All the world's major religions include some statement of what is called The Golden Rule in their primary ethical consideration. To do to others what we would have others do to us. Let’s go deeper and ask: “From where does the golden rule come?” I claim that it comes from a common root experience had all over the world in all ages. This is the experience of cosmic consciousness, which occurs in many different ways and circumstances.
LISTEN TO "Root of the Golden Rules" (duration 0:03:26; 1.57 MB; 64 kbps)
2 comments:
It's interesting to compare the Golden Rule (which addresses the moral question of how we relate to each) to a similar concept in Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
Einstein reasoned that if there were any discoverable laws of Nature, they should appear the same to all observers. If a putative law of nature looks one way to one observer and another way to a different observer, then there is something amiss.
Hillel and Jesus (among others) employed similar reasoning when asking if there were any universal moral laws. John Rawls used the same reasoning in his "Veil of Ignorance" argument. If a putative moral law comes out different when the roles are reversed, something is amiss.
The Golden Rule has the property that it is invariant under role-reversal.
Perhaps what makes it so hard for people to reckon the Golden Rule is the difficulty of imagining how things look and feel to other inhabitants and observers of our turbulent world.
There is no Golden Rule for Christian churches today. They would convert religious Christians of other Christian faiths, because they can't convert non-Christians.
Or, would it be to take the primative to disease, depopulation, poverty and then religion, because the converted have already been through that. You can only evanglize the primative.
These churches live the weak case of their own religion.
Theocrats must resort to politicized force, because they no longer are a moral example.
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