[metricspaces]

It’s like love. You fall in love, you fall in love with God. The rest is just garbled mumbling to yourself and others. And like love, it is your experience of it and your view of your beloved that matters, who cares what others think. This is how it is with actual belief. You experience something that shatters the illusion. Once that happens, you belong to God bothered people. And yes, those who have never experienced love also think love is “just chemical processes in the body”. But it’s not, otherwise they’d bottle that chemical process and make a zillion selling it. (They try with drugs but is just ain’t the same thing, you know?)

[freedomben]

If falling in love with God conveys truth/reality, then how do you reconcile two people who are both "in love with God" but have incompatible beliefs about God?

I know a person who fell in love with a woman that didn't exist. Person A (my friend) was straight. Person B was gay and fell in love with Person A, and then created Person C (fictitious person) with the hopes that Person A would grow to love Person C, and eventually Person B would tell the truth but that Person A's love was pure enough that he didn't care about the deception and wanted to be with Person B.

Hell of a story, but the reason I mention it is because Person A falling in love with Person C didn't make Person C real. How does that work with God?

[metricspaces]

you do not have beliefs about the one you love. seeing truth/reality is when you stop cheating on the one you love. so love becomes real when your hearts sees clear. and since this is not “fiction” but rather the Reality of your Subjective Experience that is the only thing you ‘know’ for a ‘near at hand, within sight, felt by heart’. Love always tames Reason. whether imaginal love, temporal love, or divine love. The former are shattered when they are subjected to ‘external reality’.

The acid test of true love for God is that Reality confirms it.

[chambers]

This strikes close to home. Until you've experienced love, you cannot understand it. Doubly so for the purest forms of love, love above human love.

I wager we avoid that kind of love because it boils down to "sacrifice yourself for the good that's outside you". In human terms it's something like parents sacrificing themselves for their children, or friends sacrificing themselves for their friends[1]. Losing something painfully that cannot be replaced in the world. A world where we have all the time, money, internet to distract us from hardship & suffering that brings us closer to goodness.

I personally didn't believe in God until I received a tiny part of his love for myself.

[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2015%3A13&...

[metricspaces]

> a tiny part

don’t you believe that for a second. God does not deal with tiny graces. it’s just a process and then it becomes overwhelming and all resistance is gone. all of it.

[RankingMember]

> otherwise they’d bottle that chemical process and make a zillion selling it.

Oh they do- ask anyone in recovery from opioids.

[metricspaces]

that doesn’t provide the real thing - it is a ‘Fire’ destroys the person. God’s Love is a ‘Light’ builds you up and makes you strong and vital. You really have to experience it - and read Pascal’s wager in the light of his expressing a subjective personal understanding of spiritual experience not a logical formula for converting non-experienced. (Pascal got a hit of Love from God not a hit of opium.)

[RankingMember]

> that doesn’t provide the real thing

How would you know without experiencing it? The experience of joy someone else gets from anything- physical activity, their own religion, love, drugs (however fleeting) is as valid as yours.

[metricspaces]

it’s a matter of duration not external evaluation. i say the “real thing” since that comes to you rather than you affecting a state of mind-body. there is no street corner for someone to deal you that drug. this is the fundamental difference that is discernible from without. you can see the source of one type of bliss (and you can buy it) and the other one is subject to endless debate except by those who are blissed /out!