God is Love: Despite Athiest Ojbections

 

Originally Posted by NoctambulantJoycean

God is not love; God can have the attribute of being loving, but God is not love. I don't know why some theists make a mistake this basic.

The basis for something is equated with the thing itself.

Yes God is love. you are making a huge mistake but it's typical reductionist misunderstanding of things.

(1) reduce the wording from its metaphorical state it's an attempt to denude the power of the statement.

(2) It's literally true in the sense of the contingency. If love is merely an experience of adaptation that comes from an accident of neural net based upon brain chemistry, then it's limits to the feelings attached to the sentiment and is not purposeful or expansive. So the concept of Love (agape) in a God ordained universe has a lot more to it than love in a Godless universe.

It's like saying your dog is hunger, as opposed to saying your dog has the attribute of being hungry or more simply, your dog is hungry. It's confusing adjectives with nouns! 

 

No it' snot. that's a sure sign you don't understand the concept. you think love is just a matter of something god does. it's like when Augustine says God is truth you would think he's equating truth the correspondence theory. even that would make a certain amount of sense.

God is not a single individual who is endowed with feelings and emotions. God is more analogous to a logical category. God is the actual origin of the concept of love. It's not a matter of certain behaviors but of the possibility of a concept.

And even if we go with the noun, it still makes no sense. If God was love, then since love is not a mind (it's an attribute a mind can express, but that's not the same thing as it being a mind), God is not a mind. And once you forfeit the claim that God is a mind, there go any claims of God being aware anything (including people's prayers), having knowledge, beliefs, thoughts, hearing prayers, etc. 

 

 

love is not merely a feeling produced by chemicals in the brain. It's a concept. it's an abstract concept first and foremost. It's an imperative. God is directly responsible for the possibly of the concept. If god's character was not described by the concept there would be no basis for it in us. the aspect of brain chemistry that makes it possible to feel love is probably put in us by God specifically purposefully as part of the imago dei.

Also, you'd be in the position of saying that everytime I loved someone, I brought God into existence or exemplified God (not just acted like God; no I literally brought a God into existence by bringing into existence an instance of love) since I instantiated the property "love." That's absurd. 

 

 

That's just a product of misunderstanding the meaning of the phrase. you are trying to liberalize the metaphor.

And last I checked, mental attributes like love don't go around creating universes, communicating to people, or doing the other stuff people attribute to God. So saying "God is love" is just an absurd abuse of language. 

 

you've reduced love to a mental attributes. God is not an individual man so the sense in which he is said to be love is not just a mental attribute. It's a description of his character but it also describes the origin of the concept.

you have the same problem with saying God is being itself. if god had not created the only being of any kind would be God. God is eternal being he's the basis of all that is or ever could be. He's also love becuase he's the basis of of the possibility of loving and the meaning of the term.

Instead, simply say "God loves" or "God is loving." But, of course, that would involve admitting that love can exist regardless of whether God exists (ex: God isn't necessary for the existence of humans, and humans can love), which some theists (*cough* Metacrock *cough*) would rather not admit (see http://forums.carm.org/vbb/showthrea...06#post3627506). And we'd also have to deal with the way in which you cherry pick Biblical passages to insure your picture of God comes out as loving. For example (taken from http://forums.carm.org/vbb/showthrea...67#post3625467):

that would a foolish and stupid waste of a metaphor. that's just fascism in diction.

It's not enough that scientist types control all forms of knowledge reduce all knwon to scinece but we have reduce all forms of speaking to literalism. Notice his foolish link making. none of those go to any kind of proofs. They are just more statements of his all knowing opinion. The one about "you are cherry picking Bibical quotes where God appears loving" show me a verse that ays God is hate.


the literalism doesn't capture the unique relationship of god to either being or love.

The Greek doesn't say "god is capable of loving" it says God is love.