Jokes aside, people seem to have converged on one word as the nub of Christianity viz. love — Agent Smith

People could live life any number of ways and there's no reason that one necessarily needs to prioritize love. — Moses

It is in our attachment to this ‘stuff close to our hearts’ wherein lies the seeds of untold suffering. — Possibility

Comments!

Attachment, at least in the sense I’m referring to here, is not the same as the original Christian notion of love - but I could argue that most modern expressions of ‘love’ fail to distinguish between the two.

Drastically oversimplified, attachment is when you pluck the flower…

Attachment, at least in the sense I’m referring to here, is not the same as the original Christian notion of love - but I could argue that most modern expressions of ‘love’ fail to distinguish between the two.

Drastically oversimplified, attachment is when you pluck the flower… — Possibility

Nice! As per your assessment then love isn't attachment and, flipping the sign, it hasta be detachment, but then we end up with the problem of having to disentangle love from indifference/insouiciance because love also isn't that either. Ergo, my brain informs me we're in a pickle. In re attachment and its opposite detachment, love is adiaphora (logically undifferentiated). It, love, is something else entirely. It is neither attachment nor detachment, it is ...

Nice! As per your assessment then love isn't attachment and, flipping the sign, it hasta be detachment, but then we end up with the problem of having to disentangle love from indifference/insouiciance because love also isn't that either. Ergo, my brain informs me we're in a pickle. In re attachment and its opposite detachment, love is adiaphora (logically undifferentiated). It, love, is something else entirely. It is neither attachment nor detachment, it is ... — Agent Smith

Why is the binary necessary? I didn’t say that love was opposite to attachment - so, no, it doesn’t hafta be detachment.

I think that love is more about realising the fullness of potential in any relation. Christian love simply posits ‘the Christ’ as the fullness of human potential in relation to the absolute. Our relation with reality is triadic, not binary.

The binary logic is just part of the process of negation. If I say "love is not attachment" then that would mean "love is detachment". I evaluated both in my previous post and came to the conclusion that love is neither attachment nor detachment. Perphaps it's somewhere in the middle or, even more intriguingly, nowhere.

How is our relation to reality triadic?

The binary logic is just part of the process of negation. If I say "love is not attachment" then that would mean "love is detachment". I evaluated both in my previous post and came to the conclusion that love is neither attachment nor detachment. Perphaps it's somewhere in the middle or, even more intriguingly, nowhere. — Agent Smith

I’m inclined to say nowhere. I didn’t say ‘love is not attachment’, rather that it wasn’t the same. Love can manifest as both attachment and detachment, or neither.

If love is neither attachment nor detachment, as you state, then this binary logic is insufficient. I would argue that it’s always insufficient in relation to reality, as a third point always exists, ‘somewhere in the middle or, more intriguingly, nowhere’. At minimum, that third point is us.

When I mentioned attachment, I wasn’t referring to a maximal value for which ‘detachment’ is its negation, but rather the qualitative idea, inclusive of negation. Love has a much more expansive meaning. As an event, love is realising the fullness of potential in any relation. As a value it is this fullness of potential in any relation. As a qualitative idea, love is the quality of any relation, but as meaning, love is pure relation itself.

So my argument is that love is inclusive of attachment/detachment, not the other way around.