Can anyone explain love?

by mrhhome 24 Replies latest jw friends

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  willmarite

  Good points flying.

  Most humans intuitively know that love isn't caused by chemicals released by the brain. These chemicals are correlated but are not causitive.

  I would illustrate it like this. Suppose a skeptic remains unconvinced that the images appearing on a television set are coming from somewhere else. He believes they are due to the internal material components of the television set only. He messes with some parts and the images become fuzzy which strengthens his belief that they are only due to the physical components in the set. He moves another peice and a line begins to run thru the image. He cuts a peice out and all images stop. Because of his experimentation he now is completely convinced that the images that appear on the television screen were due solely to the material components and nothing else is necessary for them. As we know he only has part of the picture. Those images were streaming in from some other place but the physical components were correlated but did not create the images.
• 

  Island Man

  Love is selfishness in its most noble and dignified form. Love pleases the lover - a fact that is necessarily implied by the maxim: "there is more happiness in giving than there is in recieving". The selfishness of love is also seen in the way a person mourns the loss of a loved one. The dead person is in no pain, no suffering, but simply lifeless. Why the mourning then? The bereaved has forever lost an object of his deep spiritual pleasure. He is mourning a lost that he (the bereaved) has sustained. It is selfish.

  But that isn't to say that love is bad. As I said at the outset love is selfishness at its most noble. What separates love from traditional selfishness is that love derives personal pleasure from seeking the interests of the loved, whereas traditional selfishness is willing to derive personal pleasure at the expense of the interests of others.

  Seeing love as being inherently selfish, as it indeed is, demystifies it and removes any superstitious notions of divinity that many seem to ascribe to it. It helps us to realize that there really isn't anything remarkable about an inherently selfish quality existing in a natural world of creatures with selfish motives. Love only seems divine and unexplainable in nature, to those who fail to grasp that love is ultimately selfish/self-serving.
• 

  FlyingHighNow

  It is selfish.

  Respectfully, I have never agreed with this line of thinking.

  When someone dies, I feel very grieved for the fear and the pain the person felt in the dying process. I feel very sad for the person that in most cases, didn't know it would be his last day or night on earth. I feel very sad for the loss for the person in unfulfilled potential. When I was 13, my friend, who was 12, was dying from leukemia. I remember her mother, who had not explained to her that she was dying, offered to buy her a padded bra. My friend had not begun to develop and didn't need even a training bra. She was completely puzzled by her mother's offer. Her mother realized that my friend would probably not develop and she was trying to give her a chance to experience that right of passage.

  My friend eventually realized that she was dying. She told me a couple of weeks before her death, "I feel like I could sleep for a 100 years. I am so tired. My parents had all of our family in to see me today. They didn't tell me why, but I know why. I'll never go skating again. I'll never have hair to wash again. I'll not grow up..." She knew she was not going to go to high school or prom or wear a cap and gown. She knew there would be no college, nor would she have a wedding or children.

  The love we have for people, when expressed in grief, is very much about the person who has died. Grief definitely includes our loss, but it also includes the pain we feel for the dying and the dead, knowing the impact it has on the person and the loss of their future.
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  mrhhome

  Not all "love" can be explained away with hormones and chemicals. If I am happy to see an old buddy who is grey and fat, I am certainly not motivated by any hormones. I doubt that I would be even if I was a woman.

  While I am intriqued by jgnat's idea of "native instinct to altruism" to explain "love for our neighbor", I disagree. In my experience, most of our natural experiences are selfish. I may be convinced that it is a learned response. Life is general better if you get along with your neighbor than if you are throwing stones at each other.
• 

  Mr. Falcon

  What is love?

  Baby, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me. No more.