Valentine’s Day – a Day to Love Your Neighbor

Love Your Neighbor. Not only is Valentine’s Day a day for romantic love, but it is also a time to celebrate brother or neighborly love. Both kinds of love can have their rewards – love from a good friend or a parent, love from a brother or a sister, or love from a sweetheart!

So many times, we hear of horrible stories in the news where someone was beaten or murdered. And we think to ourselves – didn’t someone ever love the person who committed this atrocity. We read about wars, current and past, and we wonder what are/were these people concepts of love? For example, the Bible says to love thy neighbor as thyself, but that certainly was not followed during the wars of religion in the 16th century. They fought over religious dogma but didn’t follow the important commandment of loving each other – these religious wars turned much of Europe away from religion.

Love Your Neighbor – Love, Peace, and Non-Violence

St. Valentine was executed and martyred mercilessly by the Roman Empire. This should be a day of the exact opposite – a day of mercy and compassion for your fellow man. Day after day, year after year – someone is being killed, murdered, slayed – all of the time. I think an optimal society is a society that this doesn’t happen on a day-to-day basis – if ever.

For whatever reason, there are naturally mean, angry, and vicious people in the world. If you’re religious – let’s say a Buddhist or Christian – these religions generally teach that you should boundlessly spread love in your life! So, they teach that we should be sharing and preaching love.

St. Valentine, for instance, was a Bishop, and tried to share love to the people – and celebrated their love. He was adored by the people he served. But then the merciless Roman Empire executed him. And perhaps you’re an atheist but you have a loving heart and don’t adhere to religious dogma – you might find the best way to defend against bad people is to keep your defenses up and avoid bad people all together.

Here are some great quotes about brotherly love:

• “It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love.” – John Lennon
• “Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.” – Mother Teresa
• “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule” – Buddha
• “If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us” 1 John 4:12
• “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.” Oscar Wilde

Spreading Love to Your Neighbor

Love your neighbor can be a selective thing in our day-to-day lives and we can all be selective of who we love. We want to show more love to that special person in our lives, the beautiful girl in class, or the nice friendly neighbor. It’s usually a lot harder to show love to someone who we find disagreeable, mean, or nasty. Probably most atheists don’t even try, people need religion to show love to even the meanest among us.

I think that many people avoid loving others because they end up in a situation where they are continually giving all the love and the other person is a black hole of love and takes all the love of the other person. You should avoid these types of relationships.

If there was more love (physical, spiritual, and mental) there would likely be less violence, less pain, less gangs, and less war. Perhaps through history no one has ever gotten love right. The ancient empires before Christ and the Roman Empire, clearly had a problem with love as those societies were brutal, warlike, and oppressive.

Its Valentine’s Day: Love your Neighbor

So, on this Valentines Day try to love another person. Do a good deed to someone, give them a kiss, a hug, a card, a flower, some candy. Anything to say you are loved by someone!

For More on the History of Love, Follow this Link…

Love – Wikipedia

To Return to the Main Valentine Site, Follow this Link…

The Website Dedicated to Valentine’s Day – (saintvalentinesday.net)