Reticent Rebuttal

Love is religion or religion is love? Before you can love God you must understand love, even if only in its most rudimentary meaning. God may be ever present and instilled love in our human nature, but we don’t have to recognize this to love. Does religion requires love? Probably not but love certainly doesnt require religion. Some of God’s most beautiful creations, are people that are very loving but have no inclinations in religious circumstance.

The correlations between love and religion can be exemplified.
“We do stupid things in the name of religion. We kill we punish, we suffer we abstain. We do all these things for love.”
This smacks of fanaticism?

“Both Religion and Love require sacrifice. We give up the things that don't correspond to what we believe. We give up things that don't agree with the ones we love. We sacrifice ourselves for a purpose.”

We compromise ourselfves daily. Often as a means to an end. A nessesary need that requires fulfillment. Strong conviction can outweight logic, it doesnt always make sense. Dont give up on love......

If love is a religion as you so aptly contend, then it should be the universal religion. Nature, law-giving, prophetic, salvation, sacramental, tribal, and mystical religions will bode much fairer incorporating a docterine of love. Love should not be shunned and feared as if it were some satanic cult. Love should not be viewed as your own personal holy grail, and once lost you can no longer drink the nurturing sustanance love provides in life. It may be different or even difficult but small scoops can be sipped again using a cautious hand.

"Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails."

Only God presides over all aspects of our own destiny, much is out of our own control.


“Do we really fall in love over and over again. If we regard love as the Bible does, then the answer is irrefutably "no."”

Interpret the bible as you wish, I know I am far less versed in its passages and meaning but I disagree.

There is no fear in love. -- John 4:18

God is able and willing to forgive. He has called us to peace, not legal bondage, and He can make a good marriage and a happy home no matter what the previous history of the people involved may have been, provided that true repentance, proper restitution, and genuine saving faith and sincere desire to serve the Lord now exist in their lives.

"If the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or sister is not under bondage in such cases: but God hath called us to peace" (I Corinthians 7:15).

This obviously means that the Christian husband or wife is then at liberty to fall in love and remarry. In fact, if there are children involved, and if a caring Christian spouse can be found, it would be good to remarry, for children need the love and guidance of both a father and mother, provided, of course, that the stepmother or stepfather is "in the Lord" (I Corinthians 7:39) and desires to assume such a responsibility.

"And the woman which hath an husband that believeth not, and if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not leave him." (I Corinthians 7:12,)

Through studies of these passages I previously misconstrued that the bible contains many discrepancies. Now I find these would be more accurately described as allowances or forgiveness’s. Life is not so different today to see that even at the time the text of bible was inscribed, foresight into the problems imposed by an imperfect world and untoward human sins, would give rise to struggles that a God loving Christian would encounter attempting to live a life of faith.

I find love cannot be so tidily explained, nor can it be encapsulated, boxed in a dimly lit room and set upon the dusty shelf marked “love”. Love would take a thousand rooms, of a thousand boxes, to sort out and categorize all its subtleties and characteristics, and leave the lights on because this messy collection of smudged and frayed containers should be rummaged through, updated, and rearranged with thoughtful regularity.

Love is seemingly much easier to demonstrate than to explain. Here is an example:

”Me, I just dream. And in the end, none of my dreams seem worth pursuing. So, tomorrow I will get up, fight traffic to work, and put in my eight hours as a legal secretary. I will go to David's after work, and we will hang out and dream together over dinner. I will water the flowers I planted in his yard as he works on the next story he is writing. I will sit at the small picnic table he bought and watch the little finches peck at the bird seed we put in the bird feeder in his yard. And I will be happy yet insignificant like those tiny birds.”

These words are bluesy, soulful and astoundingly beautiful. This love on multiple levels; self, nature, David, and simply life in general. Love makes life palpable.

“Love is perhaps the greatest religion of them all. Or perhaps the greatest epidemic.”

The world would be a much more beautiful place if we had this implied epidemic. I hope you are right on this account. Avoid the antidote, the pain is in the cure.

I would like to understand religion further, I know you have given it more thought than I breifly have, this is just a humble attempt to thwart unfavorable supposition regarding love. Of course as I will keep my word, you wont read this so truely what is the point.