Or is it just something that people have concocted in their minds and in the culture to justify the evolutionary drive to produce as many genetic offspring as possible?
.
[This message was edited Mon Nov 11 10:47:25 PST 2002 by NuPwrSoul]

I can't speak for all athiests, but yes, I believe in love.

So, you're gonna say, if I can believe in something I can't see and measure and study, why not believe in god too, right?

The difference is, I do perceive love. I have a direct conscious experience of it. Can't say that about God.

That doesn't mean that love isn't a result of evolution. It helps us create strong social bonds, which are beneficial for survival. Doesn't make it any less. . .lovely.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

NuPwrSoul said:

Loving is just liking on a grand scale. Discerning and discriminating between what one likes and dislikes is of course essential to well-being and a big part of survival. That doesn't make it any less splendid and profound as an experience.I certainly reject the idea that atheists see love as something mundance and dryly functional. It is both ordinary and extraordinary, and has nothing whatsoever to do with believing in God or not. It certainly doesn't come from God, because as you know, he doesn't exist.

Love has nothing to do with god... love is an emotion, or more specifically, a biochemical, electrophysiological and neurobiological event, therefore atheists can believe in love.

tackam said:

Thanks for your response.

There are many who have had "direct conscious" faith experiences. Are their experiences not valid?

Are "near death experiences" simply the malfunctionings of electrical impulses jumping from one synapse to another in the brain?

Everything can be reduced to its most elemental scientific basis... its mathematical, cold, "unfeeling" basis.

Love is based on as much a human/societal construct as is religion. And it seems to me that many who have expressed athiestic leanings have done so on the basis of their ability to break down and demystify religion and faith based experiences to their most elemental level.

I just wondered if they approach everything else in life like that... if they do they'd miss the beauty of other constructs like romance, love, etc. If not, then let the believers alone... let them experience what has been for them a beautiful experience, even if it is merely extrascientific construction.

Cuz at the end of the day it all is. But who wants to walk the earth thinking themselves a glob of genetic matter and energy that is here just to reproduce before dying. How sad is that?

Aero & Ice,

I wasn't suggesting that (dis-)belief in God has anything to do with love... only that much of what we think about "love" is societally and culturally constructed. At its simplest it's as

Ice stated:

that more than likely evolved in order to promote genetic reproduction.

However, is that what most people say when they are in love or have found love? Or is there something more meaningful and more beautiful?

Believing in God may serve some simplistic purpose from a scientific basis, but what is wrong with building on that and inventing, imagining, believing in something greater and more transcendant than its building block basics?
.
[This message was edited Mon Nov 11 11:17:41 PST 2002 by NuPwrSoul]

NuPwrSoul said:

The difference between conscious experience making love real, and conscious experience making God real, is that love just IS a conscious experience. The experiencing of it is all that it takes to verify it. God is supposed to be more than a conscious experience; he is supposed to be a metaphysically real being out in the world. You can't extrapolate to that from a conscious experience.

I think near death experiences are something akin to dreams, an experience of your own neurology, yes.

There is a lot of social baggage surrounding love, but that stuff is not the same as love itself.

None of this has anything to do with missing the experience of beauty. I find lots of beauty in things that can be explained via science. The most recent issue of Discover had me in tears! I'm not kidding. It was about how the universe lit up at one point. . .what a great image.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

( John 4:8) He that does not Love has not come to know God because God is Love.

Love is God God is Love girls and boys Love God above...

NuPwrSoul said:

Well, I have a "direct conscious" experience of not feeling, hearing or seeing any god around me damn near all the time.

Just because emotions can be tied to brain activity or a specific region does not mean the emotion itself is supposed to be a mere cerebral event. Not surprisingly, we are equiped to handle a range of feelings, emotions and other thoughts.

If I could give Icenine a pill that would make him love all human beings including Hitler and Hillary Clinton, would it mean that love is insignificant? No... it just means we know how to provoke it.

Likewise, the existence of a region of the brain devoted to spirituality is not in itself a proof of the existence or non existence of "god". It means we have used these thought processes for a long time, for one reason or another. Atheists just disagree on these reasons. They can also use the same region of the brain to justify altruist acts. In fact, atheists are just as capable of compassion and love as believers.

whoops ! 4:8 I meant.I don't know how that happened

Aerogram said:

I find it sad that we should have to SAY this! It speaks to the depth of the prejudice against athiests in this society.

