True, you can not will yourself to love everyone, but you can allow yourself to love all others.
This is the basis of all religions. But mankind is weak and doesn’t understand why this is important. Only after you do it, will you find the value of it.
He meant everyone as your neighbor.
OK, I understand what you and meara are saying. Perhaps my take on the “second great commandment” is overblown. But even on a more limited basis it’s still difficult. How much compassion do we show other people?
I think I’m a reasonable person. I’ve given money to people. But at the end of the day, I’m still thinking more of myself than of anyone else–with the possible esception of family and a few very close friends. I don’t think of my neighbor as myself, and I’d guess that very few people do.
I still hold that Jesus teachings are inseperable from his spiritual message and his claim to god-hood. Sure there is a basic message there to be compassionate. But one hardly needs Jesus to tell us that a certain compassion and benevolence are good things. The heart of Jesus’ teaching involves a renunciation of this world and all worldly things. This is a terrifying command and requires a grave spiritual commitment on the part of his followers.
I personally don’t think moral standards, as I think you mean them, are the issue.
Or to put it another way, there is no God, not even figuratively (not even sure what you mean), all our morality is self-created, and the only standard we have is societal. I don’t think there’d be much argument that societal standards of morality are very much relative. Society does hold the educated to a different moral standard from the ignorant, for example.
One of these bolded religions is not like the others, kids. Can you tell me which one? That’s right, the one that doesn’t have a monotheos - which, BTW, is essentially an all-powerful emperor…in the Sky! So I for one don’t see the difference in the morals there
Even the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis agrees that our moral standards arise from the common experience of mankind based on what works for a society and what doesn’t.
Many who argue for a fixed moral standard and decry ‘situational ethics’ defend the ownership of slaves by George Washington on the grounds that such was acceptable in his time and place.
Moral standards can come only from a Higher Intelligence. I don’t think man would have come up with “love one another”, without defining conditions.
Only God can say love one another unconditionally.
So humans can impose moral standards on animals? Hm.
Kant and Socrates would disagree with you. AFAIK, IIRC, etc. etc., JS Mill and Buddha would also disagree.
lekatt
---- I don’t think man would have come up with “love one another”, without defining conditions.
Jesus’ commandment to Love thy neighbor as thyself[sup]1[/sup] parallels that of Hillel, a contemporary: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.
Hm. I guess that does have conditions, in a way: Hillel is summarizing. But then again, Jesus provided a precis as well. Either way, I understand that Gurus often utter aphorisms that tend towards the simplistic --or essential if you prefer.
Both rabbis recall Deut 6:4-5 (regarding God) and Lev 19:18 (regarding your neighbor).
Buddha exhorted his followers to cultivate compassion: I don’t think he attached conditions to that, though his advice was embedded within a broader approach to the human condition.
MrDibble
I’d rather drop my previous reply to you entirely: I have since learned that it contains bad and confused historical analysis. See post 38 for retraction.
[sup]1[/sup]I’m not sure where lekatt gets, “Unconditionally”, but I am certainly no Biblical scholar.
I think Jesus had it right, but we have it all wrong.
That’s cool, although it did bring up an interesting debate point, IMHO.
Overall, I guess my take on the thing is that Jesus’ morality is intellectually desireable, but functionally unrealistic, and that makes it flawed. A flawed morality is not admireable.
Unless his point was that even though it was not expected that we would actually reach the ideal, striving for that ideal is the way to make progress and mantain a balance against the opposite point of view.
There is no flaw in unconditional love. Most humans will not achieve it. But it is the mark we try for, the path we walk. There are great advantages to it, known only to those who try.
That would be a valuable point to make. Do you have a cite for Jesus clearly and unambiguously making the point I’ve underlined above? Otherwise we’re back to flawed teachings which need interpretation.
No cite, If the point is to strive toward the ideal in order to continue to improve then wouldn’t it be defeating the purpose to acknowledge that it’s not actually expected.
We acknowledge that different individuals learn and develop at different rates and achieve different things. As in school, we are all given the same basic goals to strive for and we’d all like to achieve the highest marks even though we know realistically that won’t happen. Why not morals and ethics as well?
And so we have this.
Seems incredibly unrealsitic doesn’t it? What’s the point?
Consistant striving toward the ideal is a solid foundation. Each moral or ethical challange that comes into our lives we can deal with by considering the ideal.
Doesn’t striving for an impossible ideal lead to frustration and a feeling of failure?
Dam clever the way our forgiveness for not achieving perfection is linked to forgiving others for their lack of perfection. What an emotionally healthy concept.
Jesus also recognized that growth was a gradual thing and expected that striving to continue throughout our lives.
Now looking at this in a non spiritual sense we can infer that Jesus was trying to teach his disciples to learn to look inward and learn to trust their own judgement in their striving.
As you say, it is a matter of interpretation and it is your interpretation that his teachings are flawed. IMHO teachings to continue striving and growing for our lifetime is not flawed but rather brilliant.
You and I and everyone else knows there is no such cite. But that still doesn’t make Jesus’ teachings flawed. It only makes your understanding of them flawed.
You can’t apply science dogma to spiritual events.
As I read Matthew it seems to me His ideal was that all should accept his teaching without question and if you didn’t do that you should, and would, go to Hell.
It’s easier to love those who agree with you than to love those who argue.
No flaw ? Unconditional love - unconditional anything is insane. After all, if an emotion is unconditional, by definition it is completely detached from external reality, not to mention ethics and self-preservation. “Unconditional love” is the sort of thing a self destructive abused wife feels for her husband; instead of running away, she puts up wth it because she loves him; caring about being beaten is a “condition”, you see.
Unconditional love is a bad, bad thing to promote. If Jesus taught that, that alone makes him a bad moral teacher.
Prove that Jesus’s teachings are not flawed. It’s rather arrogant to say that that someone who sees a mistake is automatically wrong.
And yes, you can apply science to spiritual events.
Sure.
Unconditional love by everyone, as Jesus taught, is the only thing possible to turn this world into heaven on earth. It could be done in seconds.
Do you have something better. Remember we are assuming the viewpoint of God.
As for science, never will science understand, measure, or produce spirituality. You have to do that all on your own.
If we all go insane, the world will become a paradise ? Somehow I doubt that.
We are not “assuming the viewpoint of God”, whatever that is supposed to mean. God is either nonexistent or infinitely beyond human comprehension; either way, talking about his viewpoint is pointless. Either it doesn’t exist, or we can’t comprehend it.
As far as spirituality and science is concerned, I talked about it in this thread. I’m not going to hijack this one to repeat myself.
Of course, Jesus did not use the word “love”: he spoke in Aramaic (if I understand correctly), and the closest thing we have to original sources are in Greek. So you may well be thinking of something quite different than what Jesus actually meant. In particular, I don’t think the kind of love Jesus taught was an emotion or feeling.
I was less hung up on lekatt’s use of “love” than I was concerned about the word “unconditional”. Like I said, unconditional anything is insane. Absolutes seldom work well in the real world.