What is love?

Originally posted by serigado
Neither.
Love is an ilusion. Some fools believe in it and are seldom happy, but tend to channel all their emotions and efforts feeding this ilusionary feeling. When they realize it was something only in their minds, they tend to get depressive, or frustrated. It's cure origins a realistic individual.

Love - a temporary form of insanity, easily cured by marriage.🙂

Originally posted by whodey
You are changing the subject. You stated that love is deviod of coercion and control. Therefore, if there be a God who is a God of such love, how does he go about creation with having absolute control?

I am not changing the subject. It was you that intentionally took my words out of context. I specifically stated that I was talking about romantic love which also implies love between human beings. You then asked a question which implied that I had made claims about all types of love and then tried to apply my words to Gods love which is clearly not what I was talking about.

To answer your actual question, I do not think that the love of a perfect all knowing being should be devoid of coercion and control. The Biblical God clearly goes for coercion big time but for some odd reason does not go for control enough (in my opinion). He is quite ready to say 'if your hand causes you to sin then cut it off' but he still goes ahead and gives me a hand which will cause me to sin and does not remove it or prevent it from causing me to sin. All it takes (as any goat herder knows) is a fence around the tree of knowledge. You can leave sheep to mow your lawn but if you decide to keep goats then take some precautions!

The only reason why we do not attempt to control those we love is because we realize that we are imperfect and do not always know what is best for them. As long as I believe that I know what is best for my children I will try as hard as I can to control them. I only relinquish that control when I realize that they may know better than me, and when I realize that I will not always be there to help them, so they had better start learning now.

Originally posted by mdhall
...regarding Love, people across time and space concur that it is the most powerful motivating factor they've ever experienced.

That's because the word encapsulates so much, both feelings and
actions, that we can talk about completely different things, and still use
the word love to describe them. If we could use a more precise language,
the word love could be removed from the dictionaries completely, and
we'd actually communicate. Saying "I love you", to your partner doesn't
quite cut it, when you can say: "Right now, seeing you bath in sunlight
makes my heart ache of pure and simple joy, sweety", or if you don't
want to sound like a puffed-up, amateur poet, you can say: "You make
me so glad, just by being here. Did you know that?".

Then there's love of a God and love of this and love of that. Why not just
put the right words on the feeling and action you're currently in? Love
doesn't really exist as a uniform, universal concept, the way I see it. It's
an umbrella term for a whole lot of different things.

It's like the lazy escape from having to actually put words on what you're
really experiencing.

Originally posted by stocken
It's like the lazy escape from having to actually put words on what you're
really experiencing.

But you see we usually don't want to put words to what we are experiencing. For example what we want to say is: 'I want you to be mine to do with as I wish' but we actually say 'I want the best for you'. The word love manages to mean both those things so you can say what you want to say while pretending to mean what you want them to think you mean and get away with it without feeling guilty that you are lying about it. 🙂

Originally posted by Yuga
Is love:

Coercion?

A controlled rush of euphoria?

A mutual feeling of attraction?

Please discuss. 🙂

1st Corinthians chapter 13: verses 4-7.


Love is patient

Love is kind

Love does not envy

Love does not boast, is not proud

Love is not rude

Love is not self-seeking

Love is not easily angered

Love keeps no records of wrongs

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth

Love always protects

Love always trusts

Love always hopes

Love always perseveres

Originally posted by KingDavid403
1st Corinthians chapter 13: verses 4-7.

Does anyone know what language it was written in and whether the word used was referring to a specific kind of love?

Originally posted by mdhall
Dostoyevsky would disagree. It's one thing to debate that emotions only exist in the "mind", but one really cannot debate that they are paramount in the Human decision making process.

And I think between Fyodor and Ayn Rand, the former has the stronger argument.

While I think that your view is a step up from the average "Good/Bad" paradigm people oft ...[text shortened]... llacy.

Per Aristotle, I have to say the Truth probably lies somewhere between the lines.

Good/Bad, Love/Hate is just what people make of it.
Although they are only in our mind, these are not soft words. Mind is everything for us, it's what I metaphorically call "soul".
And feelings are what makes us what we are, and to behave like we do, and move forward. Love is one of the greatest of these feelings, but it's "only" a wild mixture of other feelings with what we want, desire, projected into someone, mixed with imagination, a lot of literature and desire to dream.
This doesn't make love minor.

Originally posted by twhitehead
Does anyone know what language it was written in and whether the word used was referring to a specific kind of love?

Does anyone know what language it was written in

1st Corinthians chapter 13 was first written in Greek.

and whether the word used was referring to a specific kind of love?
It is referring to true love and how we might aquire it with someone else we care about, And we can also judge how a relationship is going with someone else and look at maybe somethings we need to change and work on. And we can also communicate to our partner maybe something we think is lacking in a relationship.

We can also judge ourselfs and see were we need to change, or area's we need to work on in ourselfs to be a more loving person to others.

The Greeks broke Love into five concepts: Eros, Agape, Philia, Storge, Thelema.

Eros corresponds with passion.
Agape/Storge corresponds to affection (ex: parent to child, or teacher to student).
Philia corresponds to friendship.
Thelema refers to the will.

I mostly hear it broken into Eros and Agape with variations.

Modern theorists have begun breaking down our perspectives to get beyond early thinking. So, instead of only thinking about what Love constitutes; think about how you react to it in different perspectives.

1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc-person perspectives.
1st being you as you relate to yourself.
2nd is that guy over there.
3rd being you think of your social grouping (tribe/religion/nationality).

So, most spiritual practices are 1st person; Physics is a 3rd person perspective. Hence why there is always a classic debate between people that don't really get perspectives, but really like their religion or science. They are addressing the same realities but from different perspectives so they'll are kind of doomed to argue always coming at issues from different angles.

Originally posted by twhitehead
[To answer your actual question, I do not think that the love of a perfect all knowing being should be devoid of coercion and control. The Biblical God clearly goes for coercion big time but for some odd reason does not go for control enough (in my opinion). He is quite ready to say 'if your hand causes you to sin then cut it off' but he still goes ahead and ...[text shortened]... . You can leave sheep to mow your lawn but if you decide to keep goats then take some precautions!

So on the one hand, (no pun intended), we should not be given the hand in order to sin. However, on the other hand, we are incapable of sinning without being given the hand to begin with. Thus God should control us enough to disallow us from sinning? If such a scenerio were true, then how could we reject God? If God is a God of love, then it stands to reason that he desires a loving relationship with us, no? However, how can a mutually loving relationship exist if one or both parties are incapable of accepting and/or rejecting the other? In other words, if rejecting God occurs only through "sinning", we must be given that choice. Otherwise we have no means to reject God and, therefore, no means to have a mutually loving relationship with him. If we then have no means of rejecting God, then are we not simply a mechanical extension of him loving himself back? It would be akin to me creating a robotic mate to love me back anytime, anywhere with no chance of that robotic mate rejecting me. Sure she could have a programed options as to whether to clean the bathroom first or give me a message first etc, etc, but have no programmed ability to reject me. What good is that accept for possibly having a cleaner house? To put it another way, does God need a vacume cleaner or a mop? It seems to me that if he is all powerful and mighty then he values one thing above all others and that is our free will that he has CHOSEN to surrender.