An Essay On Love

NOTE: Almost a year ago, I wrote this essay on love and posted it on my blog. The response was so positive, that I thought it appropriate to post it again for Valentine’s Day, a day devoted to the celebration of love.

Love is a powerful force in human life. Some people say that it is love that makes the world go ’round. In medieval theology, it was thought that love is the principal force behind human life, and there was a firm belief that love literally set the universe in motion.

Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persia eighty; ancient Greece five; and English, some say, only one. But that is not true. English has incorporated many of the Sanskrit, Persian, and Greek meanings for love into our expressions for different forms of love: admiration, adoration, affection, desire, family, longing, lust, respect, and worship are just a a few.

The ancient Greeks have influenced so many different aspects of our lives today. As previously mentioned, they had five words for love:

1) Eros - This is love for a specific individual. “I’m in love with you.” This is the most primitive kind of love. In the English language, our word “love” can be traced back to Sanskrit “lubh” (desire). I love you for what you do or can do to or for me. This covers everything from butterflies in the stomach to mad, passionate love. Eros is a selfish, dependent, possessive kind of love. It often demands reciprocation from that person who is loved. The person loved must have value for the person loving him or her. One of the songs often sung at weddings in past years was “Because You’re Mine.” Some critics have pointed out that too many romance novels and films place too much emphasis on “eros” as being the most important kind of love in a relationship. But most of us know that finally it isn’t. Desire and lust will diminish in the relationship in the long run and must ultimately be replaced by a higher form of love.

2) Philia - This is love for friends and friendship. “I enjoy being with you. You are my friend.” It has been said that the best marriages are those in which the partners are close friends as well as lovers. They enjoy each other’s company.

3) Storge - This is a form of instinctual love that a parent has for a child or a child for a parent. It can vary in intensity, according to the bond that has developed between the parent and the child.

4) Xenia - This is love for a stranger. A person who runs into a burning building to save the life of someone he or she doesn’t know exemplifies this kind of love. A person who donates one of his or her organs to a perfect stranger might be another example.

5) Agape - This is love that seeks another’s well-being. This is a spiritual, selfless, giving form of love that continues giving despite ingratitude and lack of reciprocation. Agape gives a person value by an expression of love for him or her. God is love. Jesus said we should love our enemies. Agape is also involved when we show love and concern for those who are less fortunate than we --the poor; the sick; the homeless; the downtrodden. Marriages are more likely to thrive when each partner is concerned with the well-being of the other. St. Paul gives us a classic definition of “agape”:

Love is patient,
love is kind.
It does not envy,
it does not boast,
it is not proud.
It is not rude,
it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered,
it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil
but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects,
always trusts,
always hopes,
always perseveres.
Love never fails.

Another form of love, which is akin to agape, and which is the highest degree of love, is the love for a Supreme Being, a principle, or a cause that the person considers worth more than his or her own life. It is a sacrificial type of love. An example might be Nathan Hale, executed as a spy by the British in 1776 at the age of 21 saying, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” Early Christian martyrs also exemplify this kind of love. In literature, we find another example in Carton, who switches places with Darnay and marches off to his death in the Dickens classic “Tale of Two Cities.”

Love plays such an important part in the process of our functioning as human beings that it is most unfortunate that in its higher forms it does not play a greater role in all of our lives. Perhaps our schools, which teach so much about wars and killing in our history texts, might also consider teaching about the many forms of love, and how love's various manifestations affect other human beings. We must try to remember always that life without love is not worth living.

The Ultimate Doghouse

A married couple in our area loves dogs - in particular the six chows they own. In fact, they love them so much that they built them a 900-square-foot doghouse. In the back of the house is a grassy, fenced run. Well, it’s really not a doghouse. It is a guest house costing $80,000, but it is being used as a doghouse. The interior is done up in earth tones and animal prints and even includes a flat-screen TV tuned to Animal Planet. The owners call the dogs that live in the guest house their “chowdren.”

A couple of days after the story about the doghouse appeared in the local newspaper, a reader wrote a letter to the editor in which she said that she wanted to be happy about the house for the dogs and agreed that the owners certainly had the right to build it. At the same time, however, she noted that there was an 8-year-old boy at one of her schools who lived in a garage with no plumbing and no heat. He goes to school needing a bath and clean clothes. She said this little boy would be happy to have a place to call home, even without a flat-screen TV.

Do you agree with the newspaper reader? Why or why not?

Keep Your Hug Shirt On

Almost forty years ago, Hollywood produced the cult erotic science fiction film "Barbarella", with Jane Fonda in the starring role. In the story, Barbarella is a sexy Earth government agent who is on a mission to find the mad scientist Dr. Durand Durand and stop him from resurrecting the “neurotic irresponsibility” of war in a peaceful universe. Dr. Durand takes her prisoner and sentences her to death by orgasm in an “orgasm box“, known as the “Exsexive Machine” with the intention of having the machine pleasurably massage her to death.

