> I know. I did realize what you were saying. But in my opinion, and maybe in unipeg's too, I believe that to experience 'true' love, that you have to know God. There is a difference between the love that the world thinks of and that of God. It's a hard concept to explain though. I'm hoping that I will find some scripture to back me up on this. I know I've come across it before.
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> I also hope that you don't think I am attacking you. I just want you to understand my point as well as I understand yours.

Unipeg and Famous are absolutely correct. I'm reluctant to quote "God is love" too much out of context, however, for these days there are far too many systems of belief I believe to be quite errant that depersonalize God and make Him a feeling or an idea. Nonetheless, it is a true statement.

True, too, is the one that God's idea of love and the world's idea of love are different. Watch any appropriately themed movie, sitcom, whatever these days, and the characters are always fretting about feeling this, feeling that, and have I "fallen" into or out of love. Love is not a feeling, and you can't "fall" in or out of it. Loving someone is quite simply defined: putting that person's needs above one's own. Period, end of story. Love is a decision, not a feeling. The world's flawed understanding of love is that we can't choose who we love. Nonsense. We can't choose who we are infatuated with, perhaps, but we can certainly choose who we love.

The reason there is such a ridiculous divorce rate these days is that marriages are based on feelings. "I feel love for you; let's get married." Inevitably, the feelings will wane, and if the marriage isn't built on anything stronger, *obviously* it's going to fall apart. You can't "feel" love for someone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. You can, however, *choose* to love someone constantly, and with a right-headed decision to do so, the feelings (less needy, selfish feelings, I might add) fall into place as a result. One reason I think arranged marriages have such a notorious reputation for success in certain cultures (not that I'm advocating them) is because it is ingrained in those cultures that that's the way things are done. If you are resolved to abide by a previously arranged marriage and commit yourself to making it successful, that decision is, in fact, love, and however unromantic the notion, it stands to reason, given the above, that it would have a better chance for success.

Interestingly, the divorce rate in the USA, somewhere in the area of 50-55 percent, does not differ significantly within any particular religious sect -- Catholic, Protestant, some religion not based on the Christian God at all -- except for the particular subgroup of Bible-believing, so called "born again" Christians, where it is somewhere under a third of that percentage.

Can you love without God? Certainly I have seen great love in others that did not know God. I believe Man was created in God's image, and I believe that image to be not entirely physical. Since the fall from the Garden of Eden, sin has corrupted that image (ours, not God's :-) ), but there are vestiges of godliness in all of us, and certainly we have nature and conscience as vague indicators of what is right and true and what isn't. But speaking for myself, I certainly wouldn't want to be without God's great love, more powerful and compassionate than any even the most loving of others can give.