Yourself?

The urge to cycle, the urge to write and the urge to think

I want to fly on wheels through the night like a dagger cutting up the black asphalt lined roads. Leaving a trail of transient light and shattered roadways.

Remembered an old friend today, to aid my thinking, nothing better than white paper, a fountain pen, and black ink.

If nobody believes what you believe, is it a legitimate belief? How is one led to believe something unless someone else has told it to you?

You can believe something entirely new by synthesis from your own experiences and from your own testing out of other people's beliefs. It's the scientific process, to prove that which you believe is right, first from experience and disbelief, then to rationalization and experimentation, then to synthesis of belief, then to practical application of that belief to make sure it's right.

Can love be defined and recognized when you see it? Must love be moral in the absence of a moral standard? Does the concept of love change in time? Is there a global definition or is it entirely personal? Is it possible to love someone without liking them? Could sex and love be the same thing?

Any concept can be defined. Love is something we've observed and experienced in our youth. I feel that love is simply the social need in man. First love between mother and child, love between father and child. Love between friends in school. First romantic love between child and member of opposite gender. The interest in the differences between genders. Shame, seperation of genders as the child approaches puberty. Encouragement of courtship as they reach puberty. Marriage. And the cycle repeats.

We all have memories of couples even in kindergarten or nursery. I think the image is modelled upon our own parents. Two people of opposite genders make up a couple. That couple is exclusive, and will end up having babies. That is love to me at it's most basic. The human need for another person of the opposite gender in a relationship, understood by all other members of society, for the purpose of making babies. Notice even homosexual couples try to fufil this definition, in various ways allowed for by society. I think this is as general as we can get to love.

The morality thing is from western thought. I think love is seperate from morality. I think love is just a relationship. Morality is just the generally accepted rules of relationships. It is accepted by the majority. But that doesn't mean the minority is not entitled to follow their own rules if most members would accept those rules.

The definition of love has changed. It has changed as society has become more complicated, more modern. Birth control means that sex need necessarily not lead to babies, unlike the past. One can engage in the fun of making babies without actually going to the pain of producing them. Babies are a choice, not a given. Some people can now define love as the satisfaction of physical need. Sex without commitment. However, I have read reports of couples regretting their choice not to have babies when they've become old. Perhaps the need for babies is also an inseperable part from the idea of love, the idea of a family.

My definition would allow the idea of loving someone without liking them. And there are couples in the world, and in history, where successful families were created from parents that didn't like each other initially. There is a difference between not liking each other, and disliking each other, although we commonly use them as one and the same. The lack of like isn't dislike. You could be neutral, neutral-receptive.

Sex is a part of love, under my definition. But sex is not love, and love not necessarily leads to sex. It's more of the human companionship, and that there are many ways of having an exclusive relationship besides sex. It's just that sex is the ultimate act between couples. It signifies that both parties love each other and are willing enough to start a family and have babies. It seals the contract. That is, until birth control came along.

posted by Downhere. @ 9:20 pm