The Author of Evil

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For the same reason you speak of fact as mere myth: Free-Will Belief!

Fact is what is. Fact would be fact even if we did not exist. On the other hand myth is up in our heads. It is made up out of whole cloth.

ruveyn

Yes, I suppose, and it is a fact many people bang their heads against facts to try to turn them (select either) into mere myths!

Umm.... my objection is that there is no problem with denying a "freedom to disobey God", and that it is unnecessary to provide. The biggest objection is that "love requires a choice", but the issue is that I don't see how this is the case. It seems quite apparent to me that love isn't a matter of choices, so much as it is a matter of desires and emotions towards a person which express themselves in actions taken. In fact, I would have to argue that instances of love tend to be unchosen(falling in love is noted with extreme emotional distortion, and individuals even feel these emotions even if they have no desire for them) and even that free will seems very unlikely to exist.

I don't see what your long response has to do with mine, and frankly, you seem to have gone very much in a different direction than what I attempted to rebut. I guess you may have just been talking about the free will response, but.... whatever.

Fuzzy: Good one.

On love being a choice/not a choice...

I think that given the emotional response to some sort of an attraction is one thing--we don't necessarily "choose" it, we just have our own, individual, unique sensibilities of what is hot, sweet, pretty, sensitive, simpatica, and so on that we confuse this kind of desire with "true love."

My thoughts on love is that it is a "willing desire." I can say I love my wife, but I love my wife because I love her. It's something I wake up every day and resolve in my mind and heart that I will do, and at some point, in some way, I'll express in some way that I desire her and seek her well-being. In a sense, the "fireworks" of the beginning stages of our relationship are still there, but there are other factors that affect the intimacy of our relationship.

Jobs/careers and career goals that do not involve the other person, for example. Children, also, frequently come between us. One night a week I have a 3-hour practice with my band, my wife and I practice handbells together two nights a week, we have church choir practice one night a week, and so on the other nights it's like, "Hey, I remember YOU!! !" More often than not, we just fall into bed too exhausted to really talk or relate to each other in any other way. It's easy to forget that we are lovers when we don't get to really be any more than housemates.

So most of the time we aren't "in love" like most young people think married couples are supposed to be. But we are best friends, and the closest thing I can think of to describe it is more like a brother-sister kind of relationship (in a non-weird kind of way). We don't HAVE to choose love, nor do we have any unrealistic expectations or visions of what true love is all about. But we nevertheless make that choice that we will desire each other--as companions, as friends, as brother/sister, as joint babysitters for two children, and the usual husband/wife stuff--above anyone else. One reason I think marriages fail is because couples get tired of reminding themselves to love the other person. They fail to choose to love that person, and inevitably the marriage grows stale. As long as the decision is made, the choice is made, to love someone on a daily basis, then there's no problem to be had in a married relationship.

It was from www.xkcd.com. The author seems very close to being an aspie and has been accused(and thus far has not said). Much of his output is very appealing to the WP community. Each strip also features some hidden text which is revealed by hovering the mouse over the graphics.

Some good samples:
http://xkcd.com/688/
http://xkcd.com/62/

and this one, particularly for PPR at WP.
http://xkcd.com/386/




There is a technical term for that: "limerence".

Somehow I kind of doubt that it is just a matter of choosing. I mean, you may choose to express your feelings, but somehow I doubt that you have a choice about whether you actually feel any degree of sympathy for this person.

Of course I have a choice!

I think there is such a thing as wanted feelings and unwanted feelings. It's like catching a cold--microbes/viruses are inescapable, they're just floating around in the air and lurking on solid surfaces, in drinking water, and so on. All it takes is a momentary lapse of immunity for the cold virus to start producing its effects, and you don't really get to control your body's reaction to it.

But if you live in a fairly sterile environment and have better control over the air you breath, i.e. you live alone, never leave your house, keep things clean, and have air filtration and de-humidifiers, maintain a steady, warm temperature, you are less likely to catch cold. Such is POSSIBLE, but not really a likely way of living life.

Most of us don't live in a bubble.

Love/emotion is the same way. We don't live in a bubble, and no man is an island.

If you live in an emotional bubble, then you won't be swayed by love-emotions because you won't allow yourself to be exposed to anyone or anything that risks an attraction to itself.

The other side of this is, just as with a cold, if you KNOW someone has a cold, you may choose to avoid contact with a contagion. I'm prone to miserable colds, but I have a choice to make. I often work around children, and lots of them. Young children still haven't developed a strong immunity, so they're breeding grounds for a host of different viruses--I came down with hand, foot, and mouth disease last year, not fun. So if I go to meet a child for a piano lesson and I can see she has a cold, I can tell her to go back to her class and see me again in two weeks. The down side is that I lose money and the child forgets what they've already been taught. So for me, catching a cold, which I've learned to handle and control symptoms over the years, is just a necessary risk worth taking if I care about my students.

Love is no different. If it is a feeling that I do not want, I can simply avoid the object that is tempting me, wait for the feeling to pass, and then re-expose myself to it at a later time when I might be immune to its effects. For example, I grew inappropriately fond of a young lady I worked with in a theater production, a play in which she played the role of my love interest. We became very close over the course of the production, off-stage as well as on-stage. But after the production ended, there was no point in us hanging out--I'm married, she had a boyfriend, and it would have been a disastrous affair if I'd thrown caution to the wind and pursued her. So I immediately stopped seeing her, stopped calling her, stopped emailing her... Nothing inappropriate ever actually HAPPENED, and I'm over any attraction I ever had for her.

Not to say love is a bad thing. In a sense, I'm "in love" with all my young piano students. But that only means that I love them as if they were my own children and treat them as such. If I have to raise my voice to "put the fear of God" in them to make them perform better, I'll do it because I genuinely care about how they perform. I really want to use music to improve their quality of life and instill a sense of discipline they won't get anywhere else, and just by the nature of what I do I'm part strict disciplinarian, part therapist. I don't HAVE to be, though. I don't HAVE to love those children. I could just as easily show up for lessons with no more interest in them than to collect fees. It's certainly much safer that way. And just like people in general can be truly awful, so can kids and, even worse, their parents. So every now and then I'll have a student drop and say, sarcastically, "aw, too bad!" But more often than not I'll have a parent try to take away a truly talented student, and when I find out I'll call their cell phone and DEMAND to know, 1st, WHY and 2nd "What is WRONG with you? What kind of idiot let's their child quit something she's exceptionally good at?! You stupid f*ck!" I may make it with that kid another month or, rarely, another year, but it's a great sense of loss for me when that happens. I'll rant about it to my wife for a while, but I eventually get over it. If I were completely unemotional and purely objective about it, my feelings would be spared from year to year. But on the other hand, I'd also be spared the joy of success of an emotional investment.

What does that have to do with so-called Romantic love? Well, I think of love as love, no matter what "kind" of love it is or what form it takes. I make every effort to love all people equally (I do my best, which is only so much). Every woman is my sister, every man my brother, every child my children. Part of the reason my married relationship works out so well is we do have a sibling relationship, which is something I see my own son and daughter act out every day--laughing, crying, tantrums (though my daughter is MUCH more stable than my son), fights, conflict resolution. They are their parents in miniature. So I make an effort to distinguish between an over-emotional attraction (romantic love) and "love" as an action, a verb rather than a noun. For me love is something I do, not something I feel. I can give it or withhold it. I could decide any day to get in my car and just leave. I don't because I made a promise that giving love would be an eternal act, not something I could just change my mind about because I "fell in love" with someone else or I just got bored with my own family. Couples have a tendency to get comfortable in relationships and take each other for granted. But that doesn't free them from the responsibility to decide each day to love the other person. It might be perceived as "falling out of love." But the reality is a person falls out of love because they want to, not because of some unfortunate act of chaotic nature.

Further, it's a choice you can make even when it's not in your own best interest. I loved a girl for YEARS and almost married her, but I came to the realization that my love and attachment to her weren't enough for my own satisfaction in the relationship because she treated me lower than dirt. I ended the relationship, not because of lack of love or attraction, but to protect my own precarious sanity. Going back to her would have been easy; after all, I did still have feelings for her. But when loving someone feels more like a disease, it's time to take off the rose-colored glasses. The emotional part eventually did fade. But only because I made sure to keep my distance and keep myself preoccupied with different things--i.e. a choice on my part.

Yes, it very much IS a choice. I also think there is a degree of choice in who you're attracted to, as well. We can make up our minds to be attracted to only a certain type of person, or we can say "no, that's a bad idea, avoid that kind of guy/girl and go for THIS kind of guy/girl." I'm not saying it doesn't happen passively, I'm just saying we have the ability to either accept passive attractions or discipline our minds/emotions otherwise.

ADDENDUM to above: People turn their emotions on and off all the time. Any time genocide is committed, it takes a group of people to bury their sentiment for other human beings, perhaps rationalizing to themselves why those people must die, and then work out some emotional response to the act of carrying out the work of death. We've even invented words to describe this: "cold-blooded," "sociopathic." While genocide is an extreme example, there is a whole range of actions tied to emotional responses, all of which are ultimately controlled by the individual.