Now it appears that we have made a giant leap toward making that science fiction machine a reality. Time Magazine recently nominated the “Hug Shirt” as one of the best inventions of 2006. What, you might ask, is a Hug Shirt? Well, embedded in the shirt are sensors that feel the strength of the touch, the skin warmth and the heartbeat rate of the sender and actuators that recreate the sensation of touch, warmth and emotion of the hug to the shirt of the distant loved one.

How does the Hug Shirt work? The system is very simple: a Hug Shirt (Bluetooth with sensors and actuators), a Bluetooth java enabled mobile phone with the Hug Me java software running (it understands what the sensors are communicating), and on the other side another phone and another shirt. When touching the red areas on your Hug Shirt, your mobile phone receives the sensors data via Bluetooth (hug pressure, skin temperature, heartbeat rate, time you are hugging for, etc) and then delivers it to the other person.

The Hug Shirt is not meant to replace human contact, but to make you happy if you are away for business or other reasons and you miss your friends and loved ones. It also has some very interesting applications in the medical field with the elderly and children. An increasing mobility of humans throughout the globe, due to business or study reasons, has brought family members to spend most of their time apart from each other. Humans need physical contact with each other. Technology should allow for a pleasant Human-Human Interaction.

Presently the Hug Shirt is not available commercially, though it appears that you may be able to get your hands on it in the near future for a price as yet undetermined. Oh, by the way, it is washable.

What next? Stay tuned for the introduction of the “Love Suit”, available for both men and women. Let’s hope it also is washable.

Did the Devil Make Me Do It?

NOTE: This post is dedicated to Heide on Blogstream, who recently requested that I write a post about the Devil. After doing considerable research, I have attempted to distill the information I gained into no more than two pages. Of necessity, this post has to be a rather light treatment of the subject, since my purpose is to make it interesting as well as informative, while keeping it brief. There are many different views regarding the Devil. If the one I have depicted here does not agree with your view, please do not rake me over fire and brimstone for writing it. Instead, write your own post on the same subject, and I will promise to read it.

Flip Wilson, the African-American comedian of the early 1970s, on his hour-long prime-time NBC show, The Flip Wilson Show, used to assume the role of the show's most popular character, Geraldine. That character’s most famous one-liner, which always broke up the audience, was “The Devil made me do it!" It wasn’t long before you heard almost everybody using that line to say they were sorry for some pretended social impropriety.

When God asked Adam about his taking a bite out of the apple in the Garden of Eden, Adam pointed to Eve and said, "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate." Then God asked Eve to account for her actions and she said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate." In other words, the Devil made me do it.

It is convenient to have someone to blame for our misdeeds. But does the Devil really cause our actions, or do we do what we do, because it is what we want to do? Is the Devil an attempt on our part to refuse to accept responsibility for our actions? Do we need some being to blame for the bad things that have happened in our lives and in our world?

Certain characteristics of the Evil One can be found in the gods of every religion. To understand the emergence of the Devil as the personification of evil, it is necessary to consider the divine personages in world religions who prefigured him. In most of the earlier religions, each divinity was capable of doing both good and evil, as the mood would take him. There was no case in which an individual god was either all good or all evil. This moral ambivalence explains the existence of good and evil without resorting to a heavenly schism, in which each individual god assumes the character of good or evil.

Even today, in the 21st century, we still have some religious leaders who see God as capable of doing both good and evil. After thousands died or were left homeless in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck, Rev. Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans in Metairie said, “New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion -- it's free of all of those things now. God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there -- and now we're going to start over again.” Then this man of God added that he had warned for years that God would pass judgment on the city.

The idea of dividing the Power Beyond into two, one good and one evil, belongs to an advanced and sophisticated religion. Demons in the earlier religions were usually the spirits of natural forces such as fire, plagues, droughts, infant crib death, and diseases, and often took the form of fantastically-shaped creatures made up of a conglomeration of parts from dangerous or dreaded living things such as scorpions, serpents, lions, and hawks.

In general, a demon may be defined as a malicious spirit who does harm to human beings. Early religions fought against them with magic. They placed special bowls inscribed with potent word charms upside down under the foundations of their houses to catch demons and prevent them from entering the houses through the ground. They also made amulets with avertive verses against specific demons, such as those that might threaten the life of women during childbirth.

Zoroastrianism , the doctrine or teaching of Zarathustra , was founded by the Persian prophet Zoroaster or Zarathustra about 720-541 BC. In this ancient religion, the war between light and darkness, good and evil is eternal. Here dualism posits the existence of two absolute cosmic principles, wholly independent of one another. Neither can be omnipotent, since they must by definition limit one another. In absolute dualism, there can be no single, ultimate divine principle. This concept differs from Christianity in that in Christianity God is more powerful than the Prince of Darkness.

