thread: 2007-03-02 : God Q&A
On 2007-03-03, NinJ wrote:
Love is something you feel. Every human (and probably hominid and hominin) forever has felt love, or at least had the capacity to. I'm quite certain it can be denied, but it comes up in weird ways when you least expect it. It's usually not fireworks, but something more akin to reliance and understanding someone. The fireworks part that they go on and on about in movies and stuff seems to be about the first two days of a relationship. The part where you discover that you can fuck three or four times a day.
Not every human forever has felt God. It's a newer idea. It's a complex idea. Even if all you believe is the literal translation of one of the two creation stories in Torah, the humans don't meet God for a while.
So I don't consider them similar at all. I love my wife, I love my friends, I love my sister, I love my mom, I even love my cats, all to varying degrees and in different ways. But I don't love God; God's too big and weird to love, really. It's like loving Jupiter (the planet, not the god) or electrical polarity, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. God is also responsible for the worst things to ever happen; for the Holocaust, for Lake Pinatubo, the Great Extinction, the Little Ice Age, and car accidents. Love just isn't the issue. Even if you take out the ones with human agency, the wars, genocides, murders, insults, deprivations and misleadings, you still have a universe where the criteria for goodness are met much less than the criteria for badness. I can't say that I "understand" God at all; it would be blasphemy to say so, not only from a cultural perspective, but from a personal, mystical perspective. It would also make God quite suddenly useless as a philosophical goad.
