Can God love?
Offline Can God love?
We are told that the mythical bible God is love or the epitome of love.
Archetypal Jesus said that we would know his people by the love, deeds and actions they showed others.
Jesus gave us examples of the deeds and works. Feed the poor, love all our neighbours, do not sin and many others.
Love then, seems to Jesus, to be something that must be shown by deeds, actions and works to be alive and true love. Love, like faith, without works is dead. Both St. James and Jesus agree on this.
It follows then that if God is not doing something to show this love then the love for man expressed in scriptures is wrong and God cannot love.
You are in the image of God. When you love someone you show them that love by works and deeds. This is how the recipient of that love knows it is there and that allows for reciprocity. You will agree that without reciprocity, true love cannot exist between two individuals. We must do things for each other for true love to exist.
Imagine what those you love would think if you never did anything to express your love. Imagine what you would think of the love of others towards you if they never did anything to show they loved you. See what I mean. Love always must have deeds to be real and true and reciprocity must be at play.
Love then has no choice but to be expressed if it is true love.
We are told that God loved his son so much that he planned to have him sacrificed even before the earth was created. This human sacrifice or any other human sacrifice, voluntary or not, is immoral and the notion that it is good to sacrifice an innocent victim to give the guilty believers a free ride into heaven is a completely self-gratifying notion and is completely immoral. One does not show love for someone by having them sacrificed for the sins of others when God himself stated that we are all responsible for our own salvation and cannot put that responsibility of the shoulders of a scapegoat Jesus.
Does love need deeds and works to be expressed?
Have you seen God express his love for us lately?
Regards
DL
These following speak to this issue if you wish to view them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMXoPhgTkuY&feature=player_embedded
- Login to post comments
So Chistian love is be nice to people to get a reward(heaven) instead of punishment(hell). Hardly sounds like a sacrifice, just long term investing.
Just like Jesus' 'death'. Hardly sounds like a sacrifice to loose just 3 day out of eternity.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
I don't know how loving God is but he sure is good at killing people.
No argument here friend.
Regards
DL
True.
Regards
DL
God doesn't kill people, he just sets up the game and then blames us for when he "allows" us to die for his "plan" and then blames us for the game he set up.
God's game is a Monopoly board where you never pass Go or collect 200 dollars, and always end up in Jail. The lesson of the game is he always wins. If you object, then "fuck you".
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
Are you kidding me?! 2012 is soooo obviously some sort of divine preparation for the big finale between good and evil!
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)
Eh. Whatever.
Regards
DL
it is going to be great to see all of the non-believer face when they SEE the truth in flesh and the word comes down from heaven and makes ALL knee bow down, wow what a day that is going to be for all the true BELIEVERS
dont be against him and you will not be killed - it is simple as that
The same could be said of any number of ruthless human dictators. Or GWB "You're either with us or against us". If I started killing people just because they didn't do what I said and simply declared that I wouldn't kill you if you were on my side, you would rightfully declare me a psychopath and support throwing me in jail or even killing me. Why do you set a different standard for your god?
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
Okay araujo03 so apparently you will worship anyone who threatens to kill you ? That's the reasoning of a coward.
"Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God,
holds other people in contempt.
Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God,
there is in that man no spirit of compromise.
He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature;
he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance.
Believing himself to be the slave of God,
he imitates his master,
and of all tyrants,
the worst is a slave in power."
--Robert Ingersoll
Regards
DL
What a loving guy.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Hello,
This is not the question you should be asking. The question you should be asking is can God have a righteous hate towards the wicked and the stupid like all the atheists that ever lived.
He can hate, and if you're an atheist, and a non elect person, he hated you before you were born and you have been destines to demonstrate the justice and wrath of God by your evil filth.
: )
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
A Rational Christian of Intelligence (rare)with a valid and sound justification for my epistemology and a logical refutation for those with logical fallacies and false worldviews upon their normative of thinking in retrospect to objective normative(s). This is only understood via the imago dei in which we all are.
