If Love was an intellectual property, does religion own the copyright?

Could you refresh my memory? What was the bible’s beautiful definition of what love is? The bible was late to the game, but I’m interested to see if it adds anything.

Of course love existed before the bible. Part of love is chemical, there are hormones that create bonds with people. It is also practical to love. Our bonding with each other creates a society where we care, nurture, and can rely on each other. Whether it be considered innate or environmental, I believe most certainly love would exist without religion. I think the people who authored the bible just observed love and wrote down its benefits and good feelings (if indeed they did? I don’t know the bible well enough to know what it says regarding love. I want to know like @tom_g what definitions the bible uses.)

No, but I think God would.

Before religion existed, nothing existed. With religion came love, God, heaven, hell, Moses, Buddha, Stalin and Rice Krispies, among other things. Before religion, words were just words, but after religion, words had meaning. Indeed, religion was the source of the bicameral mind.

Of course, if you don’t believe, you have no love, God, or Stalin. You have nothing. You can’t even think. As is demonstrated by this comment, provided by an atheist zombie.

I probably shouldn’t have said this. Religionists will be converting to atheism in droves, now!

The universe and the human brain are the rightful copyright owners, I’d say.

Last night I discovered the purpose of religion. Not that most of you heathens here on Fluther will care, but it isn’t to save one’s soul. Only God can do that. No, religion is for man alone; so he may remember to remember the One who saved his soul.

“This do in rememberance of me,” is not a solemn command to sip and eat in reverence on Sundays. It is merely one man’s entreaty to his friends; one God’s wish for his creation: Remember me.

@tom_g 1 Corinthians…

“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.”

Religion owns nothing. God owns LIFE. Faith in God is life. God IS Love. It isn’t that he has love, it is that he IS love. Simple sentences and you can flip them off real easy, but it is the whole truth. @mazingerz88 has just posted from 1 Corinthians of the Christian bible. Boy did we have an example of this here in Canada with the death of our New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton who claimed atheism. WELL, he wrote a letter to Canadians from his death bed a couple days before he died. His last remarks are pretty interesting. If anyone wants to read this, I can get the website or send you his letter which I retained on a word document. It is a great death bed letter.

Love can be looked at through the prism of religion, but it exists independently of religion.

@mazingerz88: – Thanks for the reference. Personally, I’m not particularly moved by that passage as it makes very little sense to me. As for an explanation of the origins of love and the bio-chemical process which makes up those feelings, I prefer the scientific explanations.

There’s more to love than what Paul said there. I consider to be love “For you I’d kill a whole damn crew! why? Because I know you’d do the same for me”. And love is expressed in more ways than one person can see. You might do someone a good deed while he is not aware but on the surface you still use a bad attitude because you don’t want others to find out.
Love is complicated.

The Bible is written in words which existed long before the Bible; and long before the word was created there was love.

No. Love cannot be copyrighted, only experienced.

No. I imagine the very first pangs of love in human history had nothing to do with religion.

Nope. But religion copyrighted marriage.