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What is love?

I had always heard that love is a trick a mother and her baby play on a man to keep him from taking off for Vegas.

And every time I'm reminded of that, I think, "Hey. I've got to get to Vegas."
 
mslxl said:
Or, to be more precise, not so much what is your personal opinion of what love is, but how does love fit in the belief wars that JREF is engaged in? Can love be defined, studied and understood in a rationalist, materialist perspective?
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Yes.
Does talking about love indicate something about the speaker's other beliefs, and if so, what?
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Not unless there is something they specifically say that suggests something about their other beliefs.


If someone says "I love you" then they are simply reporting an immediate experience rather than making any assumption about its metaphysical basis.
What use and abuse of the concept of love is being made by believers in the paranormal and the supernatural?
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The only supernatural use of love of which I am aware is the claim "God is love".

It would actually be quite nice if love were the governing principle of all of existence, but to date I have not seen any reason to believe that it is.
 
plumjam said:
Some pretty poor replies , which is not surprising, as materialism struggles to accommodate the myriad forms of love.

Food for thought here, offered to my fellow forumites in a spirit of ....well, y,know ;) :
http://discoursesbymeherbaba.org/v1-156.php
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Huh? He's no Kalil Gibran, or Alan Watts. Wonder what he really thinks. This materialism fetish of yours is self destructive. People are just people. Pretty much all the same problems. Get over this struggle to judge your fellow man.
 
Olowkow said:
Huh? He's no Kalil Gibran, or Alan Watts. Wonder what he really thinks. This materialism fetish of yours is self destructive. People are just people. Pretty much all the same problems. Get over this struggle to judge your fellow man.
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hmm.. what a bizarre reply
 
plumjam said:
Some pretty poor replies , which is not surprising, as materialism struggles to accommodate the myriad forms of love.
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No, I think it's more just cynicism in the face of a question which crops up in precisely the same form every few weeks. You're just still trying to grind a theist agenda.

The easy way to show you your fallacy is simply to look at animals other than humans. Even such a simple organism as a cat will show the same attributes as a human mother in terms of protecting and nurturing its offspring. But a cat, having no "soul" clearly can't love its offspring...

A simple search of threads on the subject (Search, thread titles, "love") will give all of the relevant details without the necessity for everyone to repeat themselves stupid at the same question.

To the OP - in brief, "love" is a human construct. Unless you belong to one of those religions where cats, dogs and amoebae also have souls and go to the baby Jesus' place in the sky.

I would have thought divorce statistics alone would disabuse people of the notion that love is anything else.
 
The Atheist said:
No, I think it's more just cynicism in the face of a question which crops up in precisely the same form every few weeks. You're just still trying to grind a theist agenda.
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Of course I'm grinding out a theist agenda. Just as most here at JREF are grinding out a materialist and/or atheist agenda. It's called discussion.

The easy way to show you your fallacy is simply to look at animals other than humans. Even such a simple organism as a cat will show the same attributes as a human mother in terms of protecting and nurturing its offspring. But a cat, having no "soul" clearly can't love its offspring...
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Personally I believe animals have souls too.
Why do humans love animals which are of no practical use to them whatsoever, and in fact are often a material burden?


A simple search of threads on the subject (Search, thread titles, "love") will give all of the relevant details without the necessity for everyone to repeat themselves stupid at the same question.
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I never quite understand this view that often crops up which seems to imply that because a topic has been discussed in prior threads that the topic can't be discussed again.
If I go and find a dead 2 year old thread and put a new post on the end of it what are the chances that people are going to be interested in revisiting it and contributing much? Not very high, I reckon.
 
Love is the conscious realization and experience of idealized conditions, states, and circumstances.
 
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plumjam said:
Some pretty poor replies , which is not surprising, as materialism struggles to accommodate the myriad forms of love.
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Well then, why exacerbate the situation with another poor reply.

In case you did not notice the OP did not ask us to accommodate the myriad forms of love, in fact explicitly asked us not to.
 
And by the way, I am a Materialist and have never had any trouble accommodating the myriad forms of love. I have absolutely no idea why anybody should think it a problem.
 
plumjam said:
Why do humans love animals which are of no practical use to them whatsoever, and in fact are often a material burden?
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You mean why does human behaviour sometimes not make rational sense?

