Animal instincts

Last nightI saw “The Outsider” (stage adaptation of L’Etranger by Camus) at a small theatre, above a pub, called Etcetera in Camden. I recommend it very strongly as a brilliant play and an excellent intro to existentialism. Anyway, after the play we got into a long, deep conversation on existentialism. Part of it was about love.

Here’s the reason for the post. People always reduce humans to mere ‘animal instincts’ in philosophical discussions. Modern man is likened to a caveman with exactly the same instincts. Society is reduced as being the product of self interest. I.e it has a coperative and competitiv function. A caveman would compete to survive by killing a fellow caveman (competitive) but other cavemen want to kill him so instead they collude for everyone’s personal interest (cooperative). This creates society.

Personally I see this way of thinking as unnecessarily pessimistic. Is society not born out of anything else? We talked about love as I said and my friend said that love was nothing more than a concept invented by the victorians. His argument is that love is no more than extreme lust and we are conditioned by society to make this acceptable by calling it love (something more spiritual). We belive in love because society has created this concept, supposedly. Marriage is just society’s way of ensuring that we don’t become promiscuous and spread disease?

So i want opinions? Is this way of thinking realistic or not? Does love exist or are we just animals in clothes?

[This message has been edited by alex (edited 15 December 2001).]

You really do like existentialism eh al I must say, the Camus play sounds appealing. “Mother died today. Or was it yesterday.” and all that

I don’t see why love existing and animals in clothes are mutually exclusive. Yes, in one sense we are animals, we belong to the same biological phylum(?) as animals. But does that mean love doesn’t exist.

Take the emotion of “fear” for example. It is not something you can touch and its usually brought on by a rush of adrenaline caused by hormones in the brain which have reacted to a bad memory that has just been triggered. However, we would not say then that “fear” does not exist since it is a very real emotion. I think “love” falls into the same category.

Whether “love” exists in objective reality is debatable but it certainly exists as a real emotion in the lives of humans. We may have varying versions of love but there will probably be similarities across the board. So when we say “love” or any other emotion exists, we are just saying that a “label for a manifestation of physical brains” exists. Love is just a label but nevertheless it corresponds to a real emotion.

I don’t see this conflicting with the view that we are animals in clothes. Your use of the word “just” is misleading.

[This message has been edited by ben (edited 15 December 2001).]

one of my economics teacher seems to think that EVERYTHING we do is economic, saying we only fall in love for security and this so we are more stable emotionally and thus more likely to make logical decisions with money. then again he is a dick, and he does lie, continiously, oh yeah and he is a dick one more thing he is a dick

An excellent point Andy. There are many types of love and to class them all into one is not very productive. Indeed, the Greeks said that the highest form of love was between a man and a young boy!

The point about agape is confusing. From what you say, agape seems to be unconditional love. But if God’s love is unconditional, why is there a condition of believing in Him in order to get to heaven? A loving God would SURELY not condemn anyone to hell. Perhaps God only loves those who believe in him and therefore agape is the wrong word. I’m interested to see the Christian response to this.

Also, take the example of Romeo + Juliet. For them it was “love at first sight.” They couldn’t possibly have known each others personality and so I would go so far as to say that it was LUST and not love that they had. A burning sexual desire and nothing more. How could they possibly talk about love having only known each other a few hours?

I’d say that rape is more than just lust. It’s about power and intitiation of force without consent. Nothing wrong with a bit of lust methinks, it’s what gets most relationships going.

The viewpoint on love expressed in the post was NOT my opinion but that of a friend with whom i disagree. I suppose the issue here is very similar to the posts about whether humans have a soul. We must answer the question of what differentiates us from animals before we can answer the question of love. Philosophers have ‘invented’ the idea of a soul that differentiates us, that makes us more than homo sapiens sapiens (an animal) in some indescribable way.

The problem I have is when people deny the existence of this difference which is why I named the post “Animal Instincts.” I hate it when humans are reduced to nothing more than beasts with visceral desires that govern our lives. I believe there is more to love than lust, in fact I think that they are separate concepts. You can, as Andy pointed out, be in love with someone who you aren’t lustfully (?) attracted to. Lust is a visceral desire, an animal instinct, that we all have. We should not deny its existence, nor treat it with disdain because it is entirely natural. But there is something separate called love. Something which is not visceral, something which animals can’t experience. That’s my ‘humanist’ stylee approach to the whole issue.

Just a few points that come out of your post Andy.

“He died so that every person ever born could be reconciled to Him”

I can’t quite remember the reference now (i can find it if need be) but in one of Paul’s Epistles he says that “he who knows not of Jesus will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
So firstly this rules out all the people who’ve never heard of Jesus because they live in shacks somewhere in Lesser Diomedes. (Yes, I am aware of missionaries but they do not reach everyone.) Secondly it rules out all the millions of people who lived BEFORE Jesus and it rules out all the people who are mentally disturbed and cannot know anything at all.

That’s a lot of people who, through no fault of their own, do not know Jesus. Ok, people like me who have the capability to know Jesus and choose not to won’t go to heaven, that’s fair enough, but the people i’ve mentioned above. You say God is fair. Doesn’t seem very fair to me.

“God IS love, but He is also holy, just and fair.”

I’ve already commented on God’s fairness. God is just? I don’t think so. Father Christmas is just because he gives presents to children who are good, and coal to children who are bad. God, however, saves people who believe in him whether they are saints or serial rapists, and does not save people who do not believe in him, whether they are saints or serial rapists. That’s not justice in my book.

Any sane person who wishes to reward someone will reward on merit, not whether there is belief in the person giving the reward. It just doesn’t make sense.

I apologise for going slightly off-topic

Blimey! That’s a post and a half

“Surely the more relevant point Ben is that YOU have heard!”

