Unconditional Love?

[NotHardUp1]

Conditional is conditional.

Unconditional is unconditional.

Anything in between is fudging.

I do not believe in unconditional love -- not in man, not in the animal kingdom, and not from God.

There is altruism, a selflessness that is an imbalanced and sometimes noble unilateralism. But even it is not necessarily unconditional.

We make choices to love based upon triggers. Those include returned affection, blood relation, and duty, just to name a few.

Animals may bond or imprint on humans, which is fair to call love, but it is by no means unconditional. Give a dog food that it hates, abuse it, or neglect it, and see how unflinching that love is. And, allow the animal a choice as it is raised. Trapping it in a human environment and then claiming it chooses to love when it knows no other existence is a skewed scale tilted in favor of humanity, and indirectly, to animal virtue that mostly doesn't exist.

I have two dogs. I give and receive affection. They respond, but they are no nobler or baser than humans.

As for God, I don't believe he ever claimed to love unconditionally. According to the Hebrews, he spent thousands of years telling them all the things he hates, like mixing wool and cotton, not to mention menstruating women. I fear St. Paul and others after him extrapolated more than a few "truths" about God that simply are not supported by the scriptures.

Like the doctrine of "original sin," unconditional love isn't a direct assertion by God nor by Jesus. It is an extrapolation. Many passages in the Bible speak of love not depending on this or that, or being limited by this or that, and they also go on about God initiating love. All of that can be true without it being unconditional. Men praising their Gods often assign perfection and idealization to the extremes.

I do believe God loves, and love is an enduring attribute of both God and man and even the animals in creation, but not unconditionally. I'm happy to disagree with thousands of years of Jewish and then Christian dogma, as they certainly were wrong about many things.

As this phrase is almost exclusively associated with Christian and Jewish theology in the West, I'd welcome hearing from Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Wiccan, or other religious views, be they about God's love or man's, as I'm wholly unfamiliar with what parallels there are across the other traditions.

In the end, I think it silly to inflate love into some idealized impossibility that ignores the obvious in human, animal, and religious lights. Great love can be very forgiving, and often is, but it isn't unconditional, just enduring.

 

[mikey3000]

Well said. Thank you. Obviously I'm at a cross roads in my life and trying to make sense of old beliefs. Unconditional love is one of those beliefs I'm re-thinking.

 

[luckynumbah7]

My cats' love is unconditional.

Mine's not. I'm sure if she were being abused she'd grow to hate me, as she's had a fairly comfy, if uneventful, life so far. Cats don't do Stockholm syndrome, which is what the unconditional part of unconditional love says to me.

 

[luckynumbah7]

Stop feeding it and see how long that lasts.

Nah. It seems one way to show good will is by sharing food for mammals. And some reptiles. But that just establishes an example of benign intent, has little to do with who the cat ends up showering in affection.

 

[luckynumbah7]

Oh please, I've been in a relationship for 34 years, I don't need them explained to me thanks. What I said is not a mockery of anything but true. How many guys under my post said the same thing about animals? Humans can't have unconditional love for anything. There are too many emotions and feelings that are easily damaged.

Are you under the assumption that unconditional love also means unconditional like? Pretty sure other animals also feel more than one emotion at once. I notice like and love get confused very, very often. I don't have to like something to love something. Various family members spring to mind.

 

[zoltanspawn]

You're the animal's food source, hence the illusion of unconditional love. Technically, comparing a dog to unconditional love actually makes a mockery of the entire idea.

However dangerous this might be I'm just going to leave this here: If you want a relationship that has unconditional love, get one with God. Humans will disappoint you, and pretending your dog loves you like that is just silly.

This is a pretty common idea: that the social lives of animals can be reduced to their most elemental instincts, for food and shelter. I don't believe it. Dogs have demonstrated all kinds of behaviors that defy such reductive explanations. They follow lost families across state lines, pull their buddies from the highway and joyously re-unite with their departed masters. There are more economical ways their desire for food could be expressed. Instead, I think it's fair to describe a social animal in typically social ways, via affection and annoyance, caring and competition. What makes love something particular to humans anyway? Aren't we all animals?

 

[zoltanspawn]

If I make a pile out of grains of sand and I just never stop, the pile will get infinitely higher. But it will not get infinitely wetter or infinitely greener.

What I mean is something can be unlimited in some ways but not others.

So I'd say I love my guy infinitely, but not unconditionally. He can dive into a bottomless pool of my love for as long as he likes but there are things he could do that would (at the risk of violating the continuity of space time) make it as though no love were ever there.

There's something to be said about the difference between 'indiscriminate' love and 'unconditional' love. If your guy for some reason *randomly* decided he was the Starmaiden Penelope and wanted to destroy the Academie Francaise in order to standardize gelatinous sculpture as the ultimate French medium of communication, you would of course cease to love him. But that sort of random change of character is so unlikely as to be nonsensical, right? Which means you love him for being *him*, because his character isn't genuinely vulnerable to ridiculous changes. He is, somehow, himself. It is that 'himself' that people mean, when they say that their love is meant unconditionally. It doesn't mean that people love others as though they could somehow be other than themselves, but that people love others in spite of their frail human vulnerability to have faults.

