I would agree with the fundamental idea that you can't be "perfect" (I chose that word because Jesus said "be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect) apart from God

I would disagree with taking that to mean that only those who are Christian or who recognize God in the form of the historical person Jesus, or even recognize God in the symbol "Christ", which is more than just the historical person Jesus (Jesus is Christ, but Christ is more than the historical person), although that's a statement that probably requires a lot more explanation than I'm going to give in this post.

My opinion is that the effort and the disposition of goodness and kindness towards others (I'll avoid saying love to avoid the semantic debate) is what is important. Theology and culture and religious tradition is useful but only in that it cultivates the proper attitude of the heart, not in that the word "Jesus" is a passphrase towards God's good graces.

So I would rephrase your statement more along the lines of "No one can perfectly express the ideal that Jesus spoke of without being in communion with the Divine, and the very act of attempting to live such an ideal places one in the right context to experience the Divine"

So we heathens can love but if we do so or try to we are unknowingly in communion with the Divine? Well i guess thats a little better.

I agree.

I'm a big fan of you heathens in general. Physics is awesome and you have the best rock bands

Love,

Well Named

I don't disagree with this, and most Christians would refer to this as 'Loving Kindness'. The argument being that showing kindness is and act of Love. An act of personal sacrifice is an act of Love.

Can I love a stranger like I love my children? No, because there is a relationship, history, shared experience, etc, that cannot be replicated with the stranger. So the emotional bond is not present with the stranger.

But this is a matter of semantics made necessary by the English language, and nothing more. We use 'love' for multiple meanings, where Greek would use eros/agape/phileo/storge.

Ok, so selfless love is real love, you say. But the kind of love you are describing , isnt selfless. It includes a self that has an intention, a motivation, even if that motivation is "to do good" or "to be loving" it is still not selfless, because the self gains something from it. And the self is involved in choosing what to love, there are preferences and choices made.

the only way I could see selfless love working is if there was no self to do the loving, and no object to be loved, and so everything was loved. This inlcudes things we abhor and are repelled by, cancer, war, pain suffering, abuse, and so on. It would be the acceptance of everything.

Otherwise, you are just talking about the normal sort of love , where you love strawberries but hate sprouts, you love that girl but hate that one, and so on.

you cant fake that kind of love (selfless love). It just looks unwieldy and false. You end up doing actions that you perceive as loving ( and we have already seen that actions are irrelevant) for whatever motivation your mind comes up with

Yeah but you guys got eternal life and the blues. I think its a push.

Love, (almost...)

batair

Yes, this is significant. I am a little bemused at neeel's "what is this 'air' you speak of" attitude, which I may be wrong but makes him sound as if he does not know what love is, not that he is simply unable to define it very well, like the rest of us have been floundering about with itt!

neeel, is 'happy' real? Is 'embarassed' real? Aren't these just simple labels we have given to complex psycho/bio/socio/chemical actions and responses? You don't need to understand any of those processes to experience the 'feelings' associated with the labels.

At the end of the day, isn't "really really really really really really like" just as good a description, with variations in how many "really"s each of us needs to label it love rather than like? What I think is much more interesting is why does "like to the nth degree of really's" (aka love!) make most of us do highly irrational things, at least when it takes the form of romantic love?

Let me add to this something that might be a little unpopular amongst the Christians here:

Imagine a boy is crazy in love with a girl, to the extent that he is obsessed with her. He follows her around all the time, everywhere she goes he needs to be there as well. He does every little thing she wants (or at least, that he thinks she wants). He thinks about her constantly, almost every action he does he thinks "I wonder if she would like this?". It is clearly an obsession.

I think most parents would be rather troubled by this, in fact this boy could well be emotionally unstable and considered a potential psych risk. This level of obsession would almost universally be seen as a negative relationship, and it is unhealthy for the boy.

Now for the switch (I expect you know what is coming): what if instead of being obsessed with a girl, you are now talking about his "relationship with Jesus"? Nothing else needs to change in the description. In fact, it could be made to sound much worse. Is this just as unhealthy? Or is this in fact a scriptural requirement for Christianity? (and btw, I don't mean to imply that every Christian feels that way, but it is probably common enough to be something that not only fundamentalists behave that way).

I think the sort of infatuation you describe is a pitfall of some religious practices. Or maybe it's not that the infatuation is a danger in and of itself, but having the mistaken idea that it is the end and goal of religion, or that it represents the deepest and best possible way of understanding one's relationship to God.