I would add to my previous comments that consciousness is NOT understood. Those of us in science and philosophy mostly feel confident that conscious experiences are caused by neurological events. There is good reason to think so. But we don't know HOW; we don't understand what consciousness actually IS. It's important to keep that in mind when we are talking about this stuff, methinks.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

tackam said:

Might I also suggest a couple of good books...

"Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions" - Thomas Metzinger

"The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind" - by Julien Jaynes

"The Purposive Brain" - by Ragnar Granit

I may be confused here, but Why on Earth wouldnt an athiest be capable of love?
Can someone please explain the logic there?

IceNine said:

Love is also a philosophical event.

teller said:

True enough.

IceNine said:

Why, thank you. I'll give those a reading at the end of this quarter. If you are suggesting that one of these people actually gives an adequate explanation of consciousness. . .well, all of philosophy thanks you.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

IceNine said:

Uh, really? Like, we decide to love, or something like that? See the free will thread.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

tackam said:

Which is a FIVE FUCKING STAR thread if you ask me!

oh lawd i hope folks don't take my post the wrong way. please reread what i posted. i never said athiests are incapable of love.

what i DID say is that i have seen religion and faith based beliefs/experiences dismissed as unscientific at times... and i wondered if we applied this same strict scientific reductive type reasoning what would love end up looking like.

tackam said:

Love becomes philosophical in that it is a strange, emergent property of the functioning of the brain, much like consciousness... love is not very scientific.

I don't think that we decide to love someone... I believe that love is a by-product of the functioning of the brain and the interaction of erotic stimulation and mental stimulation... it is a VERY difficult question, but it manifests itself biochemically, etc.