In Zoroaster's system, there is a cosmic struggle between the good Lord and the cruel Evil Spirit, the Demon of Demons. Zoroaster preached devotion to the absolute good, and prophesied that, in the fullness of time, evil would be utterly destroyed by the Lord.

While Zoroaster and his followers are the first to have embodied the principle of evil within one personality, the concept of the Devil is of definite Hebrew origin. The god Yahweh encompassed both good and evil, mercy and justice, yet could not be assigned a specific moral character. As in Zoroastrianism, however, the evil in this god's nature was eventually differentiated from him and ascribed to a malignant spirit.

As always, the Devil is a figure who actively inflicts suffering and pursues wholesale destruction for its own sake. In the Old Testament, we see the Evil Spirit, Satan, at work. We have already seen him in the Garden of Eden. Now we see him again. In Job, Satan appears as the tempter and the accuser of the just man; in Kings it is he who incites David to murder the prophet. In the New Testament, Satan is a name that is thought to refer to a supernatural entity who appears in several passages and possesses demonic god-like qualities.

The concept of the Devil is very much the same around the globe, and has been recognized in just about every culture for the past millennia. Even people who do not have a clear understanding of God, or believe in a heaven or hell, harbor belief in something akin to the personified master of evil.

The Devil is often depicted as having horns, hooves, a beard, a tail, and sometimes a widely-brimmed hat. He usually carries a pitchfork. The horns are a way of signifying his godhead identity, much the same as Christian art shows a halo to signify Christ as being "holy."

What is the basis for evil today? To the Sumerian godhead, evil was a reversion to the weakest impulses and drives of the being. Humans, being part animal (homo erectus) and part godlike were prone to give in to their animal desires. This was the evil in men - the residual primitive drives for self-preservation and procreation. Evil would always prevent man's movement to become more godlike. His lack of self-control would naturally inhibit this process.

Where is the Devil? He is inside every human, waiting to impose self-interests and attend to our animal psyche. He is, I fear, part of each and every one of us.

Questions. (Please answer one or more of these questions):

1. Do you believe in the Devil?

2. If you were asked to draw a picture of the Devil, would your picture contain horns, hooves, a tail, and a pitchfork?
3. Does Satan have a physical appearance?

4. How has the Devil played a role in your life?

Some Possible Side Effects

Ten days ago, I strained my lower back doing some lifting. In the interim, I had used hot and cold pads to relieve the pain in the daytime and had refrained from exertion which might have exacerbated the problem. When I went to bed each night, my back felt fine and I soon fell asleep. But then I would wake up about four hours later with lower back pain. I used a heat pad to relieve the pain and then went back to bed to fall asleep again for another three or four hours.

After noting the pain did not lessen in those ten days, I decided it was time to see a doctor and get a prescription for the ailment. The doctor noted that I suffer from asthma and wrote down the medication I am taking He then examined me for possible back injury, and after determining that no major damage was done, wrote two prescriptions - one for a muscle relaxer and another one for Nabumetone, a NSAID (Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory) drug.

When I returned home, I began to read the small print as to the possible side effects of each drug. I had no problem with the mild side effects of the muscle relaxer. But when I read of the possible side effects for Nabumetone, I couldn’t believe that I was prescribed this drug for a backache.

Here are some possible serious side effects that include:

heart attack
stroke
high blood pressure
heart failure from body swelling (fluid retention)
kidney problems including kidney failure
bleeding and ulcers in the stomach and intestine
low red blood cells (anemia)
life-threatening skin reactions
life-threatening allergic reactions
liver problems including liver failure
ASTHMA ATTACKS IN PEOPLE WHO HAVE ASTHMA

Some other possible side effects include:

stomach pain
constipation
diarrhea
gas
heartburn
nausea
vomiting
dizziness

I was told that it was important to get emergency help right away if I had any of the following symptoms:

shortness of breath or trouble breathing
chest pain
weakness in one part or side of my body
slurred speech
swelling of the face or throat

I was told to stop my NSAID medicine and call my healthcare provider right away if I had any of the following symptoms:

nausea
more tired and weaker than usual
itching
my skin or eyes looked yellow
stomach pain
flu-like symptoms
vomit blood
there was blood in my bowel movement or it was black and sticky like tar
unusual weight gain
skin rash or blisters with fever
swelling of the arms and legs, hands and feet

Then I was told that these are not all the possible side effects with NSAID medicines, and that I should talk to my healthcare provider or pharmacist for more information about NSAID medicines.

Needless to say, after returning this medication to the pharmacy the next day for a refund, I am back to the hot and cold pads and the muscle relaxer. Now that I have a headache from reading about all the possible side effects of that medication, I think I’ll take a couple of aspirin.