Wow, its almost like we weren't designed at all.
 
Robin said:
You mean why does human behaviour sometimes not make rational sense?
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Yeah, why does most of human experience and behaviour directly contradict the evolutionary/deterministic/materialist world view?
For starters, we shouldn't even be conscious.
Bit of a killer, that one.

Funny how materialists try to turn this around and make out that humanity not fitting into their materialist dogma must be a sign of us not being designed.
Makes me laugh.
 
plumjam said:
Yeah, why does most of human experience and behaviour directly contradict the evolutionary/deterministic/materialist world view?
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OK, explain why you think that an evolutionary/deterministic/materialist worldview would imply that a human should act completely rationally 100% of the time? What a very odd thing to claim.
For starters, we shouldn't even be conscious.
Bit of a killer, that one.
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Another odd statement. Why shouldn't we be conscious?
Funny how materialists try to turn this around and make out that humanity not fitting into their materialist dogma must be a sign of us not being designed.
Makes me laugh.
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On the other hand your claim that a mind that developed over billions of years through billions of steps of a blind iterative process ought (for some unspecified reason) to be completely rational 100% of the time strikes you as somehow rational?

I suppose laughing is a good substitute for actually providing evidence for these dopey non-sequiturs of yours.
 
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Robin said:
And by the way, I am a Materialist and have never had any trouble accommodating the myriad forms of love. I have absolutely no idea why anybody should think it a problem.
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There's no problem, there's just an axe to grind, over and over again. At this point, plumjam's axe has been ground down to the the point that it is all handle. :D

You can assume all sorts of unfounded nonsense about souls and such, but it adds nothing to our knowledge. From a practical standpoint, what we call "love" is a collection physical processes of the human body, developed completely naturally through evolutionary processes, and without the need to completely irrational imaginary entities.
 
JoeEllison said:
There's no problem, there's just an axe to grind, over and over again. At this point, plumjam's axe has been ground down to the the point that it is all handle. :D

You can assume all sorts of unfounded nonsense about souls and such, but it adds nothing to our knowledge. From a practical standpoint, what we call "love" is a collection physical processes of the human body, developed completely naturally through evolutionary processes, and without the need to completely irrational imaginary entities.
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But I am still looking forward to plumjam's new excuse to avoid telling us why he thinks that Materialism implies the human mind should be 100% rational.

I would like to add this to Plantinga's claim that Materialism implies that the human mind should be completely irrational. So rigorous and consistent is the case against Materialism :)
 
plumjam said:
Of course I'm grinding out a theist agenda. Just as most here at JREF are grinding out a materialist and/or atheist agenda. It's called discussion.
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What on earth are materialist/atheist agendas?

The only agenda at work here seems to be an anti-absurdity one.

plumjam said:
Personally I believe animals have souls too.
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Oh goody!

Does that apply to animals like intestinal tapeworms? Blue-bottle jellyfish? Cockroaches? If not, which ones have souls?

plumjam said:
Why do humans love animals which are of no practical use to them whatsoever, and in fact are often a material burden?
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I'll leave that for someone familiar with the sensation - Dogdoctor, maybe. Or Darat and his cats...

plumjam said:
I never quite understand this view that often crops up which seems to imply that because a topic has been discussed in prior threads that the topic can't be discussed again.
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No, that's quite right. It's just that this particular subject has been done very recently on several occasions.
 
Robin said:
But I am still looking forward to plumjam's new excuse to avoid telling us why he thinks that Materialism implies the human mind should be 100% rational.
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You're a clever boy. I shouldn't have to explain everything to you.
Anyway, irrationality - defined as forms of thought/behaviour that do not fit into the evolutionary/deterministic/materialistic world view - has literally no possible origin.
Yet we are completely surrounded by it. By this definition irrationality would include things like art, music, humour, sport, ..etc.. in fact anything that goes beyond simple survival and procreation.
90 odd percent of human life, I reckon.
Yeah, another killer.
Sucks, huh? :p

Time for your excuse.
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