Love: What does it mean?

Love.

It’s what every religion claims to strive for, aid, and abet. It is almost universally recognized as the highest personal virtue, the ultimate goal. It’s what most religions cite as the reason for their actions.

Love.

For what we see as one word, the Greeks used four: “agape” to refer to perfect and complete love, “phileos” for affection and fondness, “eros” for romantic love, and “stergos” for parental love.

Love.

How quickly we deviate from it in our religions. How quickly it becomes un-important. How quickly “love” can become a matter of control – “I can’t let you do this because I love you,” “I can’t let you do this because I love them.”

The Torah sets down strict laws related to the punishment of unauthorized sexuality, stating that their purpose is ultimately loving – “thus shall you keep evil away from yourselves.”

C.S. Lewis once wrote that it is, in fact, a community’s duty to ensure that its members are in “good internal order,” because “a ship that goes astray can be dangerous to the whole fleet.”

The Qu’ran states that God is loving – but also that He has the right to do anything he wishes to the humans he made. This same mentality seems to be reflected in the Torah and the Bible, where the story of Job tells us that God is still considered virtuous after committing many murders in order to test one man’s faith.

Every culture, every religion, has its laws for a reason. In many cultures, religions were once tribal, and so religious differences were an extremely serious matter: if you followed a different tribe’s god, there was a real likelihood that you would be motivated to sabotage the well-being of your own tribe.

Even more recently, religions were used for political power. The entire reason for the persecution of Christianity in the Roman empire was that Christianity represented a threat to the divinity of the Roman emperor, which was an essential part of the glue holding that sprawling, mostly-religious empire together.

Time was, women and children were property; your tribe lived or died on the backs of your warriors, and women were how you made warriors.  You lived or died on the resources of your land, and inheritance and war were the two ways you acquired land. From this stems the gender heirarchy and obsession with sexual purity found in the Abrahamic faiths.

Similar trends can be found in cultures around the world; the Vikings’ intricate fealty system served their own purposes, and is reflected in their mythology; the Roman’s taboos (or lack thereof) reflect, among other things, their geographic surroundings and technological limitations.

So how are we to interpret what is “loving” in a world with thousands of conflicting prescriptions for what that means?

I would propose an evidence-based approach: can you demonstrate evidence of harm occurring in the modern world when your taboo is not followed?

But, of course, in practice, love comes down to an internal mental state; a personal practice.

But perhaps we should be clear on what can and cannot be justified by “love” from an empirical standpoint.