Love me or else (Where is it now?)

by hyjyljyj , Wednesday, December 19, 2012, 16:38 (4358 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Welcome "aboard". Good to have another fresh voice... -B_M: "...your complete ignorance...etc."-Hello and Happy Holidays to you as well. Laying aside the amusing absolutism of bursting in to allege someone's "complete ignorance" about love and fear...they really aren't, after all, such alien concepts--biblical context be damned (that pun's for you, David :^D). Moreover the bold declaration that "Love is not a feeling. Love is an action" may be popular among the daytime TV and pop psychology set but is unbacked. It is opinion dressed up in a fact costume. We might very well feel love without doing anything about it, such as in the case of "forbidden fruit" (if you'll pardon the biblical metaphor for the married neighbor). In that case love is a feeling, regardless of whether one may wish to label it something else. It certainly feels like a feeling; is any further confirmation required, or even possible?-B_M: A parent that loves their child often disciplines the child, not out of a desire to hurt the child, but out of a desire to ensure that the child grows up strong and good. -And a parent who loves their child often doesn't kill it, plan to kill it, threaten to kill it, or dare it to kill its own children, all in the name of "love". See, it's all the killing that seems as if it might hurt the child. (But that's just me, and it has been established that I am ignorant.) It forms a depiction of so-called love, of which I do quite happily admit being totally, completely, 100% ignorant. I believe it was Mark Twain who said, "Everyone is ignorant, just on different subjects." 
 
Also, you might want to check some of your statements regarding their accuracy. The hellfire doctrine is not biblically sound. No where [sic] in the bible does it talk about eternal damnation or torment of the dead. That first sentence applies to its writer: Of course I have no idea what version of the Bible you have, but gee whiz...all of mine are chock full of references specifically to this. I am deeply uninterested in playing the Bible quote game, nor will I bother doing your homework for you; rather you can google it as I just did a moment ago, and verify the word-for-word passages for yourself. Plenty of results there to keep you busy begging the Lord for forgiveness for having unnecessarily embarrassed yourself regarding His Living Word. Here, in the spirit of Christmas I'll help you get started with the first result I came across, Matt 10:28, wherein we read: "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell." Those are allegely the words of Jesus himself. Do they count? If not, you may prefer a second example from 2 Thess 1:8-9, which speaks of Jesus using "flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. These will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction..." (NRSV) If you wish to exclude those two troublesome verses from consideration, perhaps because they serve to obliterate your assertion that they don't exist, there are plenty more where those came from. Just making the effort to search for them as I did, rather than casting aspersions, might do more to further the discussion and make readers more open in the future to your views as rational, sensible and foundationally sound.-why do YOU set a double standard, demanding that people do something(creating and enforcing laws) while decrying God for doing the same thing? Makes you a bit of a hypocrite, no?-For God to "do the same thing", or do anything at all, presupposes that he exists as an a priori fact; and further that the creator of life deliberately instills within the objects of his creation an overwhelming desire to constantly do things that upset and enrage him to a marked degree: he makes rules which he knows in advance will be repeatedly violated. The issue of free will vs. determinism is something that rational people can have a respectful discussion about; conversely you are simply assuming, to make a point here on the agnostic web site, that the angry, jealous, vindictive, dictatorial God of the Bible actually exists just as described therein, and now that that's firmly established--because "the Bible tells us so," we suppose--they who question it prove thereby that they are ignorant hypocrites laboring under silly notions. Whereas one of the cool things that you will find about this forum, and the only reason I'm still here, is that participants uniformly refrain from ad hominem attacks and name-calling, which so far as I know with my finite brain and its sharply limited knowledge have never served to advance any position anywhere, online or in person. -Hopefully moving forward, more balance can be maintained :) Peace, Merry Xmas, Happy Hanukkah & Happy New Year