childeye said:
Love is the very empathy we feel for others. To feel others pain or joy when we witness them experience the same.
I guess this makes more sense to me. In the case of God and neighbor - The object of love should be the very basis of our desires and consequent emotions and not the other way around.
Going back to the initial question - how does 'love for pizza' differ from 'love for God and neighbor' - I realize now that I desire pizza
because it satisfies a desire in me - and if that desirable quality was no longer present in pizza, then I would no longer 'love' it. But 'love for God and neighbor' is entirely different. If I'm to love my neighbor, I ought to desire his well-being and set that as the basis of my satisfaction - and not search for something I find satisfying in that person to then choose to love them. God loves me when there's absolutely nothing lovable in me - how can I then love another on the basis of my own satisfaction.
And this is where it gets so muddled - I can look back on numerous events where I've sacrificed out of 'love' - but I know I did that 'act of love'
because it made
me feel good - it made me feel good knowing how charitable and self-sacrificing I am. The basis was my own feeling good - with the other person's benefit a means to this rather than that person's benefit being the only and chief cause of my actions. Out of which actions, perhaps, I could eventually feel good... and that too feeling good about how he has benefited, period, rather than how he has benefited
because of me.
I guess the greatest obstacle to loving God and neighbor is our own self-love - and its deception of blinding us to itself - I mean, I could even 'hate' myself out of self-love. How can we ever be convicted of this apart from God. This raises serious implications that I think should influence our whole understanding of God.
