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?

Arguing With Reason

Divine Irony:

To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.

Thomas Paine
(via moralanarchism)

Chainsaw

ummagumma.co:

The Crime of Feeding Homeless People

Make no mistake; this is precisely what the repugs want: poor people dead from starvation, and those who want to help them in jail.

A pastor determined to live out the Bible’s dictate that we feed the poor was shut down by local police because he didn’t have a permit to serve food.

Twice a month, Rick Wood, a pastor at The Lord’s House of Prayer in Oneonta, Alabama, gets in his truck and drives around Birmingham with more than a hundred hot dogs and bottles of water, handing them out to the homeless. Wood has been serving those in need for the past six years because he wants to put Matthew 25:35-40 — “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,” a scripture verse he has plastered on the side of his truck — into action.

But last month, Wood was stopped from handing out food by local police because he was in violation of a new city ordinance, passed in December, that regulates food trucks. The new regulation requires food trucks to get a permit, which can cost as much as $500. Though the ordinance is specifically targeted at retail food vendors, rather than charities, the city nevertheless used it to block Wood.

He was livid. “That makes me so mad,” Wood said in an interview with ABC 33/40 News. “These people are hungry. They’re starving. They need help from people. They can’t afford to buy something from a food truck.”

The pastor accused Birmingham of wanting “to chase them out of the city.”

ABC 33/40 News’ video has more:

If you read this blog, you know I cut religious people not a micrometer of slack for any reason whatsoever. But when their humanitarian and Democratic actions speak louder than their freakazoid beliefs, they will find me beside them in the trenches every time.

Twenty Years Ago This Month

I had completely forgotten.  Or rather, I turned away from remembering when the end of the genocide turned into a civil war, then a multi-nation war, then a massive refugee and humanitarian crisis that not just continues, but continues to get worse.

So read, and remember, and think about how easily enormous permanent wars begin.

Solemn commemorations marking the 20th anniversary of Rwanda's genocide on Monday bore reminders of a festering anger as a major diplomatic row broke out over allegations of France's complicity in the 1994 massacres.

The French ambassador to Kigali said he had been barred from the commemorations after Paris decided to cancel a ministerial visit in response to the renewed accusations by Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo also told France that it had to face up to the "difficult truth" over its involvement in the murder of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis two decades ago.

Official mourning, which began three months ago with a flame of remembrance touring towns and villages across the small central African nation, culminates on Monday when the torch arrives at the national genocide memorial.

Happy Sandwiches

What Repugs Failed to Learn from "Dead Poets Society"

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

It is not an inaccurate or extreme statement to declare that ideological Republicans do not understand what it means to be human. They view human beings as economic units to be plugged at their lowest possible price into a maximally efficient market that provides the greatest possible returns on investment to the wealthy few, with any resulting human resentment and misery dulled by humility before a pleasure-fearing angry God promising rewards to the obedient in the hereafter. It is a dark, meager, shriveled and cramped vision of humanity.

To accept their worldview is to reject the essence of human identity and purpose. If human beings could create a sustainable world of plenty free from violence, war, hunger or want, a world in which human beings were free to devote 24 hours a day to the leisurely pursuit of whatever activities they wished so long as they harmed no one else, conservatives would be terrified.

It's not so much that conservatives don't believe such a world of boundless human potential is possible. It's that they don't want it to be possible.

"Ideological republicans" is redundant.