One of my best friends pointed out pointing one of the famous Bible account that is God is love. He said God is love, not God has love. That means God is a personification of love as well as wisdom, power, justice.
We must believe in God or at least we ought to.
Very true; in his first letter, John makes that point very clear.
ReplyDelete"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love." (1 John 4;7& 8, NKJ)
What does that mean for those who know only unrequited love? :-/
ReplyDeleteThan you only have half a God. ;-)
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Ethelred
I don't know about religious belief. But if God is the personification of these virtues, we have nothing for it but to believe in God. I think love is in essence a requited one, never mind.
ReplyDeleteIn the first place I thought God is far and exists beyond our comprehension. It was just the objective of admiration. As I heard his explanation I feel him much closer to me. I can simply believe in God if God is the representation of those virtues.
ReplyDeleteA little bit of Les Miserables you might appreciate:
ReplyDeleteWe are equally far removed from the hosanna of Joseph de Maistre, who wound up by anointing the executioner, and from the sneer of Voltaire, who even goes so far as to ridicule the cross.
An illogical act on Voltaire's part, we may remark, by the way; for Voltaire would have defended Jesus as he defended Calas; and even for those who deny superhuman incarnations, what does the crucifix represent? The assassinated sage.
I'm sorry but I don't think this makes sense. Are you saying that if you don't believe in God you can't love, or have wisdom? Because that's silly. Lots of people love without God. Lots of people have loved so much that they forgive Christians who tortured them to death because they didn't believe; for example, the cathars did exactly this during the inquisition.
ReplyDeleteOf course you can love without believing in any God or gods. It's the other way around, I think: if you don't love, you don't really believe in a higher being. Or you think you believe because you've been taught certain things, but you don't know God.
ReplyDeleteYou can believe in love - and love others - without absolutely having to personify the concept. It's a personal choice.
ReplyDeleteIf you love someone, you are automatically believing in God, please don't worry too much.
ReplyDeleteEveryone who loves believes in love.
ReplyDeleteGod is love.
Ergo: everyone who loves believes in God.
All right, that's valid. Is that what you mean?
One of the pretty young girls were wearing a cross pendant on her neck. I asked her if she is Christian. She seems to feel perplexed by my remark, catching her cross and saying it is just a decoration. Here in East Asia, cross is just a decoration. We tend to believe that hakencreutz is probably associated with Nazis, but in Asian countries this sign, though the direction of arrow is not clockwise, represents temples in general. It is illogical to seek for the meaning in symbols and signs as a whole. For believers of God, God is almighty so it's natural that they believe in God. On the other hands, secular people who think God is a representation of many virtues are also believing in God probably in a slightly different manner from believers.
ReplyDeleteI am a completely secular person. But I think we ought to believe the value of virtues like love, justice, etc. Some believe in superhuman incarnations usually believe in God. In the same manner some who think Jesus was just the assassinated sage are believing in God as long as they think Jesus was assassinated and sage. If we thought Jesus was just the executed criminal, we are definitely not believing in God though.
Yes, it is.
ReplyDeleteBut what does that mean for polytheists?
ReplyDeleteThat's one problem I have with Mer's statement. Polytheists usually have a number of gods who have very different characteristics or essences. While I have no difficulty in seeing those as aspects of the Divine, it would be quite problematic to see all of them as aspects of love.
ReplyDeleteThen there are the people - Pantheists, for instance, and many Buddhists - who firmly do NOT believe in a personal God; they may well believe in love as a universal principle.
Yeah, these are my problems, too. And more than that; There are hard core atheists out there who are quite aggressive about NOT believing in any kind of god at all and yet embody all these virtues that we've been talking about, most especially love. This is what I was getting at in my comments earlier.
ReplyDeleteI was going to say I think it's the other way round, buty then that's not true either. Certainly if you call yourself a Xstian, you are forced to "believe in love". But this isn't neccessarily true for other gods, say Isis/Thoth for example. No, I'm afraid "love" and "god" are completely exclusive from one another. They just happen to coincide sometimes is all.
I think the thesis here is: a God who is pure love actually exists. So, if you feel, practice and believe in love, you believe in Him whether you know it or not. He will consider you a worshiper of Him.
