{"id":21774,"date":"2014-02-19T21:44:55","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T02:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=21774"},"modified":"2014-02-19T21:44:55","modified_gmt":"2014-02-20T02:44:55","slug":"i-dont-believe-in-not-believing-in-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2014\/02\/i-dont-believe-in-not-believing-in-love.html","title":{"rendered":"I Don&#8217;t Believe in Not Believing in Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><div class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both;text-align: none\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/exploringourmatrix\/files\/2014\/02\/wpid-Photo-Feb-19-2014-937-PM.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" class=\" decorated-link\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/exploringourmatrix\/files\/2014\/02\/wpid-Photo-Feb-19-2014-937-PM.jpg\" class=\"alignnone\" width=\"500\" height=\"937\" alt=\"\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p>The above <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smbc-comics.com\/?id=3082\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"\" class=\" decorated-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon<\/a> offers a clever rejoinder to the \u201cI don't believe in love\u201d claim. It led me to think of another. One can respond to the claim to disbelieve in love by pointing out that that state of disbelief, and the reasoning that drives it, is every bit as much \u201cjust a bunch of chemical reactions\u201d in the brain. And so isn't that stance self-contradictory, akin to saying that one doesn't believe in thought?<\/p>\n<p>One could easily reason from love to one's own existence along the lines Descartes did: I love, therefore I am. And denying that one is oneself a thinking thing \u2013 including a thing that thinks thoughts of love \u2013 is not being rational, but about as irrational that it is possible to be.<\/p>\n<p>Thoughts? (Or loves, or pains?)<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The above Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon offers a clever rejoinder to the \u201cI don&#8217;t believe in love\u201d claim. It led me to think of another. One can respond to the claim to disbelieve in love by pointing out that that state of disbelief, and the reasoning that drives it, is every bit as much [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,74],"tags":[1625,1764,1765,2622,6741,8615,10804,11447],"class_list":["post-21774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-philosophy","tag-cartoon","tag-chemical","tag-chemistry","tag-descartes","tag-love","tag-pain","tag-saturday-morning-breakfast-cereal","tag-smbc"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>I Don&#039;t Believe in Not Believing in Love<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The above Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon offers a clever rejoinder to the &quot;I don&#039;t believe in love&quot; claim. 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