nobody
09-21-2008, 09:24 AM
I'd like to know what your thoughts are on this post:
Jesus: "[A] slave cannot serve two masters, otherwise that slave will honor the one and offend the other."
So what's the deal with love? Why do people revere it so much? Love is supposed to be the cure of the world; all of the world's problems would be solved if everyone loved each other. Me, personally, I have nothing against love. It's great. But, love objectifies. The purpose of love is to exalt the good in someone and ignore the bad. So, in my eyes and in my worldview, this isn't a state of mind to strive towards. Love prevents knowledge. As a matter of fact, love perverts knowledge. I guess that sorta makes me closer to the Gnostics and Platonism - I think that knowledge is the "savior" of mankind. For example, a mother loves her children. If the children do something wrong, she'll forgive the children because of love - she doesn't want to revel in the "bad" that her children do. But, taking this to the extreme, if the child becomes a mass murderer, she'll still love the child because she'll simply ignore or won't accept the "evil" that the child has done. This plays out repeatedly in life.
People who love someone will deny vociferously any evil that the object of their love commits. Notice that statement: "object of their love". By its nature, love objectifies; it places whatever it is that you "love" outside of yourself and it becomes a thing to possess. And in doing so, if you have multiple "lovers", you'll honor one "lover" and offend the other. I use the term "lover" not in a romantic sense, but in any sense of the word "love". Love of family members, love of friends, love of football, love of your gf.
Love leads to denial, which leads to willful ignorance. Again, this probably wouldn't happen if we practiced a philosophy of non-extremism (Buddhism), but Christianity is all about extremism - extremism in self-mortification. Obsession over "love". This idea that we have to absolutely revel in the "good" (like love) and completely shun the "evil" (worldly pleasures, for example). That's extremism. But anyway, back to my ideas. My big thing in life is (and I think has always been) the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge. We're made up of everything that exists in the world so by learning about the world in totality, we learn about ourselves. The greatest "sin" in my worldview is willful ignorance.
Christians will go on about how love and faith are the same thing, and I think they are. They're willful ignorance. But, doesn't love of knowledge lead to this cold, emotionless technology and science? Well yeah, if you only concentrate on "non living matter" as Creationists put it. We can also learn about our fellow human beings. The way I think this should happen isn't by love or faith, but by empathy. With empathy, you take the thing that's outside of you and bring it into yourself. Empathy leads to understanding... understanding leads to knowledge.
Knowledge is power.
The reason why most people are "good" in this world isn't because of "love", it's because of empathy. The reason most people don't go around kicking people in the face or stabbing children is because they know what it feels like to be kicked in the face or stabbed. In knowing that abstract pain, they know that - through empathy - the other person will feel the same thing they feel. This psychology doctor named Johnathan Haidt pretty much validated my whole "theory" on empathy. Here (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html) he talks about how on this one trip to India for his postdoc, he was disgusted by the way his hosts had treated their servants. But because he was coming from a liberal mindset, he couldn't understand why they would do that. But then he began to empathize with his hosts, and discovered why they have the society that they had, which led him to the major premise in his article. He had a greater understanding of what was going on, which led to knowledge.
"He who is not with me is against me" - a statement totally devoid of empathy. Ironically enough, children "love" their parents and follow them unquestioningly, but are totally devoid of empathy which leads to the terrible things that children do at early ages (like kicking dogs, burning ants). It makes sense, though. Jesus' ramblings about "becoming like little children" is exactly what a person who revered love instead of empathy would say. Jesus' golden rule isn't even unique to him; that golden rule had been around at least 1,000 years before Jesus.
Love says "I want you to be happy, because seeing you happy makes me happy". Empathy says "I want to understand what you understand". One will lead to extremism and playing favorites, the other is simply the pursuit of knowledge.
So yeah - love is good, love is great, but it's not going to solve the world's problems. In that respect, Christianity, and subsequently Jesus, are wrong. Jesus - being the most knowledgeable in the universe because he was supposed to be god - should have known that. But Jesus was a person of limited worldly experience. Not a god. That's why he preached the need for "love", because that's how a naive, uneducated person trying to do good would feel that the world needed. Love objectifies, and through its objectification it ironically leads to subjective knowledge (like faith). Empathy, on the other hand, subjectifies, and through its subjectification it ironically leads to objective knowledge. Objective knowledge being the type of knowledge we should strive to have to know about the world around us; and in doing so we are "saved".