Respectfully,
Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDbesQQi9yc
Regards
DL
It'll be awesome if you ever wake up from that nightmare. Seems you're a pretty unhappy person. All you can do is wander around threatening people with invisible magic entities. Have fun with that.
I'm glad your evil god hates me. It means I'm probably a good person. Certainly a better person than your evil god.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
By human morality, God is condemned.
Rightly so, by human morality.
Let us ask: how much "life" has natural selection 'killed', or in another way, how many selections that led to death or extinction has natural selection caused, and do we attribute a morality to that? Probably not, but should we? I suspect most here would say, no.
So why do we ascribe human moral code to the god hypothesis, but not ascribe it to the "Selection God" hypothesis, so to speak?
Isn't a process where 99.?% of all "made-it-to-life-status" mutations end up dead a rather...evil... process by a human moral code?
Our human moral code and laws say that for an act to be evil, there must be an intent to do evil. Secular law call this notion mens rea. Latin for an evil mind. Nature does not have a mind so it cannot do evil. Regards DL
Really? I wonder if anyone told my extremely devout and deacon of his church grandfather that as he lay dying in extreme pain in his early 50's of stomach cancer.
Or maybe someone told that to his brother, my grand uncle, when he was in church that day. The day a psychopath walked in with a rifle, screamed "This is war!" and shot him in the chest. That guy then proceeded to kill an elderly woman sitting in the pews, a 7 year old girl, and 3 men.
Or maybe his other brother that went down in a bomber over Germany during WWII?
Heck, maybe it was their father that was killed by poison gas in the trenches of Europe during WWI that was told.
Whatever.
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci
Humans have human minds and a human moral code. Nature cannot do evil because it does not have a human mind wired with human morality. The same for God?
You fathom the mind of the unfathomable God well enough to be able to make such a definitive statement. Wow.
Where does that insight come from?
Or are you just saying that there is no God?
Regards
DL
Greatest, are you a pantheist?
Do you condemn the clouds when they rain too much and kill thousands of people through heavy flooding? Do you curse the ground when tectonic plates collide and cause buildings to crash to the ground?
Yes, if it wasn't a totally blind natural process without any thought or intent.
Again, it's about intent and consciousness, not specifically about humans. We would consider an intelligent alien army that traveled around destroying planets to be evil, but not a giant asteroid that destroyed a planet.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
I call myself a Gnostic Christian.
I do not read scriptures literally and use the bible to talk sense into those who are foolish enought to read it literally.
The only dogma that I preach is to question all concepts and to not buy into the mythical bible God.
Man is the gratest force here and we should not kowtow to anything other than man. We are supreme here. Not myths.
Access to the Godhead is within all of us and we have no need to bend the knee to anyone.
Regards
DL
one single supernatural quality of the hypothetical external first cause. There is demonstrably no moral code that is not a human moral code.
You can see the layers of internal contradiction that beset the collective dogma we call christian faith. God hates sin. We are born into sin. God hates us. God loves us. God cannot forgive us. God's son dies to 'cleanse' us. Now God loves us. His son always loved us. Now we are immortal. But is god's son god or is he human.
Christianity really is an eye-popping agglomeration of religious and human beliefs, from blood sacrifice to eternal life - there is no neat packaging, not fundamental coherence.
Believers negotiate their own subjective path through these contradictions guided by human morality and motivated reasoning. No two christian visitors to this site have shared the same faith, the same concept of god.
As a former christian I know perfectly well that when praying I would ask for guidance and then do what I thought was right - my personal decision thus surrounded by a halo of divine approbation.
But it was just me all along.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
+ 1 and well done.
Regards
DL
The divine moral code is God's will which is love.
God is love. "Can God love?" God is love.
And with that love we...
oh wait a minute.... love is not material, and cannot directly be demonstrated, quantified nor measured...
I forgot: in an amoral, material universe, love does not exist.
Oops. Beg pardon.
It is known to be real by it's expression in works and deeds.
See God showing his love anywhere?
No delusions please but facts.
Regards
DL
For some, God is Love. And it is meant to be quite tautological.
Can love be evidenced in the world? By works and deeds?
If so, oops, we just stumbled on some proof that God exists.
