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Sorry but I cannot agree with this. It doesn't work in the effort to wrest the word "love" away from the mobsters and molesters. By your realignment one cannot love themselves and I would insist just the opposite that without love for yourself you cannot even love others.
Does not follow. Loving oneself (the object) would be just the same as loving another person. Self-interest might have to be translated to selfishness, but otherwise the same.
Sorry but I cannot agree with this. It doesn't work in the effort to wrest the word "love" away from the mobsters and molesters. By your realignment one cannot love themselves and I would insist just the opposite that without love for yourself you cannot even love others.
This doesn't work either. The fact that the gravitational force between you and the earth is an attractive force does not mean that there is no coercion, let alone that it can do no harm.
The fact is that the attraction of love has more to do with the choices of the person involved for the truth is that love has no power at all to attract or sway people who do not value it. This belief in an indomitable, unstoppable, always-win power of love is simply a lie. It may be a sweet lie that people want to believe in but it is still a lie.
Instead, I would simply say that love is the right way to do things. Ultimate power - NO! Ultimately right? YES!
This resonates especially with the current ISIS mobsters. To boil down the Pope's idea of love to counter them would be equivalent to using hugs to stop the beheadings. Any such attempt to use the power of love with these thugs will be fruitless. I can embrace your last statement wholeheartedly.
Sorry but I cannot agree with this. It doesn't work in the effort to wrest the word "love" away from the mobsters and molesters. By your realignment one cannot love themselves and I would insist just the opposite that without love for yourself you cannot even love others.
This doesn't work either. The fact that the gravitational force between you and the earth is an attractive force does not mean that there is no coercion, let alone that it can do no harm.
The fact is that the attraction of love has more to do with the choices of the person involved for the truth is that love has no power at all to attract or sway people who do not value it. This belief in an indomitable, unstoppable, always-win power of love is simply a lie. It may be a sweet lie that people want to believe in but it is still a lie.
Instead, I would simply say that love is the right way to do things. Ultimate power - NO! Ultimately right? YES!
Actually, I should have used the term "selfish interest" in the first paragraph.
Physics and personal relations ar different fields and gravitational attraction is not the same thing as person or ideational attraction. In personal relations the option to deny is always available. And I see that you approach this point in your third paragraph.
Making that attraction and the availability of information into and "indomitable, always win power of love" is just rhetoric. The point is that if it is always available the possibility of change remains and given eternity I think everyone will change. I could be wrong, but I believe that is the nature of the God I love.
On your last sentence we are in wholehearted agreement.
My answer would have been inaccurate or incomplete information.
Succinct. I'm mulling, and I keep thinking there is more to it, but then everything keeps fitting under the umbrella of your answer in one way or another.
If it were possible to take 2 brand new human beings who had experienced absolutely nothing of life and give them a choice to value love or not to value love, and one chose to value it and another chose not to ... how did they make that choice?
That is logically inconsistent. You cannot have 2 human beings who had experience absolutely nothing in life, let alone expect them to make such a choice. You choice of 2 human being suggest you understand Genesis as telling the story of an ancient necromancer creating a golem of dust and golem of bone. In such fantasies the golems usually do whatever the necromancer wants them to do.
Living things just do not work that way. Life is a process of self-organization -- i.e. learning and growth. Human beings in particular are creatures with a mind which is also a product of self-organization based an inheritance of information via human communication. Therefore, without experience, no human being is possible.
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Originally Posted by Pleroo
Was it something intrinsic within them that caused them to either gravitate toward love or not to? If so, that's not a choice, right?
Correct, not a free will choice, no.
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Originally Posted by Pleroo
We both have come to the conclusion, it seems, that if people intrinsically either gravitate towards love or not, then it's not a free choice.
Choice does not happen in a vacuum.
Correct! Choices require a context. But this does not mean that choice are a deterministic product of previously existent conditions. This isn't even true of physical events according to modern physics.
Choices are not a product of extrinsic OR intrinsic conditions, but a response to those conditions.
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Originally Posted by Pleroo
People consciously and subconsciously draw on their past experiences, from their experience in the womb, to infancy on through childhood and into adult, in order to make choices, wouldn't you agree? How much of what happens to a fetus in the womb is by their choice? How much of what happens to them in infancy is by their choice? How much of what happens in early childhood happens by the choice of the child? And even older children are much at the mercy of their environment and the people in it, yes?
Free will is not about controlling what happens to us. Free will is about how we respond to what happens to us.
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Originally Posted by Pleroo
Would you agree that what happens to people in these early years goes a long way towards informing their decisions and choices in adulthood?
No, but how they choose to respond to those events may indeed go a long way towards programming their decisions and choices in adulthood.
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Originally Posted by Pleroo
That's not determinism in the sense that GOD determines their choices, but to a large extent, their "conditioning" in childhood does, and that conditioning is often enforced by the choices we make throughout our lives, BASED on that conditioning.
Determinism isn't about what the causes are but only whether they exist and allow only one outcome.
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Originally Posted by Pleroo
It would seem to be impossible to overcome, based on the belief that there is nothing intrinsic within people that would cause them to go against their conditioning.
But it's not impossible, because people do overcome it. So, what gives them that ability?
God Almighty is greater than all. Yes God is love, but God also has great wrath on those who rebel against Him and continue to do evil.
Eph 5:6 Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient
Jude 1:7 In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.
Surely choice comes from being influenced by what you have considered. So something that influences you for good isn't love ?.
If it is an "influence" which takes away your choice then no it isn't love. This has been a common theme in quite a few dramas. Whether by love potion, spell, machine, or drug if such things take away your choice and makes you do things then no it isn't love.
But there are influences which do not take away your choices. In such case you choose whether to be influenced by those things and how much.
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