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What is love?

plumjam said:
Confused, no. Check the online dictionaries and most coalesce on an agenda being simply a list of things to do. That can be within an organisation or outside of one. As a group or as an individual. "My wife has a hidden agenda".
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Well, this all actually confirms that you are confused. A small group of people who claim to be atheists (but who are actually anti-theists, in my view) have agendas which might masquerade as "atheist agendas" but that doesn't make it real.

This is all pretty obscure as to relevance to the OP, but you need to grasp this point first.

Anyone can claim to represent a group. Whether they do or not is subject to evidence.

plumjam said:
It is the people who question the above materialist/atheist agenda who come in for the most stick and abuse. You must know this as you have questioned it yourself on occasion too, and pissed quite a few people off by doing so.
For which I congratulate you.
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Well, thanks, but I can assure you that they are a tiny fraction of atheists - the vast majority of which are apathetic atheists and really don't give a flying fig about any of this. When you can tell me what agenda those people subscribe to, I'll be prepared to listen.

Meanwhile, Hokulele's right: "love" is just another word.
 
The Atheist said:
... Something like this?

{TA's def'n of love}

FSM thought it was pretty good and I still stand by it. ...
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Add me to the list who thought it was pretty good. :)

plumjam said:
Some pretty poor replies , which is not surprising, as materialism struggles to accommodate the myriad forms of love.
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Love Doctor... in da house!

Dr. PJ Luv must have his own, better definition then:
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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That's odd, instead of offering his own, he links to some bad boy named Meher Baba's. Do you suppose he's unable to come up with his own definition of love? Isn't that part of love, a very personal expression of one's desire for this beauty- and pain-riddled world and its rarer beings, authentic, your words, from your heart (see TA's eg), not someone else's.

Well, let's see what this bad boy's got to say anyway: okay Baba, what is love? (baba don't hurt me...)

Meher Baba said:
The law of gravitation, to which all the planets and the stars are subject, is in its own way a dim reflection of the love which pervades every part of the universe.
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Dude! My mind. Blown. Seriously. (No wonder you claim to be God, o wise one.)

Even the forces of repulsion are in truth expressions of love, since things are repelled from each other because they are more powerfully attracted to some other things.
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Then again, if you are God, you sure ain't Spinoza's...

(or think of all the physics textbooks to be rewritten: "Magnets of the same polarity do not, as previously thought by Faraday etal., repel each other; we now know, thanks to the revolutionary and groundbreaking researches of Meher Baba in the field of electromagnetism, that in fact they just happen to be more attracted to "some other things" as they come closer to each other. [Better inform the Nobel committee -- looks like we have a winner!])

Repulsion is a negative consequence of positive attraction.
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Are we gonna be tested on this?

Yawn.

The forces of cohesion and affinity which prevail in the very constitution of matter are positive expressions of love.
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Zzzzzzz.

A striking example of love at this level is found in the attraction which the magnet exercises for iron.
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Baba foreplay: "Baby, that must be steel wool I see, 'cause my magnuts are being attracted according to the inverse square of their distance. O Baby, O yeah."
...
Baby: O Baba. Baba: O Baby. Baby: O BABA. Baba: O BABY. Baby: Baba! Baba: Baby! Baby: BABA! Baba: BABY! Baby: O Baba. O Baba. O Baba. O Baba. O Baba. O Baba. Oooooooo... BAABAAAA!!! Baba: Bay-bee.

;):p
 
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Blobru, my sides are aching; life must really be a riot chez vous.
Got nothing better than attempts at humour to offer?
 
The Atheist said:
Well, this all actually confirms that you are confused. A small group of people who claim to be atheists (but who are actually anti-theists, in my view) have agendas which might masquerade as "atheist agendas" but that doesn't make it real.
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More semantic hocus-pocus I'm afraid.
So now it turns out that theists plus anti-theists are vulnerable to the agenda virus, but atheists remain magically immune.
If the people you allude to claim to be atheists rather than anti-theists, shouldn't you listen to them on that? I mean I guess they have a better grasp of what goes on in their minds on a daily basis than you do.
Oh yeah, and I notice you are now just talking about atheists, whereas my original point was about 'materialists and/or athiests'. Interesting how the materialist part got dropped out of the equation somewhere.
Do materialists have agendas? Would you describe yourself as one?


