GOLDEN RULE IN THE LIGHT OF LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR AS YOURSELF

Jesus said you must treat others in the way you would want and expect to be treated.  This is the famous Golden Rule.  He also said, "Love your neighbour as yourself."  These famous over-rated teachings are irresponsibly worded.   The problem is the word YOU.  When you see that, you willingly and also subliminally start to make it too much about you.    When the brain sees the word, it becomes a trigger.  It is a catalyst for projecting.  We project without even realising it.  I think of the other in a way that seems to be about the other but is actually about me and what I am like and what I want.  We don't need Jesus to make it worse.  It is no wonder that we sense there is something patronising in Christian love.

The rationale for the rule is that the outlook, "Let us take an eye for an eye", would only require making everybody blind.  There is no only about that.  It is complicated.  And are you including children in this everybody?  And you are showing that you think all should be blinded but the only problem with that is the lack of practicality.  Your hypocritical lie is part of the problem.  It a world riddled with serious problems hypocrites should just stop lying and shut up.

It is said by the Churches that the Golden Rule is a paraphrase of love your neighbour as yourself. Considering how Jesus made it near-central that is quite correct. He sanctioned the command to love God absolutely. That is the central rule.  And love your neighbour is not sanctioned absolutely but because God says so. 

He declared that the command to treat others as you would be treated is all the sum of the law and the prophets. So the Golden Rule and love God and love your neighbour as yourself are all identical. They are about action towards others in the name of the love of God. The implication is that you need to love the God in them to love them and this love is for God's sake. God is not left out.  In fact God has to be treated with respect just like you want respect so he is one of the others too.

Love your neighbour as yourself does no good at all. Jesus made it the second greatest commandment, with the command to love God totally being first. But it is not.

If you have to think of the other as being another you and treat them accordingly then you must know them well enough to know what they want.  Most people don't want your charity but they want you to help them help themselves.  The commandment is extrovert but many of us to a significant degree want our own space.  We tend to be very aloof with a lot of people.  And many like being abused and victimised so what about them?  And the person themselves knows what is best for them.  The command uses what you like as criteria for how to treat them.  It is about you and your life being some kind of standard.  It is you being patronising and condescending.   You just project your needs unto them and that is not fair.   It is selfish virtue-signalling.  It is about looking good in your own eyes and thinking God is stupid enough to reward you with his approval and send blessings in return.  This teaching only leads to you associating with people you know.  Jesus used the word neighbour.  Why not just say, "Love the other person as you do yourself"?  Neighbour is there for the rule is not really a command of universal love.

The presumption is that God makes you in his image so you and others must live up to that image.  It leads to religion deciding what you should be and should want and treating you within that vision.

The rule is not a fuzzy nice thing.  For example, in wartime you need healthy organs from a man to save innocent children in your hospital.  An enemy soldier ends up coming look for help.  Do you shoot him to harvest his organs?  Jesus would say no even though you could tell yourself that he might be planning harm.  Most people would say yes.  What if he just dies anyway?  Taking his organs according to Jesus and the ethicists is wrong, gravely wrong.  Don't be fooled that moral rules are really about wellbeing and happiness.  They are about brutal horrible choices.

You can rape somebody and it may be the case that you have lost your family forever and are hated by everyone therefore the judge sending you to jail is breaking the Golden Rule.  You already have a punishment worse than jail.  The judge would not like to go to jail so how can he or she send anybody to jail?  The judge will explain that though you may not like it you don't like lawlessness either.  You admit deep down that if it were not for the threat of jail someone might have had you murdered now.  So in a sense you do want jail.  You asked for it anyway.  Now that is fine but the reality is that we have never really had a world where any criminal receives justice.  The system that sends them to jail is corrupt.  The punishment is based on guesswork and opinion not justice.

The golden rule would need to be able to uphold the Christian doctrine that prostitution is objectively a sin.  It does not.  They say that the client is using her body as a means to and end, pleasure, and thus treating her like an object he can use.  Does she really sell her body?  Does she give him temporary ownership of her?  That is impossible for no amount of money can cause him to really own her.  She still owns herself.  He can only treat her as if he has ownership.  He is not getting temporary ownership of her for she is her body.  She is temporarily giving him command over her body.  It's a transfer of command not ownership.

Most love is not something that is commanded or even advised but is forced.  You cannot help who you fall in love with.  Nature forces you to love your child.  The love that counts is not voluntary.  Jesus by trying to command love as a duty is clearly disparaging this love. No wonder he tells you to leave your father and mother and follow him.  Commanding love backfires.  It leads you to simulate it and you feel compelled by your community and religion to play along in a charade.

The command needs a context, absolutism or consequentialism, to be of any use.

The view that certain things are wrong under all circumstances is the ethical theory of absolutism. Absolutism ignores the consequences of doing or not doing something. Consequentalism is the theory that even murder, though bad, is right under certain circumstances and it all depends on the intended results. You can't mix absolutism and consequentialism together they are oil and water. If any harmful actions are right because of the intended consequences then there is no room for saying things like 'abortion is always morally wrong' etc. Catholicism has a lot of absolutism in its theology. Divorce is never right. Contraception is wrong even when it protects from AIDS. Disbelieving in what God has supposedly told the Church is always wrong too.

Jesus preached absolutism too.  So you treat others according to those absolutes and you tell yourself that if they protest it is what they really want even if they don't see it.
 
So Jesus' commandment was useless for it didn't tell us how to love. What is the use of love if you should let people divorce and don't know this and think divorce is always wrong?
 
Jesus then should have declared either absolutism or consequentalism to be true.
 
The only reason he gave love your neighbour as yourself such a high status was because God commanded it. So we are to keep the rule because God commanded it. Jesus didn't care if it was right or wrong or dangerous or whatever. Pleasing religion was all that mattered.
 
We would worry, as would the psychiatric world, if the commandment said, "Love your neighbour more than yourself." But Jesus said that the first greatest commandment was to love and serve God totally and without any reservations. So God comes first. This makes "Love your neighbour as yourself" as bad as "Love your neighbour more than yourself." In principle, they are the same: they both require you to devalue yourself.
 
Jesus said the Golden Rule was the summary of the law and the prophets. He said that about love your neighbour as yourself as well.   The Golden Rule is as much of a failure as is the command to love your neighbour as yourself. The two commandments are believed to be different ways of saying the same thing. So they are really the one commandment.   They fall together.

Kant pointed out that we should only make duties, or moral commandments, out of maxims that can be generalised and applied to everyone on earth.  The Golden Rule is unjust for it commands you and is so vague.  Kant says one universal law is that you must never lie.  The Golden Rule can lead to you lying to a dying person that their son who just died in a car crash is healthy and good.  Jesus banned lies too.  Philosophy was not God incarnate's strong point!  Against that Jesus might say that it is a form of mistrust in him that he will not be there to help the vulnerable person accept the truth.  He might say you are guilty of the bigotry of low expectations will point to how some "vulnerable" people took terrible truths on the chin and with endurance.  He might say you just don't have the guts to risk being accused of damaging the person with the truth.

Jesus stole the doctrine from the Jewish tradition that ended up in Talmud, Shabbat 3id which reads, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man.  This is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary."  He used the wording.  But a command not to hurt others is not the same as one that commands you to do good for others as you would want them to do good for you.  Rich people who do nothing for others do not hurt them just by doing so.