Perhaps Aeon’s editors tell me that they will publish it with the warning sign ‘Read this article and get seven years of bad luck.’ On the basis of that new information, I revise my degree of belief in the success of the article from 0.8 down to something like 0.4, as I assume that some people are superstitious and would rather not risk seven years of bad luck to learn what I think about love. Though I cannot think of any reason why it would not be a hit, imagine I receive some information to suggest otherwise. For example, I believe that this article will be a hit! I am pretty confident of this, given the article’s awesome topic and the awesomeness of Aeon’s readership, and so my degree of belief might be somewhere around the 0.8 mark. Importantly, these values are not forever fixed, and can change when given reason to do so. These credences can be given numerical values between 0 and 1 (where 1 is being completely certain), to demonstrate how strong that degree of belief is. It is not that I take love to be a belief – rather, I take it that by looking at conditional/unconditional belief we can see a potentially helpful and illuminating analogy to conditional/unconditional love.ĭegrees of belief are called credences. What does it mean to love someone conditionally or unconditionally? Is it possible to love unconditionally, and if so, is it rational to do so? I will try to make sense of the confusing and complex emotion that we call love by creating a parallel between conditional/unconditional love and conditional/unconditional degrees of belief. Take two types of love: conditional and unconditional. But what is love? (Baby don’t hurt me.) In this article, I will articulate how I have come to understand what love is, with the unexpected help of Bayesian probability theory. Love is important, and many of us wait for it, travel for it, and build our lives around it. Amen.Right now, in millions of bedrooms across the land, people are sighing for love. Listen to the wooing whisper of the Holy Spirit, and, if you hear it, ask the Yeshua the LORD to meet your heart's need for love today. In His chesed, God is drawing you close to Him. This passage of Scripture is clear: God everlastingly loves you (the Hebrew verb ahavteekh uses the singular "you" ending rather than the plural) and wants you (singular "you" again) to love Him in return. We must soften our hearts and confess our need for His healing and chesed (lovingkindness). We must personally decide to trust God to meet our need for love, regardless of the current circumstances of our lives. The love of Yeshua can set us free from the fear of a love-starved existence.īut it takes faith to be healed. By the power of His Holy Spirit, He can draw us to Himself and be the answer to our heart's cry for significance, meaning, and complete acceptance. The Lord can meet the need for unconditional love within our hearts. We "hew broken cisterns that can hold no water" and forsake the Fountain of Living Waters ( see Jer. The Lord created us with a built-in need to be loved unconditionally, but we seem hell-bent on "playing god." We try to get our heart needs met through all sorts of false loves, false promises, and idols. Above all I wanted to feel alive and significant - to escape the nagging thought that my life was a nothing but a "useless passion." In the end my self-styled search for life ended in despair and vanity. So I sought "life" through romance, through drugs and food, through desire for power and recognition. I wanted life, but I wanted to be in control - to be the "lord of the ring" and find satisfaction my own way. "Why get up in the morning? Why go through the daily ritual of fecklessly seeking an answer to the hunger I always feel inside? Why keep thirsting for the draught that never seems to satisfy?"īefore I trusted Yeshua as my Messiah and Savior, I was spiritually dead. Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee (Jeremiah 31:3b)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |