Eddie Munster Eating Oatmeal And Drinking The Unrest Cure During The Third Reich, When Property Is Not Theft, Nor Man's Invention.

"The rise of the Quakers, with their studied rejection of secular authority and distinctions of social rank, was particularly ominous, and the Baptists, though in fact comparatively innocuous, were always associated with the excesses of the notorious Anabaptists of Munster a century before, while the Fifth Monarchists' belief in the imminent return of Christ to reign on earth for a thousand years with his saints had obvious and profoundly disturbing political implications. Economic depression and continued unemployment enhanced the general working-class unrest, and it was no coincidence that in April 1649, with food prices still rising, Gerrard Winstanley and his Diggers made their famous occupation of common land on St George's Hill, Surrey, denouncing property as 'a Norman invention'."

Stuart England, J.P. Kenyon, p. 180.

"You're Not Fun, You're Fat."

And this may be why.

Eroticaphile.

Because I usually forget the answers I provide in useless surveys that I take to make myself feel witty (I am by no means accusing you of such a thing!), here's the question and your answer that I am responding to:

"4. Believe in love:
Do people not believe in love? I wasnt aware of this lack of belief. That takes cynicism to a new depth. How does one argue against the belief in love? I want to know. Please send me a message if you know."

(Please note that I assumed you were not being sarcastic when you asked for someone to send you a message if they know, so I am not being weird.)

First of all, I had a big problem with "love" from my senior year of high school (it goes way back) until my sophomore year of college. The problem that I had with love lay in its definition. Most people, normal people, people that do not really think about defining words, would give me ostensive definitions, pointing to some action and saying, “That is love.” It was clear to me (being ever cynical) that those examples could be instances of spuriousness. Someone could be pretending that he or she was in love for some ulterior, selfish motive (free dinner?). While I admit that it is highly unlikely for all of those instances to be selfish, logically however, finding one selfish person acting as if he or she is in love is enough to discount the ostensive definition. Simply performing the actions that a person points to as love does not necessarily make one love.

Those with whom I spoke who thought about it more would give me definitions of “sincere and ultimate devotion,” “thinking of another person or persons more than you think about yourself,” etc. These may be better definitions, but my cynical mind thought of instances of torture in which, as in Orwell’s 1984, someone puts himself before the person he or she supposedly loves. Can someone truly tell me that Winston did not love Julia simply because he caved in to his fear of rats? Even in not so extreme situations, is it possible to put oneself before the beloved? People can be fickle beings, and what they say they love at one point of time can change later on or under different circumstances.

What is more, “love” itself can refer to various kinds of relationships. There is the love between family members, between friends, between lovers, between people and objects, between people and animals, etc. The intensity of the emotion varies so much so that it is hard to see if the same term truly encompasses all of those relationships. The Greeks divided love into “philos” and “eros.” Philos was used to refer to the more amicable type of love, whereas eros referred to the intense—often physical—kind. This distinction does not exist in English as far as I know, and that makes love twice as confusing. For instance, when a girl tells me she loves me, she usually means it in the philetic (I know, I made up a word) sense, even though sometimes I ardently wish (and in some cases believe) she means it in the erotic sense. This gets even more confusing out of context, or in a context that can make the statement seem equivocal (as in an ending to a drunken phone call). People say all the time that they love others, and I believe many hardly know what they mean when they say it.

Given this problem of definition, it was much easier to avoid the whole question of love. And if one does not know what love is, then how can one believe in it?

I admit that the argument proffered is a weak one for many reasons, and that is part of the reason why I believe in love now. But, as one who did not believe in love for a time, that was the basis for my lack of belief.