The following is an answer and/or comment by inhahe aka ColorStorm (inhahe.com - myriachromat.wordpress.com).

Wasserpistole: The Bible says "Do not love the world or anything in the world." The Qur'an says "The life of this world is only a false sense of pleasure" in every other religious scripture we find similar words. Does that make you, unlike me, unhappy?

ColorStorm: Well I don't give a lot of credit to the precepts of religion just by virtue of their being claimed by religion, so they don't make me happy or unhappy in that sense, but as far the truth of those statements goes, to whatever degree to which they happen to be true, well.. actually lemme back up: it it differs for each of the above sentences. I mean, "Do not love the world or anything above the world" is just irritating, because it's despicably wrong. It's everything that's wrong with Christianity. They're so worrying about securing the good life in the afterlife that they fail to do what would actually make them good people: being worldly, giving to charity, caring about pollution and the future of our planet, etc. I guess that's why they tend to be republican, ironically.

Life is all about communion and love, whether you're in this world or the next. If you're not loving people in life you're definitely doing it wrong. If you don't love the world you're not a model human being. Though if they mean don't love things, that would be more understandable. But even that wouldn't be totally right. You should love the view of a snow-capped mountain or standing in a windy rainstorm, or whatever--you don't have to love those specific things, but there should be something in nature that you love. Nature is God, after all. Just don't love the house, the car and the 50-inch TV so much. =P

As for the other one, "The life of this world is only a false sense of pleasure", it's not entirely clear to me what that means, but sure. Pleasure itself isn't that noble a thing to aim for. I mean, depending on what means by pleasure. Some philosophers call every type of well-being pleasure, including happiness, joy, ecstasy, bliss, euphoria, satisfaction, contentment, fulfillment and peace, but assuming they mean pleasure qua specifically pleasure, and assuming they mean something more like "The things in life in this world have a tendency of producing pleasure, which is a false sense of well-being or The Good," then yeah, I'd go for it. But if they mean that all things in life in this world that are good are merely a farcical pleasure, then that's wrong. That would go back to my argument about the Bible quote. But otherwise.. pleasure is a base form or analogue of joy, and pretty much just exists so that evolution can program us to seek certain things, and even that doesn't benefit us as much as it used to because we didn't evolve in the context of our modern, human-created environment.

At first glance I took the two sentences to mean something like, this world is only an illusion, so don't get too absorbed in it, which I'm sure is true in some way, and I I figured it's a happy thing because there's so much suffering in the world and not getting too absorbed in the illusion would lessen or nullify the suffering, and it also would imply an afterlife where things are more real and more worthy of taking in, and probably much more conducive to happiness. So that's why I said, inasmuch as those things may be true, it would make me happy. But when I actually paid more attention to them it changed my mind.