How to understand God is love?
You talk about God as the Ultimate Judge
and focus on accountability / living as if God exists.
But how to love God?
Is it a feeling like loving a person?
Can love of balance out the crushing responsibility?
This is a hard question.
I'm going to take it apart in a couple of ways.
This is my understanding.
So it is how to understand God is love, because I can't answer that question,
but I can provide some information about how I might understand what that means.
Well, the first thing is that I think that you have to make a decision in your life...
And this is a decision...
And I would say that it's a voluntary
element of faith because it isn't exactly evidence based.
It's more like something you decide before you even look at the evidence.
It's more like you decide to stake your life on this.
Like if you decide to get married
to someone, you don't really do it on the basis of the evidence that you're
going to have a happy life because you don't have that evidence.
You decide that you're going to make
a happy life with this person and that it's worth the risk.
So you get married as an expression of faith.
Okay.
And so, faith doesn't mean believing things that no one with any sense would believe.
Faith sometimes means putting a stake in the stand and saying:
Here's where I stand, in some sense, regardless.
And you do that when you get married. You do that, maybe when you...
Pledge allegiance to a friend, you have a best friend and you want
to maintain that friendship as long as you possibly can.
It's a decision of faith.
Maybe you do that when you decide a career, when you go to University
because you could have done something else.
Right? But you chose that.
So that's where you put your faith.
And like I said,
that doesn't mean believing what no reasonable person would believe.
Okay, so back to God is love.
Well, I'm going to talk about Being first instead of God.
And Being is the totality of experience.
We're going to define it that way for the purposes of this discussion.
Being is what there is instead of nothing.
And you experience that as a conscious creature.
Being is what you experience as a conscious creature.
It includes all your emotions, all your motivations,
all your subjective experience, as well as everything that's objective.
Okay.
So it seems to me that all things considered, it's a useful
move of faith to act as if you love being.
And if you love something, then you want the best in it to flourish.
And so maybe you decide deep in your soul that...
It would be better for you to act
towards an end that makes everything that's good better.
That's the best way to live, to make everything that's good better.
And maybe to restrict the development of everything that's malevolent and evil
within yourself and in the broader world, insofar as you're able to do that.
And so I think that's an expression of love is that...
Because when you love something, you care for it.
And the proper attitude towards being, I think, is care.
And so that's one element of God is love, God being...
Analogous in some way to being.
Now we could look at God more classically as the creator of being.
If you assume being is good, well,
it's not much of a leap to assume the creator of being is good.
And maybe you adopt an attitude towards the creator of being,
and that's also love, and you open your heart to existence,
and maybe that's the most effective means of having existence open its heart to you.
So, for example, if you love other people, you want the best for them.
You want the best in you, to serve the best in them.
If you love them and you trust them
courageously, so you open yourself up to them,
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume
that that's how you elicit the best from them, the best that can be elicited.
You're going to get hurt sometimes
and betrayed, but that's going to happen no matter what approach you take.
I think that's the most effective approach, and that is perhaps the most
effective approach to existence per se, to approach it with love and courage.
And so that's how that looks to me.
Is it a feeling like loving a person?
Yes, I think it is.
I think it is a feeling like loving a person.
It's the generalization of that care that you would have for a child,
your child, your brother, your sister, a family member.
It's the generalization of that to the broader domain of
existence, to broader domains of existence.
And I think that's a skill in some sense, right?
I mean, if you're good at loving and caring for your family,
but you can expand that outward so that more people are brought under
that umbrella, then, well, assuming you can manage that, it's very difficult.
It seems to me that that's laudable.
It seems to me that we spontaneously
admire and would like to imitate people who are capable of that.
You see that when you have a job or you encounter a boss who takes you under his
or her wing and helps develop you, or you find a teacher who's particularly
inspiring, or you work for an entrepreneur who's inspiring and who also opens doors
for you, they're acting with love,
as far as I'm concerned, they want the best in them, to serve the best in you.
And that's very motivating for everyone.
And that's the proper basis of our social relationships, not power, for God's sake.
So can love balance out the crushing responsibility?
That's a sophisticated question.
I don't know the answer to that.
Love is warmer than responsibility.
Love is part of empathy and agreeableness,
it's a different dimension than responsibility,
which is more part of conscientiousness and sort of a cold virtue.
I don't know if it balances out the crushing responsibility,
but I think it's the emotional analog to the crushing responsibility.
So maybe there's love and duty, and they run parallel.
If you're an ethical person, that's not all there is to ethics,
but love and duty, they're important,
and maybe they're better together than they would be as independent entities.
What is the difference between spirituality, faith and religion?
Well, that's not a very well posed question.
I don't mean that to be critical.
I'm going to restructure the question.
You can think about two elements of religious
phenomena that are associated with the religious world.
There's a spiritual element that's less constrained by belief and more
a consequence of, say, emotion and motivation and aesthetic
experience, and all of that unbounded in some way by explicit dogma.
So there's a dogmatic element and a spiritual element,
and that would correspond, roughly speaking, to
belief versus exploration in a more general cognitive sense, roughly.
But both are necessary, right?
Because for all its flaws,
collective adherence to a dogma, there's no distinction between
that and peace, because peace range when people accept unquestioningly a sufficient
number of presuppositions to guarantee cooperation.
So you don't get away without dogma.
You might say you're anti-dogmatic, it's like...
Yeah, in some ways, possibly now and then, and some people more than others.
But most of the time when you ask
a question, you hold a thousand things constant and allow one thing to vary.
So the constancy is the dogma, and the variation is the questioning.
There's a spiritual element that's
associated with experience, with awe, with wonder,
with questions about the meaning of life, with the feeling of love,
the feeling of devotion, the feeling of duty, the desire to admire,
the aesthetic sense that a visit to a Cathedral might produce.
Or gospel music or music in general,
for that matter, which has a pronounced religious element.
Spiritual element.
And lots of people describe themselves as spiritual but not religious,
which means that while they haven't been able to apply systematic philosophical
reasoning to the wheres and whys of their experience.
Now if a belief system becomes entirely
dogmatic, it tends to rigidify and ossify and become tyrannical.
So that's not good.
But if it's only spiritual, like the New Age movement,
let's say, then it's everything and nothing at the same time.
Everything goes, everything is permitted, all is equal.
Everything falls under the same umbrella.
It's so inclusive and so non structured
that it really degenerates into nothing at all.
So there always has to be a balance between
structure and openness to change, and structure is dogma,
and openness to change is exploration, and both of them have a religious element.
And then you also included faith.
Well, I'm not going to talk about
that because I'm out of brain power for the day.
So we'll just stick with spirit versus dogma for the answer to that
question for now.
And that's pretty much all I can manage for the day.