{"id":1354,"date":"2023-04-04T07:01:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-04T14:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pastorfred.blogsite.org\/?p=1354"},"modified":"2025-09-23T10:18:49","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T17:18:49","slug":"aphorisms-on-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/?p=1354","title":{"rendered":"Aphorisms on Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> Edited: 2025-Sep-23 <\/p>\n<ul style=\"font-family:serif;font-size:larger;\">\n<li>Many who say &#8220;I love you,&#8221; mean that they want the other to love them.<\/li>\n<li>The confusion between love and desire, between Agape and Eros, gives rise to most of the tragedy and pain in human relations.<\/li>\n<li>Desire&#8217;s gift is a baited hook.<\/li>\n<li>The emotion produced by desire is stronger but more transient than that produced by beneficence.<\/li>\n<li>The strength of desire&#8217;s emotion deceives both the one desired and the one desiring.<\/li>\n<li>The opposite of desire is hate. The opposite of beneficence is indifference.<\/li>\n<li>Eros&#8217;s intensity is more peremptory than Agape&#8217;s joy.<\/li>\n<li>Desire, in emotional terms, more closely resembles hate than beneficence resembles indifference. Thus the ease with which desire and hate can merge into one another.<\/li>\n<li>Hate differs from indifference in that hate at least implies engagement, whereas indifference is total negation.<\/li>\n<li>Many would rather feel strongly than feel happy.<\/li>\n<li>Love can give by receiving, since accepting a gift attributes worth to the giver.<\/li>\n<li>Love is willing to receive in order to give, while desire will only give in order to receive, or rather ensnare.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;If it doesn&#8217;t break your heart it isn&#8217;t love.&#8221; Love accepts suffering in hope: not hope of its own good but the good of the beloved.<\/li>\n<li>Love that can&#8217;t bear pain isn&#8217;t worth the name, but bearing pain doesn&#8217;t mean you are loving. Another of those annoying relational paradoxes.<\/li>\n<li>Love is astounding presumption: it assumes it has something to give that the beloved will be better off having.<\/li>\n<li>Agape can embrace and exalt Eros, but Eros must die to make room for Agape.<\/li>\n<li>Love is creative: it does not simply love the lovely; it engenders loveliness.<\/li>\n<li>To give being to another is the most astonishingly wonderful and beautiful thing one can do for a person. That to many this does not seem evident is also astonishing.<\/li>\n<li>Only the rich can give; the one who loves thereby shows himself rich.<\/li>\n<li>One can always rightly love another person, since at worst true beneficence does no harm.<\/li>\n<li>A paradox of love: To offer love in order to receive love is not really offering love. To offer love without offering to receive love is not really offering love.<\/li>\n<li>Desire is competitive and exclusive, but there is an apotheosis of Eros as it is taken into Agape where it loves all for the sake of the beloved.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Meditations on love and desire, intended to spur thought and reflection<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[195,74],"class_list":["post-1354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meditation","tag-desire","tag-love","has-excerpt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1354"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1572,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354\/revisions\/1572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodnews.homedns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}