This is all pretty obscure as to relevance to the OP, but you need to grasp this point first.
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Were you ever a schoolteacher?

Well, thanks, but I can assure you that they are a tiny fraction of atheists - the vast majority of which are apathetic atheists and really don't give a flying fig about any of this.
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Strange how so many 'apathetic' atheists spend such a lot of time and energy in a philosophy/religion subforum endlessly discussing things they don't believe exist, and by your characterisation, are mostly apathetic about.

When you can tell me what agenda those people subscribe to, I'll be prepared to listen.
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I already did. Scroll back if you like.

So you like Hokulele's 'love is just another word'. So I guess therefore there is no way to distinguish love from hate. Them both being just words.
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
Come on, it was much better than simply accusing Herr Baba of Empedoclean appropriation.
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No it wasn't. Personally I've always found accusing people of Empedoclean appropriation to be one of the most effective and interesting argumentational strategies available.

:rolleyes:
 
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Is our experience of love affected signficantly by our understanding of the concept?
 
An exact, nearly, universally agreed on definition of Love: A score of Zero (0) in the game of tennis. ;)
 
plumjam said:
they cry out free will, aesthetic endeavour for its own sake, and drama.. none of which can be accommodated into the evolutionist/deterministic/materialistic paradigm.
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Whereas there is some evidence for evolution, and none for an almighty.

M.
 
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?
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Belief wars? I'll let that slide for the moment.

We could get into the nuts and bolts of pheromones (controversial), hormones and brain-states and the like if you wish, but I suspect that is not what you are asking about (I could be wrong about that though). Many such explanatory devices exist, although some are as yet unverified. So, onward...

To speak of love is to speak of personal opinion and the personal perception of shared opinion, because love is negotiated social construct, just like knowledge, justice, belief, self, meaning, truth, God (and so on, and so on) are. Some concepts are simply ridiculous; some not so much. As social animals using language to share our experiences with each other, we are constantly defining and redefining our words and ideas in order to express our experiences of self into a shared context.

My view is not the sole authority any more than any one other person's view is (let's try to avoid the word "belief" for the moment, since it, too, is a social construct and subject to intense negotiation). Just as there are those who wish to think that love taps some sort of vague, supernatural realm, there are also those who wish to think that belief does as well.

In the public realm, we discuss our personal emotional experience of love (and other social aspects of being) and reach consensus about how we will understand it or we work to try to redefine it to make it more (or less) understandable to ourselves and to others. While one can posit all kinds of supernatural entities or features at will, it is simply not necessary to do so, and the more mysticism we dispose of, the more coherently we progress in understanding and efficacy (a whole other topic, but related).

To speak of something as being social does not speak of it being non-natural, contrary to the determined stances of some. Yes, I am engaged in two exercises when I say something like that. I am not merely putting forward my understanding (a rational, material one), but I am putting it on the negotiating table of human understanding as well to see if it matches other understandings as well. In this case, it is a meta-discussion - talking about love as a social phenomenon. Interestingly, enough, that also directly impacts our personal experience of it as well, but this by no means requires a supernatural component.

mslxl said:
Can love be defined, studied and understood in a rationalist, materialist perspective?
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Why not?

Well, that depends upon whether one defines it as something that can be spoken rationally of. We can stipulate stipulations at will. If one is inclined towards the "stuff" that Plumjam links to then one cannot. Assuming, however, that one does not get lost in vague, mystical shadowplay, we can develop any number of definitions of love (or any other social construct) that can be spoken of rationally.

I suspect you might be seeing how we are engaged in an ongoing debate over the nature of the human state of being, whether it is something natural or supernatural, whether social aspects of human being fit into a "materialist" worldview.

