The Golden Irony

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

If you have a heart disease and you will die, but not unless you get a new heart, tell me, sincerely and honestly - secretly within you if necessary - would you ever reject any opportunity to get such a new heart?

Well, so you know what it is to love yourself.

So now if you have a neighbour who is dying and needs a new heart to live, would you give him or her your heart?

So then it is really possible to live by the golden rule to love your neighbour as yourself?

Perhaps Jesus was being ironical and sarcastic when he said that the supreme law in the Torah is to love your neighbour as yourself, for he knows it is impossible for you to do. Not that it is not true, but it is just impractical for humankind.

Similarly Jesus have said that to be perfect is to be like God himself. Again is it possible for a man to be even close to God himself?

And thus these examples illustrate the real reasons for the law, namely to tell you how short you are from it, and how impossible is it for you to ‘earn’ your righteousness.

And thus all have sin and fallen short of the glory of God.

And that is the destiny of men, to be glorious as God is glorious.

2

that’s an extraordinarily bad example.

I don’t think god would want you to sacrifice your own life for someone else.

But I think he would be happy if you became an organ donor so that when you die someone else can continue to live. So in a way you can give your organs to those who need them, but you shouldn’t kill yourself to accomplish that. :slight_smile:

3

if everybody in the world made an honest effort to treat their neighbor like themself, and whenever they were faced with one of these tough decisions, they totally blew it and became selfish…

how freakin awesome world the world be?

would you be pissed that your neighbor messed up one single time in defense of his own life?

4

Says who? and Why so?

Such things happen dont they? And if they do what does the golden rule means then?

Why should you interprete it other than I did?

5

Er … what do you mean? Do you mean would I FORGIVE my neighbour if for once he busted the golden rule and not give me his heart when I am dying?

6

That’s what you think.

Who are you to say when and why God will be happy and to speak on his behalf? God have appointed prophets to speak for him and the prophet Moses have declared the so-called ‘golden rule’, and it means what it means, that you love your neighbour as yourself.

So do you not want a heart when you will die unless you get a new heart?

If you say no, so be it, and then by all means keep your heart when you neighbour needs it. But thats what you say with your mouth. No one sees your heart but God alone.

7

Moses didn’t declare the golden rule, christ and buddha did.

and who am I to speak on gods behalf? I feel I have just as much right as you or Moses to do so.

8

Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people,
but love your neighbor as yourself.
I am the LORD.
[Lev 19:18]

9

You felt you have the right …

Well I suppose you know whether feelings are good enough a justification or reason for thinking or believing anything, even less to give you a right.

You certainly will not believe whatever I say, if I had said it was on behalf of the President of the USA, would you? So how can anyone, apart from fools, believe anything from someone who felt that he or she can speak on behalf of God?

10

i agree chanbeng that probably nobody has the right to talk to god more than me.

luckily, we can all talk to god. call him the universe and observe the effects that our and others’ decisions have and we can use that info from god to imagine hypothetical situations.

imagine you are dying and in need of a brand new heart. somebody whos a real nice guy, a real great christian guy who sacrifices for the community all the freaking time. he shows up minutes after you get the hospital, gets down on his knees and says chanbengchin, i want to give you my heart.

honestly i guess its possible that you would selfishly gobble that opportunity right up, but i would feel pretty bad about it. so bad that i would never put somebody else in that position.

god filled the universe with two different kinds of events, ones that humans control and ones that they dont. the latter, therefore are the ones that they are forced to accept. i think the golden rule only applies to those things that are controlled by humans. perhaps this completely prevents the presence of these kinds of exceptions to the golden rule youre talking about?

in this case, the germs or bad decisions on the part of the guy with a bad heart are what caused his healable pain. they have been dealt to him, whether it was his fault or stupidity or not. to maliciously transfer that pain to somebody else who was not dealt gods will would be wrong if he did it on purpose and he knows that transfering either way would surely kill his friend.

according to the golden rule, the badhearted man KNOWS that he is not supposed to take a heart, because it will hurt others. and all the other potential heart donors know that this is so. he knows that he will feel really guilty if someone does it behind his back because he can guess that any non-suicidal donor would have prefered to stay alive.

unless of course we are talking about a guy who has a bad heart and is a valuable community leader. thats another equation… but its there.