How clumsy of me. If you have a spoon and some duct tape maybe I can get the egg back in the shell?
Likewise, Adolf Hitler expressed his love to favored groups.
( Yet even the Fuhrer's wrath pales when compared to what the Christian God has in store for those who fail to obey him. The ovens of Auschwitz could never match the ovens of Hell. )
Incidentally, both God and Hitler had a chosen race to lavish their affection upon.
They both commanded their "chosen race" to employ genocidal tactics to destroy those deemed unworthy of life and to gain control of the previous owners *property. ( *Ha'Aretz HaMuvtahat equals Lebensraum )
They both demanded absolute conformity and to deviate from their edicts brought swift and horrible punishment.
Great minds run in the same vein, apparently.
If one were to jokingly extrapolate here, pantheon gods are social critters. Humans are social critters. A one and only god is by definition not a social critter. Its view of right and wrong cannot be that of a social species by definition.
Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.
www.ussliberty.org
www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html
www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml
Excellent point.
Can't do to your others when there are none.
So much for the Omnimax God.
Can't be all powerful and omnipotent when you cannot reproduce true.
Regards
DL
I agree. A human moral code applies to humans. Clouds are not evil. A comet destroying the earth is not evil.
But a Deistic God can be a "God = love" and is also not evil, since there is no human moral code for a god to have to abide by.
Naturally, I discount the theistic human-made tales of "what God did" in History. God did not command Israel to destroy its neighbours. That is just writing-rationalization for wars. If God is love, such a command is a moral and logical contradiction, and is thereby quite false.
So, to the thread title: Can God love? Well yes, If God IS Love then God can love, and moreover, it is just about all god does do. (Allowing that abiogenesis may be deemed love, though it's a stretch. And Truth and Beauty may be lumped in there.. but again.. bit of a stretch. Personally, I think truth and beauty are man-made, or qualities that we ascribe to things. A thing is true or beautiful insofar as an apple is really red... in itself... independent of our eye organ.
God can love if God is love.
If God is love, any god that kills is not god. Just as any human leader who orders the killing of others is not a humanist, no matter how loud and often he may proclaim so.
The Bible can still show us what God really is, not by describing the creature in it as god, but also by showing us what god is not. The murderer in the Bible is not god.
Just as sometimes you can identify a counterfeit dollar bill not by what it is, but by what it is not.
Well.. the true gospel is that the truth is already here. It is in the existence of your neighbour, the one for which it should be your natural will to love - not a duty to perform, but an unthinking, full behaviour that is unforced. If you can't reach that state here, in the here and now, then it will be difficult to live in an "eternal heaven" where such a state is an existential prerequisite.
(Bear in mind, if you ever truly attain that state in the here and now, your defintion of heaven may be drastically changed: heaven is here too, right now. The apple isn't red. Our eye and brain send information around and we preceive the apple to be red 'out there'. The World, the Universe is Heaven, if you just attune to it (per Buddhists's satori possibly?) and realize it is not OUT THERE somewhere, but created by your mind.)
"Love your neighbour" is not a command, but a state of Being. God has given you Free Will to do it or not to do it. If you don't do it, you don't get heaven; not because it will be deprived of you as a punishment, but that you don't create it for yourself. As the old joke goes: God can't make you win the lottery in answer to your prayers, unless you buy the ticket first.
It is very curious, and I still find the Book of Genesis to be a very enigmatic tale. I don't jump to conclusions that the writers were ignorant theists only. I think they were very clever writers trying to get across a "moral cosmology" if you will. Why did God create "Adam and Eve" at all? to even begin with? Was it "society"? Or just an experiment, but experiment for what? The "humans" originally created had no human moral sense, since such a sense evolves around good and evil, and they hadn't eaten of that tree yet. Good and evil didn't exist for them. From a moral, not scientific, vantage, this is an enquiry into abiogenesis! Why are we here?