Here is the pivot of the error folks like Plumjam labour under, just in case you are actually paying attention to that nonsense: they assume that if you can define a thing such that it defies (even if just peripherally) empirical measurement, that it therefore is spiritual and disproves the materialist way of viewing things. Now, it is certainly possible to define anything such that this is the case, but the error then lies, not in the materialist worldview, but in the person (and, by extension, the people) doing the defining. We can say this a billion times and they won't understand it, because they actively choose not to. There's not really much we can do to help him with that, all things said and done. We can only show them the door; they have to walk through it. :)

Now does any of this mean that personal, experiential impact of "love" is any less "profound" on the individual or even among groups? Of course not. But there are those, who want to seize this human emotional, social aspect of our being and annex it to their realm of definitions and their realm of definitions only. This is not only dishonest and disingenuous, it is, from a (at least my, ymmv) human-centered perspective, rather digusting in that it cheapens the human condition.

mslxl said:
Does talking about love indicate something about the speaker's other beliefs, and if so, what?
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It can, but not necessarily so. In the case of those who are prone to view social aspects of being as mystical and non-negotiable, they may see love as being mystical and non-negotiable and this seems to suggest a disposition towards the mystical. We can probably expect their realm of definitions for other social aspects to make similar reference to mysticism. Once you let that virus in, it infects all your software. I suspect this doesn't sound too controversial although I phrase it (hopefully) entertainingly. Similarly, for those inclined to view social aspects of being as natural, we can probably (though not necessarily) expect them to view other aspects of social being as natural as well. My pop-up blocker works quite well. ;)

mslxl said:
What use and abuse of the concept of love is being made by believers in the paranormal and the supernatural?
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Well, I and others have covered this pretty thoroughly, I suspect, but here's a quick link to a post of my own (since I can only really speak with any precision for me) that covers how one can view spirituality and mysticism:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3493588&postcount=34
(I am going to try to find the original before the edit time limit expires, but no guarantees... ;) )

Must one view it this way? No, not at all. Just as one can "believe" anything at all, one can define anything in any way at all. However, we have come to discover that we ignore the material world at our peril and have seen remarkable advances in human efficacy based on verificationist, materialist thinking, whereas we slummed it in the quagmire of intuitionist emo-mysticism for so long.

Love has long been the enemy of religion in that it admits of allegiances other than the dogmatic philosophy, allegiances other than God. So, like true troopers, the religious have sought to annex it, redefine it and incorporate it into their worldviews. They seek to seize it, control it, master it, and wield it to their purposes. Hence romantic "love" has been long denigrated as base and dirty and our women vilified (as competing interests), whereas spiritual "love" has been lauded as pure and transcendent. It's all an attempt to define our concept of self (another social construct) in terms of a particular dogmatic philosophy.

This is not new, and I suspect, on reflection, it will not be controversial either. Religion has often sought to annex the human condition and claim it as its own - denying all us "materialist" people our humanity. Oh wait, that's not strictly speaking true. They are perfectly happy to permit us the aspects of social being that are perceived as being negative. But the positive aspects of our social being are reserved for the righteous. Some have even gone so far, and this is truly twisted, to decree that one cannot love (or engage in any other positive social trait) without doing it "through" their little fairy tale. How dark, nasty, agenda-ridden and anti-human is that? If that's not an abuse, what is? Are you a human or are you a cog in a self-perpetuating dogmatic machine? Your call. Am I giving you a choice (or at least recognizing your choice)? That's more than they'll offer you. Consider that.

To speak of love as being something entirely of the lover is as much an error as to speak of knowledge as being something entirely of the knower, denying a relationship between the lover and that which is loved, just as one can deny the relationship between the knower and that which is known. It is, in my view (for the consideration of others), a retreat into a purely internal realm.

Let me just end this by saying the obvious: if you want to understand a thing, you must define it such that it can be understood. If you want to be lost in vague, meta-physical shadowplay forever, then you can define things such that they are intrinsically un-understandable. The choice is yours, and in a social context, ours.
 
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Love, whatever it is, is all you need. Apart from doritos and an HDTV of course.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=rLxTpsIVzzo

What I 'love' about this video is the whacky contrast between the straight-laced sober dinner-jacketed orchestra in one corner, and the colourful ballooned hippy rabble in the other corner. Yet how the two groups come together in perfect harmony to create a great expression of love.
 
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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? Does talking about love indicate something about the speaker's other beliefs, and if so, what? What use and abuse of the concept of love is being made by believers in the paranormal and the supernatural?
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Love is clearing up after you son turns 18 - though I do not remember it as a many splendoured thing.
Love is the emotion that unites people into sexual pairs, families, groups or allegiances but keep in mind that those different kinds of group experience love in different ways.
 
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