(June 21, 2010 at 4:17 pm)tackattack Wrote: 1- I agree you can love without reciprocation, but what value is there in loving a flower? Is there more value in loving a child and it's showing it's love in return? You're treating God as a third party when I'm simply stating that God (from a Christian perspective) the initiator of pure, unconditional love. As a Christian I use that as a guide to better my love to my fellow man. I also am thankful for that love from God and reciprocate that back to him through praise and worship. Lot's of atheists claim that worshiping is because God requires us to love him back, I'm saying it's not a requirement (my whole original point I believe)Here you say that god is the initiator of pure love. I'm OK with that as your belief of a feeling from a virtual being we are unable to verify publicly. And in this part it seems that you don't include the human to human kind of love, since it seems evident that that is intiiated by one or more humans.
(June 21, 2010 at 4:17 pm)tackattack Wrote: 2- OK I don't want this to get to a semantic battle. Instead of God's Love, I'll simply use pure, unconditional love. I perhaps got caught up myself in some dogmatic semantics. In attempting to define God, I have found that pure, unconditional love is one attribute of God. Since God is also the originator, any human love would be towards God. Since the originating love perceptually appears more refined than my own abilities to love and fall in the biblical definitions of what love should be, I assume it comes from a higher source, namely God. Since I seek to better myself I attempt as often as allowed to emulate that love.But here you claim that god is also the originator of any human love and that really is a grossly sick idea to me. This is the dehumanizing I meant before, this denies our human capacity to initiate and sustain love and in fact conclusively cripples the christian message.
"I'm like a rabbit suddenly trapped, in the blinding headlights of vacuous crap" - Tim Minchin in "Storm"
Christianity is perfect bullshit, christians are not - Purple Rabbit, honouring CS Lewis
Faith is illogical - fr0d0
Christianity is perfect bullshit, christians are not - Purple Rabbit, honouring CS Lewis
Faith is illogical - fr0d0