What is Love? (Baby, Don't Hurt Me)

If you are friends with me on Facebook (and if you aren't, why not?), you probably know I like to debate.  Sometimes the questions are good enough that I should probably post them here for my own reference if nothing else.  Here's the first of this series.

A friend of a friend asked me this when I told him that I require evidence to believe anything.

So do you believe that love exists? Can it be proved matching the criteria outlined above? If not, then what is it that exists between a parent and a child, spouses, best friends, etc?

My response:

The problem is that "love" is an abstract concept. It's a term we use to describe a set of feelings and actions, not a thing unto itself. With that in mind, no, I cannot prove love exists. I can describe how I determine what love is and what criteria I require to meet it. You may not agree with what my criteria is, and I may not agree with yours.

I feel my wife loves me, and I love her in return because of two things. The first is the biological imperative that has evolved in humans and most other mammalian species to mate and develop family units to survive. We are driven to mate, and chemical reactions in our brains make it pleasing to stay that way (this also conflicts with male imperative to impregnate as many females as possible. One of a number of reason I don't believe in intelligent design. Evolution didn't design us very intelligently).

The second is that we selected each other because of mutual interests beyond initial physical attraction. These and other personality traits helped us develop a bond and empathetic concern for each other that, coupled with trust built up over the course of our initial interactions, I consider love. Your criteria may different, and if so, then that doesn't make yours less correct than mine.

Friendships are similarly built, minus the imperative to mate (probably).

Love for your children is by far the most evidently an evolutionary trait for survival of the species. It's the one that's the least rational. Anyone who has ever had a teenager will attest that there are times it makes absolutely no sense to continue to love them, yet we still do. If we're lucky, we also develop bonds of mutual interests with our kids, but sadly that's not always the case. Of course, there is a school of thought that conjectures that is also an evolutionary trait as it spurs offspring to leave the nest and continue to help the species proliferate.

Penn Jillette's God, No! is hit and miss

I wasn't expecting the pure reason of Richard Dawkins or the elegant, staggeringly beautiful prose of Christopher Hitchens when I picked up this book. That was kind of the initial attraction, actually. I was hoping for a discussion of atheism and religion that was a bit more earthy and geared toward the layman than either of those two gentlemen are known for, and Penn Jillette seemed to fit the bill. God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales is not an imposing book as it comes in at a modest 230 pages, so I figured it for some fluff reading. If it wasn't great, no big deal.

Yep, it was no big deal.

The first half of the book is okay. Jillette rambles from anecdote to anecdote, many of which either only touch marginally on religion or not at all. Though being pedaled directly toward that atheist and skeptically curious crowd, the subtitle does say it also contains "Other Magical Tales," so the case for bait-and-switch would be difficult to pin on him. My biggest complaint is how the back half of the book is so loaded with his libertarian drivel. Now, anyone who knows enough about Jillette to want to pick up a book by him will also know he's a rabid libertarian, and I would have had to be stupid to have assumed he'd be able to make it through the book without it cropping up in a number of places. I was prepared for his incessant use of the phrase "The Free Market of Ideas" throughout, so I breezed right by them, and some of his comments made me laugh out loud (He states "Now, I love Ayn Rand as much as the next guy..." and I snorted as I thought that if the "next guy" is me, I can guarantee he loves her a HELL of a lot more), but I guess I was naive enough to think he might be able to get through the book without dedicating good chunks or the entirety of chapters to espousing his hatred of government, public schooling, and liberals in general. He uses some choice profanities to describe the Far Right as well, but his contempt for the left is far more lovingly nurtured here.

Even that I could breeze through if it weren't for the fact he is so terrible inconsistent in his view, even is the sparse 230 pages of the book. In the first part of the book, he gives an anecdote on how he proudly lied to his parents to get them to take money from him so they wouldn't have to go to a nursing home. He supposedly threatened a nurse with physical violence if she didn't tell his parents that they were allowed to stay in their home because of state moneys. They accepted this because they were too proud to take money from their rich son.

Wait, doesn't Penn say throughout the book that he got his rigid self-reliant attitude from his folks? Yet, they'll take tax dollars to stay at home rather than from him?

And he's cool with that?

Later in the book he states that the ends never justify the means. Never. How does he reconcile both the lie and the threat to the nurse?

Even when I agree with him on an initial point, he takes it over the line to a place I just can't follow. I agree with him that security at airports is a joke, and the inconvenience it causes is pointless because no one is made more secure. I agree that it is a serious infringement on civil rights.

We're good to that point.

But the solutions he comes up with range from being just as infringing to being simple, outright lunacy. One might argue that he's a comedian, and he's simply trying to be funny is manner of Jonathan Swift. If so, he fails utterly. Swift brought a white hot focus on the problems he was mocking with his words. He could take an existing concern and stretch and enlarge it until its flaws are evident from outer space. Penn simply comes up with alternatives that sound like they were thought up by two stoners in the back of a van. Nothing in this book even approaches what I would call satire. It's just dumb if he only wants it to be thought of as funny, and if wants it in any way to be taken seriously, it's just plain insane.

There are points that I really, really enjoyed in the book. Penn comes across as a completely honest asshole, and I think he'd be happy to read me use that description. He's a snake and a cheat, but only when he feels the rules allow it. He cheats fairly. He's also crass, rude, and fairly disgusting, but he comes across as possessing a child's joy of life in his vulgarity. Others may disagree and I'd completely understand, but I find his repulsiveness kind of life affirming.

Without a doubt my favorite part of the book is his story of the Orthodox Jew who'd become an atheist in part because of Penn's influence and came to Vegas to ask him to witness his first bacon cheeseburger. There's a couple more really good stories in here, a lot of filler, and some frothing at the mouth bat-shittery. Whittled down, this would make for a very entertaining booklet.

The absolutely most powerful indictment of Scientology yet

You can give data and statistics that show how Scientology is a scam, but you won't find a more powerful, personal illustration of the dishonest, corrupt, and venomous nature of the religion and the man who founded it than to listen to his great grandson.

Call me Reverend Lane (when do I get my tax break?)

I just stopped by the Universal Life Church online and became a legally recognized minister.  It's takes about two minutes.  It's free, but of course if I want an actual certificate showing my new status, I have to pull out my credit card.

I quickly got the following email, too:

Let it be known to all that on Sunday the 19th of December of 2010, in accordance with the Universal Life Church; do hereby ordain you into the Universal Life Church. From this day forward, you are entitled to all of the rights of an ordained minister, with the authority to perform marriages, baptisms, and all other sacerdotal duties of clergy. You are registered as an independent minister of the Universal Life Church; this is a position that carries respect and a burden of responsibility to "do that which is right", to respect others and to comply with all state and local the laws.

The irony is that I probably know as much about religion as some of those that have actually been to seminary.