Jesus: "[A] slave cannot serve two masters, otherwise that slave will honor the one and offend the other."
So what's the deal with love? Why do people revere it so much? Love is supposed to be the cure of the world; all of the world's problems would be solved if everyone loved each other. Me, personally, I have nothing against love. It's great. But, love objectifies. The purpose of love is to exalt the good in someone and ignore the bad. So, in my eyes and in my worldview, this isn't a state of mind to strive towards. Love prevents knowledge. As a matter of fact, love perverts knowledge. I guess that sorta makes me closer to the Gnostics and Platonism - I think that knowledge is the "savior" of mankind. For example, a mother loves her children. If the children do something wrong, she'll forgive the children because of love - she doesn't want to revel in the "bad" that her children do. But, taking this to the extreme, if the child becomes a mass murderer, she'll still love the child because she'll simply ignore or won't accept the "evil" that the child has done. This plays out repeatedly in life.
People who love someone will deny vociferously any evil that the object of their love commits. Notice that statement: "object of their love". By its nature, love objectifies; it places whatever it is that you "love" outside of yourself and it becomes a thing to possess. And in doing so, if you have multiple "lovers", you'll honor one "lover" and offend the other. I use the term "lover" not in a romantic sense, but in any sense of the word "love". Love of family members, love of friends, love of football, love of your gf.
Love leads to denial, which leads to willful ignorance. Again, this probably wouldn't happen if we practiced a philosophy of non-extremism (Buddhism), but Christianity is all about extremism - extremism in self-mortification. Obsession over "love". This idea that we have to absolutely revel in the "good" (like love) and completely shun the "evil" (worldly pleasures, for example). That's extremism. But anyway, back to my ideas. My big thing in life is (and I think has always been) the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge. We're made up of everything that exists in the world so by learning about the world in totality, we learn about ourselves. The greatest "sin" in my worldview is willful ignorance.
Christians will go on about how love and faith are the same thing, and I think they are. They're willful ignorance. But, doesn't love of knowledge lead to this cold, emotionless technology and science? Well yeah, if you only concentrate on "non living matter" as Creationists put it. We can also learn about our fellow human beings. The way I think this should happen isn't by love or faith, but by empathy. With empathy, you take the thing that's outside of you and bring it into yourself. Empathy leads to understanding... understanding leads to knowledge.
Knowledge is power.
The reason why most people are "good" in this world isn't because of "love", it's because of empathy. The reason most people don't go around kicking people in the face or stabbing children is because they know what it feels like to be kicked in the face or stabbed. In knowing that abstract pain, they know that - through empathy - the other person will feel the same thing they feel. This psychology doctor named Johnathan Haidt pretty much validated my whole "theory" on empathy. Here (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html) he talks about how on this one trip to India for his postdoc, he was disgusted by the way his hosts had treated their servants. But because he was coming from a liberal mindset, he couldn't understand why they would do that. But then he began to empathize with his hosts, and discovered why they have the society that they had, which led him to the major premise in his article. He had a greater understanding of what was going on, which led to knowledge.
"He who is not with me is against me" - a statement totally devoid of empathy. Ironically enough, children "love" their parents and follow them unquestioningly, but are totally devoid of empathy which leads to the terrible things that children do at early ages (like kicking dogs, burning ants). It makes sense, though. Jesus' ramblings about "becoming like little children" is exactly what a person who revered love instead of empathy would say. Jesus' golden rule isn't even unique to him; that golden rule had been around at least 1,000 years before Jesus.
Love says "I want you to be happy, because seeing you happy makes me happy". Empathy says "I want to understand what you understand". One will lead to extremism and playing favorites, the other is simply the pursuit of knowledge.
So yeah - love is good, love is great, but it's not going to solve the world's problems. In that respect, Christianity, and subsequently Jesus, are wrong. Jesus - being the most knowledgeable in the universe because he was supposed to be god - should have known that. But Jesus was a person of limited worldly experience. Not a god. That's why he preached the need for "love", because that's how a naive, uneducated person trying to do good would feel that the world needed. Love objectifies, and through its objectification it ironically leads to subjective knowledge (like faith). Empathy, on the other hand, subjectifies, and through its subjectification it ironically leads to objective knowledge. Objective knowledge being the type of knowledge we should strive to have to know about the world around us; and in doing so we are "saved".