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And this"people who love"...??

That is so subjective and open ended....

Yeah that person at church really loves me..they smile once a week and that is it.

Jesus loved...how???

With daily detail and words...specific acts...

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First, I get what you're saying, OK, the contrast you are drawing. That's not at issue here.

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Oh contraire....
that is exactly the issue....

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It was not the issue I was getting at. The issue I was getting at had to do with the reductionism inherent in attempting to codify the experience of Love into a rigid behavioralist formula. It simply cannot be done. Even JESUS acknowledges this, that's why He says the REAL "rule" is simply to do unto others what we would want done for ourselves. By so doing He illustrates the impossibility of a "one size fits all" codification of what constitutes "living out Love".

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It is the sweet sounding hypocritical, phoney, ambiguous/subjective/abstract religious and or social cliches that lead to depravity.

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Again, I truly believe you are off-base here. What I have observed is this: that it is the wrongful denigration of REAL love by these disparaging, nullifying, invalidating, "poison-pen" terms -- and then attempting to substitute rigidly codified, "one-size-fits-all" behavioral codes in place of the experience of actual Love -- which leads to depravity. In the absence of real Love (denied because it has been denigrated by the above disparaging terms and "tainted well" tactics of which you provided some examples), people feel the pain of lacking worth and meaning, lacking validation and connection, and lacking anything to generate respect inside -- respect for God, respect for others, and/or even self-respect. In the wake of these absences is when depravity reigns, for the promise of some pleasure, some reprieve, some succor from such a hell, however swiftly passing, vapid, short-lived and/or ill-gotten, is too alluring to resist, particularly when the elements of nourishment inside which might have prompted such resistance (investment in loyalty to God, or service to others, or even the bare minimalist pragmatism of self-respect) have already been drained and depleted.

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>>>>>>>everyone did what was right in their own eyes...

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I can think of no more salient or appropriate manner of viewing this verse than to apply it to the dearth of light and hope which results from denigrating love and leaving hurting, lost, dying souls to be the prey of the wild beasts of tyrannical conscience untempered by the tender, pitying mercies of what has been so cruelly banished through the sort of calloused and unappreciative lies spun by those who suffer from the delusion that mercy and tenderness are intrinsically evil, or at least forerunners thereof.

You are not a teacher of the Word if you exclude mercy -- and I do mean unmitigated, unqualified, unadulterated mercy of the type revealed by Jesus Christ. Do you even know what that IS? I'm seriously beginning to believe either no one gets it or I've got a vision and a fire in my heart that exceeds that of God Himself (if we are to take what others represent as the way God is as actually being how God is, that is ). Since the latter is functionally impossible, I am forced to consider the very real possibility of the former ....

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You are not a teacher of the Word if you exclude mercy -- and I do mean unmitigated, unqualified, unadulterated mercy of the type revealed by Jesus Christ. Do you even know what that IS?

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No hangovers at church then?

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JimBob,

I don't feel like you are really listening to me or engaging with me. Furthermore I feel like you are attempting to make a mockery of my input, paint me as representing a position I do not hold, and being rather (not totally, but rather) insensitive toward me on this subject. I have defined how I see it and the only true definition of how I see it is what I have offered, not what you have made from it. At this point I see no need to continue this conversation as it is going nowhere. But before I depart, a few facts you might not be acquainted with.

It just so happens that it was people hammering away at the things you keep hammering away at (in this regard) that caused me to suffer what I have only recently begun to realize was probably a psychotic break in 1983. At that time, I began to believe myself demon possessed because I could not manage to make sense of their complicated series of mazes and hoops. Nothing was ever good enough. Demands and "standards" were erected that I could not even begin to hope to live up to in my condition (nor even before I had the nervous breakdown) and I had a very innocent heart back then -- all I wanted, all I lived for, was to please Jesus, to obey Him and do His will. When I found this required things over which I had no control, no one would believe me, and when I prayed to God to take control, He (seemed to) refuse me (not answering according to what I had been taught were guaranteed unconditional promises in the Bible).

