Quote Originally Posted by Yamaneko View Post
Read the rest of my post. You might be surprised.
I was primarily being sarcastic, but I'll make a point here; you're kind of contradicting yourself when you say that we can still find beauty in things even if love is just a seemingly insignificant secretion of proteins. Yet finding beauty in things, the feelings of reverence, are very much in the same league as the emotions surrounding love. If you bundle everything we feel down to it's base components, it's nothing but proteins getting squirted about the place. But the product of that becomes greater than the sum of it's parts.

When people say things about love being "magical" and all the rest of it, is that not on the same level as you finding the significance in a well-written song or striking landscape? I'm an Atheist myself, and I'm not one to start attributing anything we see in the world to mystical forces. But at the same time I don't think you can disregard all romantic (if you'll pardon the ironic term) interpretations of the physical world we see. The fact that we don't just observe everything around us completely impassively and without feeling is a good thing. Yes it can get a bit out of hand with some people, but there's a marked difference between say believing that your girlfriend is the only one for you and that Jesus is going to fly out of the clouds and slice up the heathens. I don't think you can justify directly comparing the two beyond they both happen to be expressions of the human brain's cerebral cortex.

What I guess I'm trying to say is that you can't have it both ways; you can't say that what we feel is nothing but physical chemical processes and then start using terms such as beauty. It seems that you're picking out a certain type of love that you are against while at the same time maintaining significance to other emotions you feel are more "suitable" to have. I'm not saying you have to believe love is some mystical force, but devaluing it for the reasons you're stating doesn't fit in with your other views regarding relationships and emotions.