The Golden Rule is NOT christian

I understand what Nancy LeToureau is trying to do here, but she's as dead wrong as every other religious person who thinks religion has anything to do with morality.  It doesn't.  The Golden Rule has nothing to do with Jesus.  It's not in the bible.  Go ahead, look it up yourself (your pastor is lying to you about that as about everything.)

The Golden Rule - do unto others as you would have them do unto you - and the Veil of Ignorance are, in fact, the foundation of Human Morality.  Which evolved with humanity itself, and became the basis of moral human behavior tens of thousands of years before a bunch of greedy, power-grabbing misogynists invented religion to subdue and impoverish their fellow humans.

The path to restoring the Golden Rule leads far away from the greed, arrogance and IMmorality of religion.  It leads back to human morality, treating others as we want them to treat us.  That is the only thing that matters.  That is the only rule we need.  Religion can't restore the Golden Rule but religion is what kills the Golden Rule.  Make human morality our goal, and fuck this religion shit.

Oh, and the real "reason for the season" is axial tilt.

It has become common to complain that we have forgotten “the reason for the season” when we celebrate Christmas. A theology professor once said something that helped me understand how that happened. He pointed out that Christians tend to celebrate the birth and death of Jesus, but don’t pay much attention to how he actually lived.

That is why my one tradition during these holidays has been to reflect on something kid oakland wrote years ago about the life of the man whose birth so many people celebrate tonight.

SNIP

That does a good job of capturing why so many Christians have abandoned the idea of focusing on how Jesus lived his life. He was a radical—not in doctrine or politics—but in how he treated others.

Throughout history, prophets from every major religion have been telling us the same thing, as Karen Armstrong pointed out.

What we need is a new kind of religious discourse that goes back to the core values of the religion: every single one is based on compassion and on the golden rule, first propounded by Confucius 500 years before Christ: do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain, and then refuse under any circumstance to inflict that pain on anybody else… This is civilization. The golden rule is the basis of civilization.

More than anything else I can think of, that is the antidote to the poison that has infected our system these days. My hope for everyone reading this is that you find a moment of peace to look into your own heart and contemplate your core values.

My core values are religion-free values of human morality.  What are yours?