(Though having said that, it looks like your contrast between 'infinite' and 'unconditional' resembles my contrast between 'unconditional' and 'indiscriminate'.)

 

[MakeDigitalLove]

Humans will disappoint you, and pretending your dog loves you like that is just silly.

I think it silly to believe that domesticated animals can't love you outside of a food source. Also the fact of the matter is that these animals have been trained to be domesticated so of course their association liking or loving a human is with food, but again that doesn't mean they don't like or love you for other things.

Believing that human beings aren't the same way at a different capacity is silly. We're in relationships with each other because we both get something out of it. Stop giving or receiving the things you get out of your relationships and see how long that lasts as well.

 

[Willie Boy]

This is a pretty common idea: that the social lives of animals can be reduced to their most elemental instincts, for food and shelter. I don't believe it. Dogs have demonstrated all kinds of behaviors that defy such reductive explanations. They follow lost families across state lines, pull their buddies from the highway and joyously re-unite with their departed masters. There are more economical ways their desire for food could be expressed. Instead, I think it's fair to describe a social animal in typically social ways, via affection and annoyance, caring and competition. What makes love something particular to humans anyway? Aren't we all animals?

What gets me is the way some dogs have been known to stay at the graveside of a departed master, forsaking food and water, to the point of starvation. If that is not a small example of unconditional love.......

 

[zoltanspawn]

As this phrase is almost exclusively associated with Christian and Jewish theology in the West, I'd welcome hearing from Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Wiccan, or other religious views, be they about God's love or man's, as I'm wholly unfamiliar with what parallels there are across the other traditions.

Mahayana Buddhists tend to speak about "compassion" rather than "love". Compassion should be directed unconditionally and universally. They probably very generally think of love as a romantic conundrum.

Hindus, though of such a variety, tend to share that view of love. Their concern is with "duty" rather than love, though that's a vague translation. If anything, the sub-set of love in Hinduism reminds me more of "fervor". In worship, devotees are passionately devoted to their God, whether that passion is familial, romantic, paternal or based on some other social norm.

I think you already said it. This is a phrase associated with the West.

 

[luckynumbah7]

What gets me is the way some dogs have been known to stay at the graveside of a departed master, forsaking food and water, to the point of starvation. If that is not a small example of unconditional love.......

Sounds more like a major depressive episode brought to a worn out and/or traumatized mind. Humans do something similar when they're paired off and one of them dies of old age.

 

[zoltanspawn]

Sounds more like a major depressive episode brought to a worn out and/or traumatized mind. Humans do something similar when they're paired off and one of them dies of old age.

What caused the major depressive episode?

 

[luckynumbah7]

What caused the major depressive episode?

Loss of a loved one. However, that example of death-at-a-funeral presumes it's the 'unconditional' bit that made them keel over since no one is arguing against the existence of love, at least not yet. He didn't use it as an example of mere love, but of unconditional love. Since love as an emotion is taken to exist, there must be at least 2 sides to a line which marks how unconditional love differs from the rest.

But you can't prove the actions of a depressive episode is an example of true love. I mean, what would be the check marks listed for a being to qualify? Is simply abstaining from recreation and humanity enough, or do you have to cut every and all contact because 'they can't measure up'? Do you have to starve or dehydrate to death, or is living in mourning clothes acceptable? It all seems to depend on social expectation.

 

[Telstra]

Living things are selfish by nature.
The selfish gene remember ???

Even flowers are selfish, they out grow each other for space.

 

[TickTockMan]

I believe in it, but it is very rare.

 

[NotHardUp1]

Sounds more like a major depressive episode brought to a worn out and/or traumatized mind. Humans do something similar when they're paired off and one of them dies of old age.

Or codependency.

 

[JPGhost]

My cats' love is unconditional.

 

[Vitamin]

I have read other translations that use milder talk, I don't see God as unconditional if we read and take the Bible in any literal way.
I studied the King James version so that usually what I quote.

You really haven't examined Christianity very much at all if you think all Biblical interpetations are literal.☺

 

[Vitamin]

This is a pretty common idea: that the social lives of animals can be reduced to their most elemental instincts, for food and shelter. I don't believe it. Dogs have demonstrated all kinds of behaviors that defy such reductive explanations. They follow lost families across state lines, pull their buddies from the highway and joyously re-unite with their departed masters. There are more economical ways their desire for food could be expressed. Instead, I think it's fair to describe a social animal in typically social ways, via affection and annoyance, caring and competition. What makes love something particular to humans anyway? Aren't we all animals?

Dogs were bred to be loyal for a reason. History is filled with primitive tribes who, upon their king's death, their servants would kill themselves so they could follow him to heaven.

Do you really think that's an example of unconditional love, or just loyalty?

 

[peeonme]

You really haven't examined Christianity very much at all if you think all Biblical interpetations are literal.☺

Read it again, the key word is "if", I didn't say to take it literally, I said "if".