Before that event, Adam and Eve lived within the divine moral code which was the Will of God which is the Will to Love. That was the only code to live by. There was no evil, no way of doing wrong back then. It wasn't a case of morality but a case of will. Adam and Eve were in the image of God as long as their Will coincided with God's will, which it originally did. By force of threat? No, that's not love. It coincided because Love has only one Path. God had society. Three beings in the Garden, each and all of them in full Will to Love. Paradise, eh? Both Divine Love and abject, absolute Humanism in peaceful co-existence.
The writers then attributed an event to Eve to explain our estrangement from our Will to Love (our neighbour, by natural instinct). A serpent approached Eve (this is of course, literary and a metaphor) and tempted her to commit a sin. The sin was not eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The "sin" was to break away from God's Will (expressed previously and metaphorically as, "do not eat of that tree". "It is my will that you do not eat of that tree"
. Eating the fruit was secondary and not the sin. Of course it wasn't a sin: if she hadn't eaten the fruit, it follows she didn't know it was a sin, so how could it be a sin?? How can you sin, if at the time you do it, you don't yet know it's a sin? The real "sin" happened before the eating. It was 'willing' (with God-imaged Free Will!) something in contradiction to the Will to Love. That was, and by the way still is, "The Sin".
Original Sin then is the human propensity to stray from Will to Love and betray "Love your neighbour" (the Star Trek "prime directive" of Humanism, by the way). For me, Jesus can be called the "son of God" not because of divine status or what-not supernatural stuff. Jesus was human. Period. He "became" a Son of God (otherwise known as "Buddha" in another culture) when he evidenced Enlightenment. What evidence? When he declared "Love thy neighbour" not as a command but as an existential challenge to move to a different 'moral' realm (Heaven). Recall, he said the Kingdom is within, right? No more morals, just God's will. The will to love, only. For Jesus, God was not Yahweh, God was Abba - Father. A relation of love. To become a Son of God is to go back to the Garden of Eden, beyond good and evil (thank you Nietzsche!) and live by Will to Power Love, not by a human set of moral rules.
It works for theism; it works for deism. As for atheism, well, atheism has no moral code, so we can only say it works for Humanism - which I presume is the moral code that most atheists just happen, by 'selection' of course, to abide by. (Other than the Ayn Rand "self-only" atheists of course).
While it might be pleasurable mental masturbation to wax eloquent on the nature of love ALL the physical evidence attributes it to a hormonal response. All of our knowledge of love indicates it is only hormones.
If god has no hormones then god cannot love. QED
Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.
www.ussliberty.org
www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html
www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml
Enigmatic implies there is something beyond the obvious nonsense it contains. If you assume there is more than nonsense that is your irrational choice. It is mostly "just so" stories such as why are their so many languages? The story of Sodom shows the god can be outwitted by clever men.
They may or may not have been Greeks in Alexandria as I propose but they were definitely not by people in Judea as it had no literate culture until the 2nd c. BC after a century of being force fed Greek civilization. Newly literate Judea did not have resources to create the stories which come from all over the middle east.
That was Amun/Amen the eldest god of the Egyptians creating the first people out of clay.
It was fable to feed children who kept asking why. When you have kids you will understand.
Should you ever actually read the story of Adam and Eve you will find they were kicked out before they could eat the fruit of the Tree of Life and live forever and become gods like US. That is what is says. There were many gods and A&E were half way to becoming gods themselves. That is what is says. It is clearly stated. It is not for eating the "apple."
The incredible part is people today get some fool idea like sin in their heads, and even dumber an original one, and then try to force fit the clear words of the story into their preconceived hogwash as you just did.
Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.
www.ussliberty.org
www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html
www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml
"Love is only hormones". What a sad human you are. I'm sure then that 'masturbation' plays a predominant role in your life.
The other reply you made was a rant, not rational discussion. I'm here for rational discussion.
I said all the evidence is that it is only hormones. If you produce evidence it is more than hormones you be sure to post it. As you have no such evidence your delusional state is noted but nothing more than noted. You can believe what you want or you can learn to be rational.
Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.
www.ussliberty.org
www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html
www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml
What a sad little intellectual midget you are. When you grow up, and if and when you ever fall in love, you will want to revisit your "love is only hormones" theory.
