You should not love your mother just because she's your mother, you should love your mother because she loved you and did her best to raise you well

And if she did neither she -deserves- no love

Keyword being deserves, of course you can love a bad mother

I don't see why different rules should apply to a mother who gave birth compared to one who adopted

You don't have to love your mother, if she doesn't love you. But you should still feel you owe her for your own existence. It's not that she (or country) can't do any wrongs, it's that whatever wrong they do, it has to be weighted against this ultimate gift, which few wrongs can outweigh. But, they certainly can. We are talking about outliers, though, the territory where all analogies break down :)

A great analogy. I love my family because they are my family, and I love my country because it is my country. That doesn't mean I should think that either is objectively the best, or turn a blind eye to their faults, or treat others unfairly to favor them.

I love my family and country because they are mine, they helped make me, and my memories are with them. Which helps me understand why Brits and Egyptians and Chinese, etc, love theirs.

I think good patriotism makes us sympathetic to outsiders rather than the opposite.

I feel the opposite way. I love my mother because she's objectively ranks as nearly the best mother I could have had, and I love my siblings and aunts, grandparents and great-grandparents because they are objectively the best looking, most intelligent, and most dependable people I could have had in my life. It's the same way I feel about my friends, who frequently remind me that I'm one of the luckiest people in the world.

I've see what other people have to work with, and there have been many exceptions amongst my own family and friends, but as individuals, they are simply better than most other people.

I couldn't care less about blood or soil.

> I love my mother because she's objectively ranks as nearly the best mother I could have had

"Objective" and "parenting". That's cute.

I agree on all this :)

With respect, it's much easier to make this argument [that you are indebted to your mother] if you are privileged to be born to a good mother who loves you and brings you up well.

I don't disagree. But, even a bad mother is one who gave existence.

True. But many become parents through bad decisions. Should we celebrate those decisions?

Haha, yes. Perhaps I am an accident. I do celebrate it though :)

By that logic you should should really love the hospital you were born in. After all, it was more involved in bringing you into the world than the ground it was built upon.

The whole notion of "my country" is really interesting... If you were swiss, but born and raised in India, does India become "your country" or not?

The media in Subcontinent area feeds loads of BS about nationalism to the point that you start to believe it and start to thing it's true. Even the Indian national anthem's first verse is India is better than the whole world. Perhaps upon leaving India people realize common threads of humanity that bind communities together.

With the advent of the internet hopefully more people are learning this without having to leave a country as people work in multi national teams remotely. The people I interact with are very every day are in India, UK, Bosnia etc. We work on the same thing together. There are accents and cultural differences, but a lot of what we assume about people we haven't met dissolve in the face of realities which challenge your biased views.

The internet in some way has helped dilute the power of national boundaries. You find clusters like HN where people of all background come together and interacts based on commonalities that transcend mere physical attributes of our existence. While I agree that the physical attributes are still important, nationalism is not a physical attribute, it one imposed by some a-hole who wanted to draw lines and have power.

Love your mother, your family and the hospital that you were born in. (If you were born in a barn, said love should go to barn). Destroy those to dare assert superiority over those who were born in your particular hospital/field/barn etc. If that sounds ridiculous, please thing about how some other arbitrary inanimate object in place of hospital/field/barn makes more sense.

>By that logic you should should really love the hospital you were born in.

No, your family usually cares about and for you, unlike the hospital you were born in, which you cannot rely on for any favor.

About the country issue, it is simply a manner for many people to identify others on many traits using common associations (e.g Indians are poor, Eastern Asians are hard-workers, Swiss are meticulous), that sometimes relate to accurate correlations. And it's one of the few ways, other than age and salary, to do this kind of association in a neutral and non-controversial way.

I'm talking about people, not just the physical place. The Hospital, or a barn, are inanimate objects. They did not make any decisions about the process any more than air and water decided to flow through your system. You can thank nurses, but the act of being born, although crucial, isn't as laborious as carrying to term and not sleeping every night for a year.

If you were born in England, and raised in India, you do have have dual allegiances, but probably more to India.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Allegiances to people, you community Nurses makes sense. But to a random border which you were not a part of creating does not

Borders and territories are not random though, they confine the community and people. A country is combination of both.