ReplyDeleteI kind of like it in one way, but I'm not so keen on telling other people that they believe what they strongly assert they don't believe.
Perhaps the problem is the word 'believe'. I think I'd accept the thesis as: one God who is pure love exists. Whether you believe in Him or not, you serve his purposes and/or is godlike if you practice love.
ReplyDeleteCorrect. There's no God in the teachings of Buddha. But since Buddha became the objective of reverence so now largely plays a role of God for the general public. There's another story as to a Buddhist monk. He is trying to reach Buddha through meditation, Zen practice, abstinence, reciting, etc. So there's absolutely no God.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you to a point. :) And I think we may get into the god/God controversy again lol
ReplyDeleteI think the point that was being made in the Bible was that a "Christian" is compelled to love, because his God is Love personified. In other words, Love should be a distinguishing mark of a Christian - unfortunately it is not always so!
The personification of love is not love, any more than a painting of a pipe is a pipe.
ReplyDeleteYou are thinking in physical terms - God is not physical, he is a spirit. And when the writer says God is love - he means that literally. God is the personification of love - he IS love - just like a pipe is a pipe.
ReplyDeletePeople are not love personified - they cannot be as physical beings. But they are supposed to imitate God's love toward each other. Christians are to love other Christians .. and they are supposed to love even their enemies - but let's leave that out.
I can think of several examples of Christians displaying anything but love - oh, couched in other words, sure ... freedom, democracy, equal rights, independence - still not love!
Just think of Ireland .. loving Christians killing other loving Christians.
God's principled love (agape) extends to all.
morosoph is perfectly right. Body or spirit, plant or artifact, an individual entity (a particular) is not IDENTICAL with any concept (a universal). The two groups of "things" have different forms of existence, just like a pipe and a picture of it.
ReplyDeleteGod is a spirit (maybe), but love is not a spirit. We may say that love is the most essential characteristic of God, but it's not the only one, and God is not the only being who feels love. They are not identical.
As logician Gilbert Ryle said back in the 60es: "God, however perfect, is a particular."
Thank you, morosoph. I didn't say this before because they aren't so fond of logic in this context.
Sorry - I mean formal logic. I don't mean that any of you are illogical in a broader sense.
ReplyDeleteAs right as you are, you are also wrong. :) You are mixing apples and pictures of oranges.
ReplyDeleteT o accept that scripture at its face value, one must first believe in God - the God of the Bile I hasten to add!:) One must believe that "All scripture is given by inspiration of God .." (2 Tim 3:16a). The words "given by inspiration" literally mean "God-breathed".
Only from this viewpoint can the scripture under discussion be contemplated. The linking word "is" ties "God" and "Love" into one and the same. Love as spiritual entity is the same as God, the spiritual entity. Again, let me emphasize that the "Love" here is the Koine Greek "agape" - love based on principles.
It is not "philia", "eros" or "skorge" - brotherly love, erotic love (love between two people), family love (father/daughter for example). Those are loves that man is well acquainted with and comfortable in applying. Agape comes in hand-in-hand with Jesus' command to "love you enemies" .. not so comfortable for mankind.
It is not possible to apply man's philosophical thoughts or logic to God or to understanding of God. Only belief in God can accomplish that.
I grant you this is a very narrow-minded point of view, but the only one applicable to this particular scripture - and to understanding God.
I knew I'd get something like this. My reply was primarily to morosoph who I thought should feel that his/her (?) message reached at least one pair of ears. Secondly to Mer who defines himself as a secular person.
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest, you are, from your point of view, trying to explain colours to the blind. I know your point of view, I understand how a few given premises lead to all the rest, and that's it, folks.
When two persons don't agree on the basic premises, there's only one thing to do: agree on polite disagreement. :-)
You almost always think as language thinks. But as long as language is the reflection of reality you need to work out your imagination to supplement the extremely limited role of language.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what denomination you belong to. I could discuss the subject with a Jesuit with little difficulty, they are darn good logicians and fond/proud of it. Meaning that a Jesuit would want to apply logic here. He wouldn't insist on a fundamentalist interpretation of a sentence. It's in my experience Protestants who argue like you.
