religious imposition explains it all

To respond to Iain's post on the common obsession of love, I argue that love is not the common obsession. People can be reduced not to having desire for love in common, but in having desire. We are all attracted, motivated, and driven to attain certain things. The label "love" is only a convention of society that makes desires appropriate. For some reason (religion), the nature of man has been deemed corrupt, and natural desires have also been labeled impure. Expression of appetites, in time, has forcibly become an appeal to false ideals. Instead of speaking plainly, society requires that appetites be couched in false terms of love, romance and happines. Suckling's poem is about the desire to satisfy his natural appetites; any wistful, or flowery diction is just the poet buying into socially-imposed conventions (these, naturally, have evolved from man's greatest and most flawed invention: religion).

Thanks, Sean, for posting my interesting sentence about the virtue in choosing good. May I point out that in class, I was arguing on behalf of Milton's God, while on the blog I am for Milton's Satan and Hobbes.

Hobbes would say that there is no virtue in choosing good, as anything good boils down to an appetite. Evil, similarly, is paralleled with aversion. It is not virtuous to choose good- merely natural. It is against the nature of man to do himself harm, or choose to do anything against his best interest. Therefore, a man who would choose against his appetites (evil) is not acting in a sane capacity and his actions are void of meaning. For Hobbes, the choice is plain, and virtue is beside the point.

I do, however, agree with Will that appetite and aversion, or good and evil, are dependent upon one another to establish meaning. The polar opposites of good and evil, as man-made concepts, rely on one another to exist. What is hot, without the comparison of cold?