Love humbles monsters!

I was having a conversation with a friend, who is a self-confessed atheist and rationalist, the other day.

The central point of the conversation was, when love humbles an atheist/rationalist and makes one feel powerless and helpless, would he/she act any different from the people who believe in super-natural powers? Of late, he has been going through it personally, it seems. Here goes the summary...

Of course, yes. "The practice or principle of basing opinions and actions on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response" - That's what 'Google define' has to say about rationalism. 

Now, my friend is in a fix. He thinks a bit too much about her, and gets emotional, involuntarily. The relation is nowhere close to a stage where he can talk to her much, let alone sharing his feelings with her. Being rational, he can't do anything foolish, despite his dreams every night. He rationalizes himself about dreams that they are just manifestation of his feelings and thoughts, and there are no more strings attached. Whereas, his believer friends in that situation take it as a positive vibe and refer to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and celebrate.

When he comes across something like, 'if one truly loves, ones love will never fail' - he, apparently, becomes sadder as he doesn't believe in anything super-natural. As per his school of thought, love being 'true' can have no effect whatsoever 'on its own', unless it leads to some action. Whereas, believers find such things very powerful and helpful in keeping their spirits up.

Few more areas where my friend looses against believers are blessings of elders, wishes of his close friends, taking oaths and praying for divine intervention etc., None of them can console him, as all those fall under super-natural category.

Then, suddenly, we jumped out of the context and tried to replace Love with Mangalyaan (India's Mars Orbiter Mission). If we, as rationalists, are convinced that believers have all those above advantages, won't believer scientists of ISRO have the similar advantages, when ISRO chairman seeks divine help (and goes to Tiruapati with a model of satellite), as a rule, before every launch?

But, we felt, though they both look innocuously similar, they actually are not. More on those, a little later.