The Biochemistry of Falling
in Love

The past few years have yielded a great deal of new knowledge
about what lies at the basis of the beautiful and glorious feelings we all
feel when we fall in love. Talk show host Phil Donahue nicely sum-
marizes much of this material in his 1985 volume THE HUMAN ANI-
MAL (see especially chapter six of that work).
The available data indicate that romantic love feelings commence
in the region of the lower brain that is known as the hypothalamus. The
hypothalamus is composed of a dense cluster of nerves which controls
hundreds of bodily functions and impacts in a large host of ways the
entire nervous system. Whenever a person subjectively perceives another
human being as romantically appealing a portion of the hypothalamus
transmits a message by way of various chemicals to the pituitary gland.
And in turn the pituatary releases a host of its own hormones which
rapidly suffuse the entire bloodstream. The sex glands respond to these
hormones by rapidly releasing into the bloodstream their own hormones
which have the effect, even among preadolescent children, of creating a more
rapid heartbeat and a feeling of lightness in the head. Simultaneously
the nerve pathways in and around the hypothalamus produce chemicals
that induce-provided that these chemicals continued to be produced over
a long period of time-what people refer to as "falling in love".
What current research especially needs to focus upon is the ques-
tion of whether love-shys have a hyperactive hypothalamus that com-
mences to respond and react with "love chemicals" significantly earlier
in life for them than for most human beings--and whether these hypo-
thalamus responses are stronger and more persistant over the first three
decades of life for the love-shys than for non-shy people. As I have
already documented in chapter two, many components of the lower
brain stem are much more hyperactivein introverts than in ambiverts
and extyroverts. The neurons of the locus coeruleus and of other parts
of the ascending reticular formation of the brain appears to be much
more hyperactive among inhibited people than among the uninhibited.
Thus, there is little reason to suspect that the "love nucleus" component
of the hypothalammus (itself a part of the lower brain) might not also
be hyperactive for highly inhibited, very shy men.
If this is so it would provide a key portion of the explanation as
to why so many of the love-shy fall so deeply in love as early in life as
age 5--much earlier in life than most people experience powerful feelings
of romantic love. It would also partially explain why love-shy men tend
to fall in love so easily and so often right from the earliest years of
elementary school through the years of middle adulthood. Simply put,
for severely love-shy men the "love nucleus" portion of the hypothal-
amus may "awaken to full operation" seven or eight or nine years pre-
maturely, long before adolescence is arrived at with its normal surge of
sex hormones. The prepubescent child who does not have any aware-
ness of sex or of erotic feelings (as these do not usually occur prior to
adolescence) interprets the powerful feelings he does feel as being those
of overhwelming romantic love.
Among the first signs of "falling in love" is a giddy high similar
to what might be obtained as a result of an amphetamine boost. This
"high" is a sign that the brain has entered a distinct neurochemical state.
This occurs as a result of the hypothalamus releasing a chemical sub-
stance (probably phenylethylamine) that is very much like an amphet-
amine and which, like any "upper", makes the heart beat faster and
confers energy. This biochemically-based "high" is experienced by any-
one "in love" quite irrespective of their chronological age. The problem
for the love-shy of any age is that they are emotionally incapable of
harnessing the energy that is a byproduct of their biochemically-based
"high". In essence, they are incapable of following through, flirting, and
winning the attention of the loved person. If they did follow through
and were rejected, the biochemical "high" would quickly and fairly easily
come to a halt. In not being able to make the approach to the love object
the biochemical "high" remains endemic in the love-shy child's brain
for an indefinite, usually quite lengthy period of time. And the elemen-
tary school boy (or man as the case might be) becomes "hooked" on his
own brain biochemicals. In short, for the love-shy male who cannot
approach the girl, love swiftly becomes an overwhelming strong addiction
that is probably every bit as strong and demanding as a drug addict's
addiction to amphetamine might be. (The ability to share many expe-
riences with the love object would operate to remove the "rosy colored
smokescreen" of infatuation, thus preventing this addiction.)
Of course, any "high" has to end. The evidence suggests that males
who are able to start conversations with girls in whom they become
interested are highly unlikely to experience any painful "crashes". At
least their susceptibility to such "crashes" will remain very low until
early adulthood. And even then they will be susceptible only if a boy-
girl love relationship of many months duration breaks up against their
wishes. In contrast, love-shy males are susceptible to such "crashes"
from the age of five simply because their inability to start a conversation
with and to get to know their "love-object" causes a long-term preoc-
cupation and fantasy world to develop that can and does often last for
many months. As the cases reported in this chapter suggest, all a 5 or
7 or 9 year old boy need do is look at his love-object in a school hallway
or on a playground, and his hypothalamus will cause the release of a
shot of blood amphetamines that are as potent (and distracting) as a
shot out of hell! Despite the tendency of naive parents to use the dis-
paraging expression "puppy love", the biochemical basis of love is really
no different for the eight year old than it is for the adult.
A key consideration for anyone who gets hooked on drugs is that
of withdrawal. Whether a person gets hooked on pills or on natural drugs
that the brain produces, the "crash" of withdrawal can be highly dis-
tracting and debilitating for a person of any age. But of especial interest
here is the finding that people who "crash" after having been deeply in
love tend to have an unusually strong craving for chocolate. Very note-
worthy is the fact that chocolate is high into phenylethylamine--the
very substance that is released by the brain into the bloodstream as a
concomitant of falling in love. When the love-feelings cease the body
craves chocolate because it has developed a tolerance to the phenyleth-
ylamines which it is no longer getting--because the brain has stopped
secreting them.
As I shall document in chapter fifteen of this book, from early
childhood the love-shy men studied for this book had always had a
significantly above average craving for chocolate and other sweets; and
they tended to consume significantly more of these items than did the
non-shy men. This consumption of chocolate and sweets tends to aggra-
vate the love-shys' problems in a whole host of ways as we shall see.
For now, suffice it to say that this craving for sweets may be due in part
to constantly being in the throes of hopeless and terminated, unrequited
love experiences.
Finally, Jack Panksepp, a chemist at Bowling Green State Univer-
sity, has obtained evidence indicating that the brain also produces chem-
icals called opioids (which are quite similar to the highly addicting opiates)
when a person falls deeply in love.

EDIT: From - http://www.angelfire.com/...flove.html

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[This message was edited Mon Nov 11 12:05:49 PST 2002 by IceNine]

teller said:

FUCK YEAH!

But stars won't get me free will, people! Get crackin'!

Doves,
Mel!ssa

NuPwrSoul said:

Sorry, didn't mean to put words in your mouth.

I think your concern is a valid one, but I think think many athiests are very happy to apply scientific reasoning to love, and do not feel that doing so diminishes the experience at all.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

IceNine said:

Well, I'm skittish about the 'emergent property' explanation of consciousness, but I certainly do think that whatever philosophy of mind has to say about consciousness applies to to the particular experience of love as well. Nothing mystical about it.

I'm inclined, like Aerogram, to think of love as bigger, deeper liking, and that there is a biochemical explanation, but the details of that explanation are a bit foggy. That's an interesting essay you posted, very interesting. Doesn't address the heart of the consciousness problem, though. I really don't think we have a solution to that yet.

Doves,
Mel!ssa

To me from my point of view we were all made in God's image and sice yes we were all created equally we all no matter what lifesyle we choose for ourselves have the capacity to Love and believe in Love.