I Don't Give a Fuck This Shit is Awesome

“We Cannot Understand Love”

In follow up questions during this debate about religion a woman comes on and says that “we cannot understand love”.

To say, as she was in the context of religious debate, that love is an independent force transcending our nature, that it is beyond us in its essence and that, like god, we cannot understand it is utterly ridiculous. We understand love very well: we experience it.

But isn’t love different in kind than something else that we understand through experience such as pain?

The answer is no but this doesn’t diminish the experience of love even slightly. Our experience of love will be our experience of love INDEPENDENT of what we choose to think of it, its origins, whether it is a transcendent force, etc.

Love is an awesome experience. Our rationalization of why this is so doesn’t influence this simple and observable fact; we suddenly don’t lack an ability to love if we change our beliefs or mindsets.

Why does explaining away love as incomprehensible and originally transcendent romance us so? What makes this attribute, “unknowable,” so emotionally persuasive? We are we so attached to isolating the most amazing of experiences of consciousness to a realm we cannot touch (as if this somehow explained things better).

And to put this in a different perspective, a less contentious but equally irrational example: talent.

We often use the word talented to mean supernaturally gifted — “Kobe Bryant is talented” — and in doing so we mythicize that figure, idolize him. Every reason that Kobe is fucking good at basketball can be explained in the here and now. And likewise, every property of loves immense power on our human psyche can be found on Earth.