ReplyDeleteNever mind - just interest in you as a person.
Say what? If language is a reflection of reality, I fail to see why its role should be "extremely limited".
ReplyDeleteIt would make sense to me if you said that language reflects only a part of reality - that's in my opinion quite true. Or that some truths can't be expressed by language. Then they might, by means of imagination, be expressed in music or paintings or treatment of one's neighbour or whatever.
Still: we are discussing a statement expressed in language. It should be accessible to our linguistic centers.
You want my opinion on "God is love"? OK, here goes: that statement is ordinary daily loose talk that means something like: "I experience God as love". Just like I could say that I remember my father as wisdom and kindness. I know very well that the equation "my father=wisdom+kindness" is not strictly true.
My reply was as to morosoph's interpretation of language as a whole, and not at all for ullangoo. Your way of understanding language and reality is very balanced and completely acceptable.
ReplyDeleteAnd politely close the discussion. :)
ReplyDeleteAnd enjoy getting to know each other. :-)
ReplyDeleteThat perhaps being more important than the topic of discussion .. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteOf course. A litle daily-life agape.
ReplyDeleteWell, despite my terse reply, I wasn't deliberately being trivial. I count myself a Spinozan Pantheist, and one of the problems that I have with the Christian god is what I perceive as the slurring of categories. A concept such as love is welled up by the desire for it to have a personification; Christianity is psychologically hard to resist.
ReplyDeleteI have had experiences of the paranormal, but the intelligence that I detect in the world is not a human intelligence, and appears to have the character of a cool ordering force that is slow on the individual scale, yet massively parallel. I would choose to use a word such as the Tao for it; love is simply the wrong concept.
However, if there is an emergent pattern, wishful thinking is going to attribute love and a given theology to the design. By saying that the personification of love is not love, I am attempting to get people to remove their rose-tinted spectacles so as to be able to perceive a different, more natural kind of wonder.
I'm not a big one for quoting texts, religious or otherwise: to my mind, replacing experience with words is a sure way to push spirituality out of one's mind. I make a partial exception for the Tao Te Ching and similar poetry, for there the words are a springboard for experience. To often, words normalise, distort, and limit experience to acceptable interpretations instead.
BTW, it's a he :o)
Yes, I checked - name's Tim, right? Sorry, the pop-up mini profile thingy wasn't working the other day.
ReplyDeleteYou interest me - I mean: what you say does. Slurring of categories, definitely, and I'll add a very anthropomorphic/centric view of the Universe. It's not the love I react to, though, it's the idea that the Lord of everything is sitting there judging us for petty doings that we at some point have decided are socially unacceptable. Down to interfering with our choice of food, s'help me. Nope.
I sense a very strong harmony-seeking force in the Universe. Yin and yang trying to be reconciled, become one. God is to me a Being who has managed to reconcile those two principles in him/herself. One result of this is an acceptance and understanding that may be called love although it's not a kind of love we find "down" here.
The principles themselves contain everything including what we call "evil" - but it isn't evil, it just is. It all has its part to play.
Shit - I don't think I explained it very well. Anyway, that's why I find it easy to see all sorts of gods in polytheistic religions as parts or aspects of the divine. They are. They are just seen at a stage at which harmony between them isn't yet created and/or through eyes that can't perceive such harmony because it doesn't exist (yet) in humans.
ReplyDeleteYep, it's Tim.
ReplyDeleteI think that we're on the same track. BTW (regarding your clarification) pantheistic isn't polytheistic.
Yin and Yang aren't quite it: the concepts are too "human"; it's the same error that leads to the Christian God, IMO, and leads to the need for a theory of evil (such as Yin not "obeying" Yang). Such theories are usually too simple.
To me, it is the "being" that is the wrong concept. At that point we are overgeneralising, and we are doing so to an even greater extent as to when we "personalise" nations (vis, Britannia, Uncle Sam, etcetera). At least nations are made of people; nature is not a being, and making it one falsifises our intelligence concerning nature, as one would if one were seeking comfort, rather than truth.
