[quote]ElevenMag wrote:
[quote]Trad_Climb wrote:
[quote]Ambugaton wrote:
I believe that if religious people truly took every word of their holy books for truth, they would be too scared of sinning and going to hell to leave their confessional booths. God has thought police, right? [/quote]
I believe you are forgetting the parts where God is also portrayed as a loving God.[/quote]
I believe you are forgetting when the bible was originally wrote they were several words for the English word “love”.
At one point I had studied all the great religions and none of them seemed very plausible to me. Christianity for example. I really tried to understand was Jesus was trying to say but he kept coming back to this word “love”. He said to ‘love your neighbor,’ which i figured might be possible provided I had good neighbors. But to make matter even worse, Jesus insisted we 'love our enemies.; To me, this was worse than nonsense. Love Adolf Hitler? Love his Gestapo? Love the taliban? Love a serial killer? How can he command people to manufacture an emotion like love? Especially towards unlovable people? To put it Trad_Climbs words “not listening to the thought police, not in this life”
Then came the turning point for my paradigms about life and love. Several frat brothers and I got together one evening for a few beers at the local tavern. One of the language professors, who liked to frequent that same bar, came over and join us and soon conversation moved to the worlds great religions and eventually Christianity came up. I said something like “yeah, love your enemies. What a joke. Like i’m going to have positive regard for a ax murderer!” The professor stopped me dead in my tracks and said I was a misinterpreting Jesus’ words, although they seemed plain enough to me. He explained that in the English language, we generally associate love with a feeling. You know, I love my house, I love lifting, I love my cigarettes, I love my booze. As long as you have good feeling about something I can say I love it. We generally do not associate love with anything but positive feelings.
The language professor explained to me that much of the new testament was originally written in Greek, one of his language specialties, and he informed me that the Greeks used several different words to describe the multifaceted phenomenon of love. One of those words was eros, which out english word erotic is derived from, and it means feelings based upon sexual attraction, desire, and craving. Another greek word for love, storge, is affection especially between and towards family members. Neither eros or storge appears in the New testament writings. Another Greek word for love was philos, or brotherly, reciprocal love. The “you do good by me and I’ll do good by you” kind of conditional love. Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, comes from this root word. Finally, the Greeks used the noun agape and the corresponding verb agapao to describe a more unconditional love rooted in behavior towards others without regard to their due. It is the love of deliberate choice. When Jesus speaks of love in the New Testament the word agape is used, a love of behavior and choice, not a love of feeling
The feelings of love could perhaps be the language of love or the expression of love but those feelings are not what love is. What the bible is trying to say is that one cannot control how they feel towards another but one can certainly be in control and aware of how one behaves towards other people.
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I believe that most modern Christians want to forget that the old testament exists. They seem to avoid the subject.