After months of fruitless and futile searching for an answer to why my experience was this way -- why I could not control my thoughts, feelings or actions even after praying, repenting, submitting, surrendering, etc. etc. -- an acquaintance of mine, thinking he was being helpful, gave me a book that described much of what I was experiencing. Unfortunately it was not a textbook on psychology. It was a book about demonic oppression and possession. When I asked for help and deliverance, I was told I was just "making up drama to get attention" and that my problem was that I "refused to take responsibility for my sins". I guess they weren't there when I got up every morning at 4 a.m. convinced I needed a "tithe of time" (2.4 hours) minimum for devotion to make sure I was Word and Spirit saturated -- or when I spent hours in the afternoons after classes on my knees, crying and begging God to forgive me and change me so I would not be this vile, angry, picky person who could not communicate with human beings properly and only ended up p*ssing them off and offending them when I tried to share the Gospel with them. (Didn't He want me, too, to be about My Father's business?) I guess they weren't around all the hours DAILY that I compulsively, frantically gouged myself (figuratively speaking) mentally and emotionally, layer after layer after layer, obsessed with hunting down that "hidden sin" that I was CERTAIN lurked somewhere deep inside where I couldn't get to it to even know its name, let alone confess it and repent of it, and of which I was certain it was responsible for making me, supposedly, "so insincere that I was utterly self-deceived, incapable of even being aware of my insincerity because I was so thoroughly convinced I was really sincere about wanting to serve God" -- and other assorted things of that nature.

Not wanting to take responsibility for my sins, huh? Had I done ANYTHING BUT that, eating breathing sleeping that, for EVERY WAKING MOMENT of my day during the past two years I'd been at school??? I would have gladly been rid of them ALL -- just tell me where the magic sin-jettison drop-button is!!! That's how I felt -- since praying for three hours a day crying and tearing myself to shreds looking for whatever was that "secret hidden thing" was which made me an abomination and one so totally self-deceived that I could not even know myself for one, and begging Christ to free me from them and change me availed nothing at all that I could see. Of course by then I had already broken from reality; I was deeply depressed, suicidal, and hallucinating regularly though once again, I had no idea that's what was going on. I believed I was being "oppressed by the devil" and Bible religion only encouraged this sort of thinking, and hardliner SDA distrust of the medical field, particularly psychology (ever read EGW's condemnations in that regard? They are pretty harsh!), pushed me further and deeper into a situation of isolation where the only presumable "help" for me was the very thing making me sick in the first place. I thought I needed more prayer or more faith or an exorcism or MORE of the right kind of Theologically Correct teaching ("overcome all sin"/"strait testimony" crap) shoveled into my tortured soul to whip and abuse me FURTHER and THAT would "fix" me -- what I REALLY needed, and NO ONE BOTHERED TO HELP ME SEE, GRASP, OR OBTAIN, was a nice safe hospital, a competent treatment team, and medication.)

In short and in sum, everything became very dark at that time in my life. I lost my mental health first, my ability to know connectedness with God with certainty next, and my faith later as a result of the first two, so forgive me if I'm not about to suddenly become the sort of person who believes anything good can come out of the very rhetoric that cost me everything that meant anything in my life and essentially ruined my life -- the life of someone seeking earnestly and truly to live only for Jesus Christ and willing to sacrifice any cherished thing for His sake -- for no good reason, and abandoned me and left me for dead to become the devil's plaything. Forgive me if I simply cannot jump on a bandwagon that played my funeral dirge and subscribe to things whose ONLY association in MY mind is with something that destroyed me faster than any of my own sins at the time could even conceive of doing.

I can't possibly make you understand and I can't make you stop trying to force on me the very thing that destroyed my life and robbed me of my mental health, my faith, and my ability to connect with God with any certainty back in 1983. All I can do is end my part in this conversation, which I am doing. I have no hope of reaching you with this very important truth, because you cannot possibly be as invested and concerned as I am with preventing any more tragedies of this nature. But I can tell you that prior to my initial nervous breakdown, I tried your method on the Laodiceans. Guess what? It didn't work. That was 23 years ago. Guess what? It still doesn't work today.

OK I'm done. Knock yourself out.

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Happy New Year