The image that I chose is called "The Treachery Of Images"; that is no arbitrary title. It is our greatest risk, that in seeking meaning, we overturn truth.
Sure - I know Spinoza and pantheism, but I wrote something about polytheism in a reply far above and thought I'd gather the loose ends.
ReplyDeleteI don't really know what to call the fundamental principles; yin and yang are better for me personally than most others because I don't hear these words as one negative and one positive. I don't trust all those human value judgments (including my own at this stage).
The "Being" - well, sometimes I sense a presence that feels like a "person". Aspects, manifestations, something/body that shows me the tiny parts that I'm able to comprehend. I can't define it. Maybe it's one aspect of whatever and nature is another, and you and I have chosen to focus more on one than on the other.
Maybe there's nothing that chooses except me, i.e. sometimes I'm open and sometimes not.
Jeez - this is difficult to put in words. I don't have so many answers, anyway.
Do some people say that Yin should obey Yang? I didn't know that - it's utter baloney. It's just one more judgment of something we don't understand.
ReplyDeleteDoes some people say that Yin should obey Yang? I didn't know that - it's utter baloney. It's just one more judgment of something we don't understand.
ReplyDeleteOnly strong Confucians would say that, but it is assumed in Chinese philosophy that Yang should lead and Yin should follow. To interpret that as "obey", and to rigidly allocate Yin and Yang to particular people is to miss the subtlety, I agree.
ReplyDeletePartly, I am sure, to avoid this, the Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching uses the terms "firm" and "yielding" concerning the six-line forms that the book describes. The Lynn translation, while academically superior, simply doesn't have the Wilhelm translation's humanity. It uses "Yin" and "Yang" to refer to the lines, and doesn't cushion the reader from patriarchal assumptions within the text. In a way I prefer that, for it leaves me the job of contextualisation, but it can go too far, as I feel that it does in another book "The Elemental Changes" that is structurally interesting, but the interpretations in that book are pointlessly strict, IMO.
This is not a pipe. If this statement is true, we ought to think this is similar to pipe, but it's a musical instrument, or a trash box, people's residential house, simple art objet, tunnel, pot, hammer, golf patter, jar, vase, or a balloon, anyway anything other than pipe.If you think this statement tells us this is not a pipe, but a painting of pipe, you are failing to understand the essence of language. Pipe means a real pipe, pipe in paintings, pipe objet, whatever.
ReplyDeleteNo, Mer. If you see a photo of me, you say "that's Ulla", right? But the photo you see can't walk, talk, eat, contradict you, smile ---. It's actually not me, it's a photo. Your statement is simply a short form of "this is a photo of Ulla".
ReplyDeleteYes, the relation between copy (e.g. a photo) and original is one of similarity. That's how we recognize the copy, so to speak. That's also why the linguistic sign, the word, can understandably be applied to the copy, but we all know that we can't take a pipe from a painting, put tobacco in it and smoke it. For that we need a tangible three-dimensional thing, not a two-dimensional picture, and we all know it although we can't all express it as "thing and picture belong to different ontological categories".
Usually, when you connect a particular and a universal by "be", you express predication. "Ulla's face is red" means "Ulla's face has the characteristic (attribute) red". It doesn't mean that my face is identical with the colour red per se. But when you say "God is love", you claim to identify the particular 'God' with the universal 'love', and that's impossible without slurring the categories, as Tim said.
Thanks for explaining, Tim. I'm mostly using yin and yang because these words have very few connotations for me and because they can be understood as including any pair of so-called opposites; they are much broader than e.g. 'form' and 'matter'. I'm not really thinking in Chinese philosophy.
ReplyDeleteWhatever you say, :)If some one showed my picture saying if it's me, I would reply yes it is. I dare not say no, it is not me, but it's a photo of me. Language is not an absolute tool. Language merely define the relative meaning, in other words, any word in various sentences ought to be understood in line with each context they are used.
ReplyDeleteThey almost always are as long as we speak about the world we know. We know what other people know and hear, so it's not necessary to explain to anybody that a photo is not a person or that there's no animals in the air when we say that it's raining cats and dogs.
ReplyDeleteWhen we're trying do define something we don't know, however, we need to be much more careful.