I have been to certain charismatic protestant churches that seemed that way to me. I may be overly judgmental but it did feel immature to me. On the other hand, I think when someone discovers something that impacts way of life or world view in such a profound way, it is fairly natural to have that reaction for a time.

pretty much, yes. I dont know what love is. I dont think I have experienced love. I have experienced thoughts about love, and emotions that I label love ( although even there Im not sure, because these emotions could be just as easily labelled "fear", or "desire" or whatever, and they are also intertwined with thoughts about love, and thoughts about the object of love). When someone says "I love you", what does that mean exactly? "I am feeling a whirlpool of emotions, which include exhilaration, fear, nausea, and a desire to move closer to you"? I dont think thats what they mean.


No, I dont think happy or embarrassed are real.
The feelings are real, as in , they are there, and experienced. But they are only there in response to content of thought, which isnt real. When someone asks me "are you happy" I have real trouble answering" because usually, at that moment I am not experiencing what is normally called happiness. I may be experiencing trapped wind, or cold air, or hunger, or whatever. I guess that they may mean, overall, if you added up the times you were happy, and the times you were sad, would you be happy more often than sad, but that kind of seems meaningless to me.

I dont think happiness is associated with any particular feelings or sensations of the body. Rather, it is associated with particular thoughts. And the content of these thoughts is usually filled with concepts and ideas, most of which are false.

These thoughts may trigger bodily feelings and sensations, but these sensations are not "happiness", they are just sensations.


I probably havent explained very well, I feel like I am rambling a bit.

Neeel,
It is difficult to have a discussion as your questioning fundamental parts of human consciousness that "everyone" takes for granted. "Everyone" believes there is a self even if we can't clearly identify what that means. I am not saying you are wrong but the topic of "whether or not self exists" seems like a completely different discussion.

BF,
I am in agreement with WN that there are many unhealthy ways to be a Christian. There is a way to be madly in love with a girl that is great and romantic. Conversely, there are ways to be in "love" or infatuated which is off balance and unhealthy.

Well, you were the one that brought up selfless love, and so it only seemed natural to assume you meant, love, without a self. But yes, I can see how it would be annoying for you that I take things to the extremes I do, if it happens on every topic I post on.

I don't get that at all, but maybe it's just a term I'm familiar with because of my Christian past.

For purposes of this discussion, selfless = not selfish. It would be 'Not considering your own desires.' Not 'without a self'...whatever the hell that is.

any love ( or anything) that purports to come from a self, is selfish, no matter what motivations( "I want to be a good person" " I want to follow jesus example") are given, because the self always stands to gain something from the transaction. I would guess that the original meaning of selfless love would be closer to what I am suggesting ( not coming from a self) , but what the hell do I know.

Neeel,
How did you arrive at your conclusions about the concept of "self"? Are these Buddhist ideas?

I arrived at my conclusions by looking at how things worked. I guess you could say they are buddhist ideas( although I am not a buddhist), or at least buddhism talks about them, but then, so does christianity and islam.

It depends on who I’m talking to I interpret theism through a nondual lens, which many theists consider heretical. But basically, I don’t believe there’s a real separation between you, me and God, and the statement “I and the Father are one,” applies to each of us. Not our little ego and material selves, where one could wrongly take that to imply ‘duffee is God’, but to our true nature that can rightly affirm ‘I am that I am’. A common metaphor is the ocean and its waves, whereby if a wave could speak, it would say: “I and the ocean are one, but the ocean is greater than I.” Of course an ocean is finite, so it’s not a great analogy since we can think of the ocean’s oneness as merely a sum of its parts, and not as denoting the lack of otherness as with an infinite one, but that’s the gist of it anyway.

slight derail...

duffee,
How did you arrive at this conclusion? This is not meant to be like an "up your nose" question, I am honestly just curious. Like is there a more specific line of teaching you subscribe to or is it self styled?

nondual = interconnected ?

Similar to what I mentioned to duffee, I am not trying to get all "up your nose". I am just curious to know where you are coming from. That is why I was asking about Buddhism.

<shameless_plug>you may be interested in this thread</shameless_plug>

Ye, like I said, I had beliefs about how the world worked, but when you look closely, you see that its not like that at all.
For example, our language, culture, and belief system implies that there is a someone, a self, that is doing the thoughts, thinking the thoughts, choosing the thoughts. But when you actually look at how thoughts happen, you see that there is no thing, or entity that is choosing the thoughts, and no self that is thinking them. They are there, and then not. You cant predict your next thought, and you dont choose the next thought to think.

I am not a buddhist, did not follow any buddhist dogma or path, but, as mentioned, these are things( eg thoughts, no thinker of thoughts) that buddhism talks about.

Not any specific line, more of a broad approach. If you check out the wiki article on nondualism, you can see how the concept permeates most religious or spiritual traditions, to one degree or another.

That’s not really what nonduality means, but it’s about as near as we can get to it with conceptual thought. From my experience, we can know it or realize it, but we can’t conceptually or analytically think it, if that makes any sense.