Acknowledged, and I've had good discussions with thoughtful people who said, "Love is not respect. Respect is respect. Love is not compassion. Compassion is compassion. It's not compassion, because it's an action. It's not an emotion you feel. It's an action you take."
I don't think that saying "love is an emotion" is particularly accurate. I would say that love is a specific kind of spiritual paradigm, through which we experience and understand ourselves and the world around us. Just as selfishness would also be a kind of spiritual paradigm through which we experience and understand ourselves and the world around us. And there are others.
They tell me: "There is no analogy! Paul wrote exactly what he meant. Love is being patient, kind, not being easily angered, not keeping a record of wrongs. In short, forgiveness is love."
But "they" are contradicting themselves, then. Because Paul didn't write that love is "being" patient. Paul wrote that "love is patient". The "being" makes it an active expression on someone's part. The "is" that Paul used relates the patience directly back to the love, disregarding any 'actor'. And that's how it becomes inaccurate, because evil is also patient, and evil is not love. So there is an innate contradiction if we read the words with such proposed absolute literality.
Also, the act of reading is by it's nature an act of interpretation. There in no such thing as an absolutely objective literal interpretation, because interpreting text is by it's nature a subjective act. The words mean what
we think they mean. While they mean nothing in and of themselves.
Well, I think it's clear John was using an analogy when he wrote, "God is love." For how can God be either what I feel or what I do? He might cause such feelings or actions, but I don't see how he can be them. But it's only clear as mud to me, at the moment that Paul is using figures of speech, as you claim.
In this instance, though, I agree with John's leaving this statement somewhat vague. Because "God" IS inexplicable. We don't know exactly how God relates to the spirit of love being infested in ourselves, and in the universe. So I'm OK with John presenting us with this mystery in this vague way. How else could he have done it?
So how do I determine who is telling the truth and who is deceived? How do I know what you say is true? Can you think of anything else Paul wrote that more clearly shows he is using an analogy, here?
As a human being, we don't get to know anything with absolute certainty. Which is why I believe it's far more important that we humans pursue honesty than that we pursue some "absolute truth". The only truth we can know will be relative, and so generally vague and fleeting. True; only so long as the facts upon which it's truthfulness rests, don't change. But everything changes, eventually. And whatever truth we think we have nailed down will become untrue one way or another.
Through honesty, we can come to understand this, and to accept our limitations. And to accept the limitations of others. I find this to be the better path to pursue.
Well, the reliability of scripture is a different topic of discussion all together. I think it deserves it's own discussion thread.
There is usually one on this subject somewhere on TOL , at any given time. But if you want to start one, that's fine, too.