Until then, go back to your bedroom, close the door, and use your left hand to give yourself a good dose of hormonal self-love.
Technically it's true though.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/science/jan-june09/love_02-13.html
And for what it's worth, I've been married for 9 years and have two little girls that I love to pieces.
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci
When there is physical evidence of more than hormones I will consider it.
As you have no physical evidence of anything other than hormones you are doing nothing than expressing pre-scientific romantic ignorance of the subject. It does not matter to me what you believe. It only bothers me that there are so many ignorant people in the world.
Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.
www.ussliberty.org
www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html
www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml
For myself learning it is hormones sort leaves me on wonder of how the mechanism works so well in so many ways to advance personal and social well being. Even more it is well established people in love will takes up the likes of each other even it disliked before they fell in love. People willingly seek out love. Reason is willing victim of the hormone.
And if hormone flow in triggered in adolescence we fetishes. It explains so much.
Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.
www.ussliberty.org
www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html
www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml
You equivocate a phenomenon with its "symptomology".
So science is able to inject a man with something, so that he falls madly in love for all time with the nearest woman beside him, is that it? It is all down to hormones? Love can be had by a hormone injection?
We don't have a scrap of evidence for this mythical SCA that all Life descended from, which the Evolution Creation Myth posits, and yet some assert it as evidenced, scientific fact.
Double standard here.
I equate the studies of people reporting themselves to be in love having elevated levels of the same hormones. Therefore it is a measured quantity which is consistent in reported cases of love.
You propose an interesting experiment. When it is conducted we will know of injection works. Until then we have no idea.
Rest assured the Society for Creative Anachronism is real.
I have fully exposed your ignorance of science in other posts. No need to repeat it here.
Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.
www.ussliberty.org
www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html
www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml
You can't be serious. Such hubris. So you think that is analysis of love. Here's a clue: what is being studied is hormone levels. You are not sudying or measuring love. So you think measuring how much rain fell in an area somewhere magically explains how rain is formed? Wow.
Another SCA in science. They get created whenever they are required it seems. Ain't religion wonderful?
I think you have only exposed your ignorance to argue with rationality. Take heart, with other responses I am getting here, you are in good company.
Again your ignorance of science and scientific research in this area has no bearing on this discussion.
No, Sophy, you are totally ignorant of science. That is the sum and substance of the issue here.
Hormone levels have a near 100% correlation with the presence or absense of love. That has been measured. You have no evidence of love independent of hormone levels. You have only your fantasies. Science is notorious for killing off the fantasies of romantics.
Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.
www.ussliberty.org
www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html
www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml
Well actually we do have evidence of common ancestry through a combination of genetics and fossil records, further experiments might give a clearer understanding and idea of what early life forms were like and even find the earliest life forms. Perhaps abiogenesis is accurate, perhaps there was organic matter introduced that served as a kickstart, whatever the case may be. It's possible that there were multiple single celled organisms that underwent massive horizontal gene transfer and mutation, some eventually creating a sex based reproduction rather than aesexual budding, but whatever the case we might eventually manage to backwalk the whole way given enough time and research. And perhaps we will find something different, but the fact is, I would rather work with something that has solid evidence under it with some unknown variables than with something that effectively depends on magical beings conjuring things into existence.
As for the love thing, an injection might do something like that, or at the very least might make him perceive a woman (or man depending on his orientation) as more attractive than he might normally feel and thus more willing to interact with her and perhaps love would be more likely. There is actually some precedence for this, as there are women who, due to hormone shifts while on the pill might have changes in who they find attractive. Now it doesn't negate the more intellectual aspects of love, but that also depends on how poetic you wish love to be, are you looking at the idea of an eternal love? A love that is real but might only last a few years? What ultimately is your definition before we look at how to answer the question? I coudl also point out that love can be very much understood and argued scientifically.
You are correct in your last.
If love has to be a shared thing, if it is to be true love, one has to wonder where God learned to love and develop a moral sense.
These only come from interactions between like creatures. Human to human. God to God.
Perhaps that is why the Jews have an Ashera. God's wife.
Regards
DL