15 - ‘What is the Difference between Love and God’s Love?’

Summary

Talk of the natural sentiments of humanity seems ‘secular’ enough, as does talk of metta and its intentional forms, though of course such intentionality needs to be informed. Moreover, the various ways in which our emotions are suppressed or wrongly informed makes sense of the idea of self-addressed imperatives by a moral agent with recalcitrant impulses they realise make them unreliable, Although the moral sentiments, including metta and dana (or generosity) are thus overlain or stifled, they seem sufficiently ‘natural’ to be primitive in relation to what we call ‘morality’ and do not seem on the face of it to require any kind of religious or, more specifically, theological underpinning. But religious questions have been raised about the viability of a secular approach and we shall look at such questions in what follows since they put pressure both on our conception of ‘religion’ and our conception of ‘secularism’.