of the mother who surrender her child for adoption within hours of it’s birth?
She acts from love, but it clearly cannot be conditional upon it being her child as she has just surrendered all right to call this her child.
And what if she comes back into contact with this child, say, 25 yrs later, out of love. What was her love conditional on for those 25 yrs?
I think that you are saying I would love this person warts and all. That is unconditional love. They may change and get Alzheimer’s but I would still love them. I see this with the elderly that have been married for 50 plus years. If say your spouse got into an accident and was horribly disfigured you would still love them even though they look different.
It’s easy to get caught up in the parts of the person you may not like but why should that effect the love you have for them as a whole?
You sound like Ayn Rand there.
I’m not sure the God of the Old Testament loves anyone. Love does not seem to be one of his attributes.
Jesus is fairly loving, in places.
Hardly. Material goods and services, unlike love are of value whether given conditionally or not. Oxygen sustains my life just fine, despite the fact that plants neither know nor care about me. I don’t need to earn a chocolate bar for it to taste good.
In this limited sense… sure, or at least there should be consequences to one’s actions.
Well, she was correct at least some of the time. Actually, I got the impression she was more concerned about people who claim to be motivated by unconditional love (or absolute equality, or unlimited charity, etc.) because it’s a pleasant-sounding cover for dictatorship.
I reject your second paragraph - there can be and is a personal identification point: the person’s identity. You know, the thing I was just talking about that you responded to; the human’s magical ability to identify another person regardless of changes that happen to that person. We note that this ability is not infallible - you can fail to recognize somebody, or mistake somebody or something else for them - but nonetheless you have a mental identifier attached to each person you know. You can then take your love-beam and just point it at that.
You can assert that this means that you’re not loving the person at all, despite it very explicitly being the case that you are directing your love at that person, but I will reject any assertions to this effect that you may make.
Well, that’s the way it is with my kid. She gets my unconditional love just because she is who she is.
You may not like it, but it does exist.
No, she was more concerned with people who preached the unearned, whether in egalitarian relationships or in egalitarian governments . . . even (or especially) when they were being honest about it.
Just in case anybody gets a flip, I’ve begun a thread in MPSIMS asking people to discuss their experiences of loving, and being loved, without qualification. Linky.
Was she? Her major novels have characters like Ellsworth Toohey and James Taggart and Wesley Mouch and such who claim various noble-seeming goals, but are clearly in it for the power. The stooges who actually buy into it are just useful idiots.
So basically I don’t get your point.
So Stoid isn’t coming back to answer any questions that her OP raised? Hmph.
Kind of takes the shine off of the ‘great’ in Great Debates.
Sure it does. I am a better person because there are other persons who love me unconditionally and, though I do not fear losing their love, I do wish to be worthy of it.
How would it be different for you if they just loved you a lot?
No, because those warts, too, are identification points, conditions. I’m saying that to love someone unconditionally means there can be no conditions, and that includes all means of identification. It’s not simply a matter of some things changing, or even a majority of things changing, and I agree with you there are many cases where one person changes vastly and yet is still loved. But if we’re talking unconditional love, we’re saying that even if that person changed absolutely everything about them - if there was no point the same as who they had been before - you would still love them. The question then becomes; if everything about them has changed, what is the consistency you love?
But there may be no such person anymore. That’s the point. Unconditional love means that any point which our magical ability can latch onto to identify someone could change, yet our love remain. Any point of identification is a condition. The same system that means we recognise someone who has changed a bit means we do not recognise someone who is someone else entirely. And that’s the point - i’m in total agreement with you in terms of some change, of some difference, where we can both detect the change but also that something has remained the same. Unconditional love means that even when nothing remains - when the person standing before you has nothing at all in common with the person you love - you would love them. Because the moment you bring in a consistency, a point of commonality, that’s a condition.
Put simply, even the ability to recognise the person is a condition. If you love a person whom you recognise as being a particular person, that’s not unconditional love. You have a measure of comparing a difference; a person whom you do not recognise may well not be loved by you.
I suppose all I can say in response to this is that I am entirely open to your arguments, and that while i’m as of yet unconvinced I have no desire to utterly deny the accuracy or plausibility of any arguments you have not yet made. I prefer listening to arguments before I reject them. 