So love is a function of dopamine? Well that argues for selfishness since any being would strive to maximize dopamine and it wouldn’t be genuine love at all.
From the bible perspective:
[i]Mark 12:30 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.
Mark 12:31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.[/i]
Well, those are two impossible goals because 1) we cannot control who we love and 2) we can only love ourselves.
Who is our neighbor? The parable of the good Samaritan:
29 But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?
30 And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.
31 And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
32 And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.
33 But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,
34 And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
35 And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.
36 Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?
The only way you can love your neighbor as yourself is if you happen to fancy the idea, and that is not anything you have power over. You cannot choose to feel bad for someone if you do not feel bad and you cannot choose to ignore the suffering of someone if the idea of it actually causes you pain. And whether you help the person is a function of how much pain it causes you.
When we get real with this fact and realize that none of us are righteous and every one of us are rascals, then we can lay down pretense and form mutually beneficial alliances and symbiotic relationships because, most often, what’s good for you is also good for me.
I have no special regard for the poor because I have no mechanism to have, but helping the poor helps me because a rising tide lifts all boats. I don’t support the minimum wage because I’m altruistic, but I support it because I’m a selfish prick. Robinhood didn’t steal from the rich to give to the poor because he gave a crap about the poor, but because he did what was best for him.
Ethics are what are good for me; not you, because keeping my word forms strong alliances which is good for me. I’m not striving to be righteous, but striving to make my life as good as possible. I don’t need a god barking orders to keep me in line; I need a brain to realize that being a decent person benefits me. That is probably why atheism and intelligence go hand in hand with an overall moral people while the opposite is true among the religious, most especially Islam, because it’s a more powerful incentive to act in a way that you can see with your mind, as clear as day, how acting moral is self-beneficial rather than blindly trusting in some law as a matter of faith.
Furthermore, I was listening to Hitchens last night who was going on about how morally relative the moral absolutes are and I was waiting for an opportunity to include it here:
Start at 1:10:00
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kZRAOXEFPI[/youtube]
if you can’t
71:57
condemn anyone without being yourself
72:00
without sin, then we can’t even arrest
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Charles Manson unless we were sinless
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ourselves, so these moral absolutes are
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actually more full of more
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moral relativism than you might think. And the
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reason people want there to be
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absolutes is this they want there to be
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an absolute authority who can give them
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to you because wouldn’t that save you
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all the trouble of thinking out ethics
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for yourself, which is where I started
Felix, apparently, according to Hitchens, one of the bits of genius I attributed to Jesus was knitted in late, so I wonder who it was.
the Nazarene says you can’t condemn
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anyone unless you can cast the first
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stone actually that bit was knitted into
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the Bible quite late and is almost
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certainly a fabrication but it’s
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believed in by many Christians