Love and Hate

[DeLamar.J]

You cannot love everyone, its ridiculous to think you can. If you love everyone and everything you loose your natural powers of selection and wind up being a pretty poor judge of character and quality. If anything is used to freely it looses its true meaning. Therefore, I belive you should love strongly and completely those who deserve your love, but NEVER turn the other cheek to your enemy!
Love is one of the most intense emotions felt by man, another is hate. Forcing yourself to feel indiscriminate love is very unnatural. If you try to love everyone you only lssen your feelings for those you deserve your love. Repressed hatred can lead to many physical and emotional ailments. By learning to release your hatred towards those who deserve it, you cleanse yourself of these negative emotions, and prevent yourself from taking out all that pent-up hatred on your loved ones, martial arts is a great tool for getting all that bottled up anger out in a constructive way.
Every hypocrite who ever walked the earth has had pockets bulging with love, like some religionists claim to love there enemies, even though when wronged he consoles himself by thinking "god will punish them" instead of admitting to themselves that they are capable of hating their enemies and treating them in the manner they deserve.
Alot of people say this is cruel and brutal, but only because people are afraid to face the TRUTH, and the truth is that human beings are not all benign or all loving, just because someone admits they are capable of both love and hate, they are considered hateful. But on the other hand, because your able to vent your hatred through ritualized expression, (for example, as a martial artist, I use kata) you are far more capable of love, the deepest kind of love.
By honestly recognizing and admitting to both the love and hate you feel, there is no confusing one emotion with the other. Without being able to experience one of these emotions, you cannot fully experience the other, kind of like yin and yang, soft and hard. Slowness brings speed, softness brings power. :yinyang:

 

[Bammx2]

as my gran'ma always said...

"with 5 billion people on the planet(she said this a while back) you can't like everybody,no matter how hard ya try".
God bless gran'maw.

 

[Fightback2]

I'm curious . . . what brought that on? Bear in mind I agree with you it just seems like something, um, significant may have brought it op.

 

[Ray]

Every hypocrite who ever walked the earth has had pockets bulging with love, like some religionists claim to love there enemies, even though when wronged he consoles himself by thinking "god will punish them" instead of admitting to themselves that they are capable of hating their enemies and treating them in the manner they deserve.

I may be a "religionist" (I'm not sure of your meaning). My pockets currently do not "bulge" with as much love as they should, but I try--and there are many people, religionist, atheist and other that strive to do good without hating their fellow beings.

I don't console myself with the thought that "God will punish" others. Who God will punish and reward is up to Him, not me. My thoughts are more along the lines of hoping that those who I've wronged will forgive me; and trying to be alert to when I've wronged someone and do my best to make it right.

It's been my experience that hate and rage don't do me much good. I can't imagine that they benefit anyone else, either.

 

[Cryozombie]

It's been my experience that hate and rage don't do me much good. I can't imagine that they benefit anyone else, either.

They have always worked for me.

 

[rutherford]

Personally, I enjoy rage and try to accept it when it comes. I see no use for hate. As an emotion, it serves no positive purpose for me and I see it as something that I do to myself. I'd rather DO something external.

I'm a Buddhist. Perhaps not a very good one, but that's just an internal recognition and my ability to walk the path doesn't change my beliefs in where the right path lies. So, I disagree. I think it's totally possible to love everyone, that everyone deserves your love, and that doing so is a totally freeing experience.

I do agree that anyone who claims to love their enemy and then prays for their suffering is a hypocrite.

Finally, Love and Hate are not opposites. The opposite of Love is No-Love. The Opposite of Hate is No-Hate.

 

[loki09789]

The religious idea that you 'love thy enemy' and such is a problem because of translation.

In Greek there are more than one term for 'love' where we only have one word.

Think back to HS and all the "Friendship love/family love/boyfriend or girlfriend love...." ellaborations that it took to explain why you girls wouldn't go out with guys like me: "I do love you, I just don't LOVE you ...you know, that way...."

Through translation the meaning is lost in some ways.

I can "love" my enemy by treating them like a human being even though they are my enemy because I love 'humanity' as a whole.

I can "love" my enemy by not taking out my personal issues of rage, dysfunction, post traumatic stress...on them when they have nothing to do with the origins of those things (I can "love" my family and friends this way too for that matter) because that is not fair or right to do.

I like the old Quaker idea that when you act in hate or rage (a total lack of respect/love for humanity - including your own life) the greatest damage is done to yourself...of course they work from a 'soul damaged' point of view where I look at it as engraining patterns of behavior by the actions and choices that you repeat.

If I regularly strike out in fits of rage/hate then I do the most damage to myself because I spend the most amount of time with myself relative to these other people. Therefore, I will be accumulating the consequences (Karma) of my actions that could lead to some serious voodoo later in life (jail, unhappy relationships, undeveloped talent because of all the distractions, DEATH, health issues due to stress....).

Just a different way to look at it.

It is impossible to 'love' everyone individually or even as a group, but you can 'love' (as in respect and hold life precious enough) that you try to act responsibly and address your rage/hate issues with maturity and thought instead of allowing yourself to act on them unchecked.

 

[TonyM.]

One of the most valuable things the sisters of divine providence taught me in parochial school was the difference between loving someone and liking/disliking behavior and things.

 

[heretic888]

You cannot love everyone, its ridiculous to think you can.

Tell that to the Dalai Lama.