Klowglas wrote:
I believe you've just described heaven in your description there, in heaven there will be no real need for SO's because there wont be a need to preserve and protect the family, since all of what heaven is, is God's family. There's actually a book in the bible that tends to hit on what I'm complaining about, which is Ecclesiastes, if you haven't read it already, it's a very short book in the bible (only like 12 pages or so) and it's where that well-known passage "a time for all things" originates from, but that book essentially brings the focus to God because much of what man does here on this earth is transitory, temporary, or vain. This is the reason why I can't see any value in my worth, because it means nothing in the end, and doesn't give me real unconditional love, it might give me something that feels good, something that might be 'like' the real thing, but its just not the actual thing itself.
You mention that the love would be the same and that is correct, because it IS the same sort of thing because it IS one big family, there wouldn't be a need to exclude others because there wouldn't be any evil. When we learn to see other people as our own children, then we can find enough grace to give them unconditional love, and its this sort of love that gives people the endurance to live life as it should be lived, your third child would be just as loved as the first if you were a good parent.
You'll find when you mentor younger people you unknowingly through no conscious decision of your own begin to project your own child out of them, you don't expect them to be strong, you're trying to make them strong because you care for them, teachers, guide, and wise people from all walks of life do this and they're not short of love because of it, and it's that sort of love that society should come to realize is the very best kind of thing -- one not dependent on power.
Watched the video and while I can see your point about riding the dissonance, but in the end it doesn't give you anything better than what I'm after. which is something the Ecclesiastes remarks on when it states that a fool is going to die just like a wise man will, a rich man dies just like a poor man will etc, it all goes away in the end. But unconditional love doesn't, which is why Ecclesiastes places the emphasis back on God.
But the ones that are closer to God -- closer to unconditional love end up having something much better and lasting than strength, wisdom, or knowledge.
In the end of that video, the speaker is essentially talking about the hedonic threadmill (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill), when he says that you can't really acquire that 'wholeness' something that the Ecclesiastes is essentially saying when it proclaims much of man's efforts as a 'chasing after the wind', meaning that by pursing powerful things, you're not really going to acquire that which you really seek, being permanent content or happiness, because that can only be had in God -- his unconditional love (which is what shines through your lover if their love is true, and then trough your children. Because if there's one thing you can count on it's in man's power fading,thus you can't rely on it to give you real love, because real love lasts far past your weakness, and far past your death.
That's why if humans can love each other in weakness, they can taste some of it, or take on forms of the real thing. You can't rely on power to give you what you want, and in your life, if and when you have children, I think you're going to come back towards my line of thinking, because you're not going to love that child based upon his or her abilities.
If there would be no significant others with all-out agape, why do you think if there was all-out agape that everyone would have a significant other? Or even that someone who believed in that kind of love was capable of having a significant other?
This is where it really starts to get tricky - as if it wasn't before - because I do not believe in God, or Heaven. I can sort of accept what you say in a metaphorical sense, a way of expressing something that is otherwise very hard to express, but certainly not literally.
The example I gave, and will repeat, is where someone asks of a figure who loves them, "why do you love me?". There will be things that can be listed, but there will come a point where, those reasons exhausted, there is still something left over and beyond. One way I heard it described - philosophically, not theologically - is that it is as though there is something in the beloved that is more than themselves. Or, as Neil Finn once sang, 'colour is its own reward'.
I have children - actual real biological offspring children, I mean - and I love them in that way. The reasons I love my children do not exhaust my love for my children. But it is not experienced as an all-encompasing, ecstatic, 'spritual' love. It is love as prosaic, quotidian, that guides and moves and holds up our efforts to navigate ourselves and each other and this world. It is a love that tries to ride the dissonance. And really, this is what I see every day, all around. I just don't see this power thing. I see the fallible human animal doing its best to make sense of its lot and to love as it can, and not as a failed, fallen spritual entity waiting on heaven. In this light, the love there is can seem little short of a marvel, however lacking some may find it.
I don't believe there are souls, or a heaven, or a God. I don't believe there is love outside of its individual and collective human experience, that there is some eternity of transcendent bliss awaiting us of which the love of our human experience is a pale, tawdry imitation. Rather, the opposite - that the idea of this transcendent, all-encompassing love is a projection from general human dissatisfaction with not being able to love and be loved as much and as well as we might like, and also something that we sometimes do indeed touch on.
I don't think in terms of unconditional love, because I don't think it makes sense to think of love as something that can either be conditional or unconditional. I don't think '(un)conditional love' is a useful way of thinking.
What would it mean for me to love, I don't know, 6 year old Miguel in Mexico as I love my children? I cannot be with him to act on my love as I can my children, so.... well, at that point I reach for politics, I start thinking about social justice matters. But I already do that. That's what agape is for me: a political matter.
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Of course, it's probably quite a bit more complicated than that.
You know sometimes, between the dames and the horses, I don't even know why I put my hat on.
Last edited by Hopper on 27 May 2014, 4:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
27 May 2014, 4:22 pm
the marble bench/toga thing is really more of an aesthetic consideration than anything else, admittedly fanciful yet it still appeals to me--it's that school of athens fresco by raphael: ever since i first saw it, it's become my go-to image for my conception of intellectual heaven.