Not really, you still haven’t told me what’s happening to all the people who did not know Jesus through no fault of their own. Are they going to heaven? Paul says not.

A recurring theme in debates with religious believers is their capability to completely contradict themselves from one argument to the next.

A skeptic says “Look at the evidence, God simply can’t exist!” and the believer will say “What evidence? All you have is theory. You must have faith to believe in God.”

One conversation later the religious believer will say “Just look at the evidence around you! It’s so obvious God exists!”

I’m afraid if you’re going to rubbish any kind of reason or scientific and empirical evidence in one line of argument you cannot then use it wholeheartedly in another. If I look at the beauty of the world I do not see a God, it is not self-evident. By definition it cannot be self-evident because if it was there would be no need for faith. It is a silly line of argument to say that God has revealed himself enough in the world because it defeats the whole point of faith.

Statistically you will find that 99.9% of the people who say “Look at the world! God exists!” are already believers and 99.9% of those who say the opposite are not believers.

Our calendar of 365 days comes from the Egyptians who observed that the river Nile floods every 365 and 1/4 days. This is due to the alignment of the moon in orbit with the Earth. This is quite amazing, but not divine.

The snow falling during battles. How many battles have there been since the beginning of time? millions. How many times has snow fallen during these battles? thousands, maybe even millions. What is the probability that in TWO battles out of the thousands of battles in which there was snow falling, the snow helped win the war. I think you’ll find it is very high. This is a nonsense statistic taken out of context and not mathematically checked.

However, if you insist on saying that God did intefer with these battles why didn’t he stop them LONG before millions of people were killed. Oh cheers God for sending that snow AFTER we’d lost a huge number of men. Why not stop the war before it even happened? And don’t bother with the free-will argument because you’ve just said yourself that God intefered with the snow. You can’t have it both ways I’m afraid.

So it was God’s will that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt got to power. Well thanks God for putting Stalin in. We’ll forgive the fact that he murdered MORE people than Hitler did in the Second World War because he was there to stop Hitler. But hang on, Hitler mass-exterminated 10 million jews, gypsies, homosexuals, slavs and blacks. Was that part of God’s plan aswell? You can’t say God inteferes and then explain why he didn’t intefere before without getting into VERY sticky situations.

I still don’t think you answered my questions in my last post. I’d appreciate it if you did as well as replying to this post.

Here is the christian belief on this matter with biblical references… this took ages o i hope you will take time to look them up!

(i) The quote “he who knows not of Jesus will not enter the Kingdom of
Heaven” does not actually
exist in the Bible, at least in those direct words.
(ii) However, there are passages from which you could draw similar
ideas: for example, Romans 10v12-14; 1 John 5v12.
(iii) We know that all those who hear about Christ are judged on their
response: see for example John 3v16-18. In a sense, the issue you
need to be thinking about is not those who haven’t heard, but those who have.
(iv) It’s probably important to say in passing that the kind of faith that
saves us is not merely mental assent to a set of beliefs, or an intellectual
“yes” to the creed; the kind of faith in Jesus Christ that saves us is the
sort of faith that shows itself in how we live and behave - Matthew 7v21-23;
James 2v14-17. (although messing up is allowed… it is striving not to that is the point)
(v) However, faith need not be particularly “well developed” - in other
words, to be Christians, with a place in heaven, we do not necessarily need
to have mastered the doctrines of the trinity, predestination and
eschatology. The thief on the cross (Luke 23v40-43) can only have had a
fairly simple faith, but it was enough. See also Luke 18v15-17. Therefore I
certainly think those who are “mentally disturbed”, as you put it,
can still know God, without question.
(vi) It was certainly possible for those who lived before Christ to be
saved. Abraham, for example, who lived a couple of thousand years BC, was
certainly saved (Romans 4v1-3). There is also a long list of people who
lived before Christ in Hebrews 11 who are undoubtedly saved (Hebrews 11v16).
Although they would not have had a full grasp of Christian things either,
they “saw them and welcomed them from a distance” (v13) as it were.
(vii) It may well be that some people today who never hear of Christ fall
into a similar category as Abraham above; I am not sure. However, what I am
sure about is that:

• those who genuinely seek God will find Him
• those who hear of Christ like you have a responsibility to examine
  their response to the gospel
• those of us who are Christians have a responsibility to carry the gospel
  across the world (Romans 10v14-15 again; Matthew 28v19-20)
• every human being who ever lives has at least some consciousness of God -
  see for example Acts 17v22-28; Psalm 8
• ultimately, God will do what is just: “Will not the judge of all the earth
  do right?” (Genesis 18v25).

  I think it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said: “All I have seen teaches me to
  trust the creator for all I have not seen.” In other words, we know enough
  about God to know what we have to do, and to trust Him to do what is best in
  any area we do not fully understand.

so… as i have said before, ben stop misquoting the bible and actually look in to it before you speak! thankyou.

now, regarding the matter of God working in some areas of the world and not all i can use the simple answer that if we should not and never would be able to understand all of Gods plan. but i also know that you wouldnt accept that as a valid arguement. I dont claim to understand everything in my eyes there is no need to understand eveything; as long as i believe Jesus died and rose again that is enough… as it says in my post just above this ^.

On christians contradicting faith… personally it feel that when a christian has faith and believes in God they can start seeing God in everything, and consequently it becomes evidence as it is so plain to see for someone who has faith. I believe one follows the other. As i have said before it takes much more faith to believe that the human body came about by chance than it does to believe it was created, just look how amazing it is!

I think that we fall in love for sex. So we can continue our genetic code. I belive in God, but slightly different from what I was told when I was raised. I have quit on trying to understand the concept. I leave my mind open to anything, but realize there are mysteries out there. Let’s live life, rationalize what we can, and what we can’t… discuss and debate until we are blue in the face.