…about that ambiguous community effect,
usually, when you sacrifice, the good that is accomplished is worth more than the sacrifice. in this case it killed somebody and took off a certain number of years from the end of their life, and added a few more to other guy.

if they guy gains more years than the donor lost and you can somehow know that beforehand, well thats hard. id do it for my son definetely. say you give a 40 year old a kidney, well then its quite possible that the number of years the 40 year old lives is greater than the number of years the donor doesnt live.

in that case id say the guy who just chopped off a decade or so from the donor’s life would feel pretty guilty, but overall selfishly happy that it happened. therefore, if this was our wife and it was made quite clear that the gain was more years than the loss, then maybe denying our wife a kidney could be a transgression comparable to saving your family by killing an innocent guy or something.

whatever it is, it does not matter. all that matters is if you think you did good. thats all that god can possibly expect from us. he gave us a universe that can shape our beliefs such that we can see the world through entirely different eyes that see crazy, unrelated views on morality and what constitutes a neighbor. it is completely possible to believe anything, and possible to follow that as best as you think can be done. if you didnt know it was bad and that that information was available, theres no way your accountable.

11

well if we go by that scripture YHWH declared the golden rule not Moses.

and Christ is YHWH according to christian belief.

12

Future Man,

I dont think the golden rule is that convoluted

And previously you are complaining that God’s ways are too complex. Here we have a simple way being corrupted and twisted beyond recognition by man.

For where in the simple golden rule, did it say to consider the one receiving your love before you give it? Where did it say you ought to be calculative in the way you execute the rule? And you are complaining that Catholics add their own rules to the pristine truth.

Whether he be a good man, a bad man, whether he deserves his predicament or not, whether he will abuse your love or be grateful for it, whether he is selfish or selfless, they are all entirely irrelevant.

In any case who are you to judge someone as good or worthy or deserving? Is it not only God who can truly and justly judge being the maker, knower and Master of all hearts? Who are you to be the judge?

That someone is ‘bad’ in the past does not mean he will not and cannot be ‘good’ after given a second lease of life. Can you justifiably and reasonably say anything on that?

The golden rule just say love, ie do unto the other as you would have done to you, if you are in the same situation.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the dying, wounded man did not say a single word, being probably unconscious, and is totally unknown, and a stranger to the Samaritan who came to his aid, carried him to the inn, and paid for his care.

And no one knows if the wouded man was a community leader, a poor farmer, or the city fool. All we know is that he is going from Jerusalem to Jericho.

How do you think the wounded man felt when he realised how he was saved after recovering from his wounds? Maybe he just got up, skipped along, totally oblivious to the magnanimity done to him. But then these are irrelevant to the golden rule.

If you were that wounded man, would you feel bad about being saved from death? And would it change your life henceforth? Whereas you should have died but now you are giving a gift of life, how then should you live life?

Let me now amend my bad-heart scenario a little.Suppose you are one with the bad heart, and a good heart have been found for you. You asked and verified that the heart came, not from a living person, but from someone who had pledge his organs and now have died. Then you also learnt that there are at least ten people on the waiting list for the heart. What will you do now?As to your point about God-controlled and human-controlled events, I shall address that another time but for the moment, consider these two things: What is meant when it is said that God is sovereign? and then this:Many are the plans in a man’s heart,
but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.
[Pro 19:21]

13

Sure but the exact context was that the people of Israel said they feared to hear God directly and the enitre Torah was declared to Moses alone by YHWH. And it is Moses who in turn declared to the people. And Jesus was alluding to Moses and the Torah when he answered the Pharisees with the ‘golden rule’, the undertone being, “You know Moses and the Torah and you still have to ask?” And Jesus didnt come to change the Torah but to fulfil it.

But my whole purpose here is to point out what I think is the real meaning and intent in Jesus isolating this rule from the entire Torah.

What did Jesus meant? Was he being ironical? He is certainly not substituting it for belief in God is he? In fact the ‘golden rule’ is just the second part of the full ‘golden rule’, the first being to love God, and often that is ignored …

14

If your neighbour also loves you, he would not accept your heart. :slight_smile:

The golden rule works well in an utilitarian system.

15

But the golden rule didnt say anything about your neighbour loving you, ie it is not like ‘love your neighbour IF he loves you’. It just say love your neighbour. It’s another matter if your reighbour rejects your heart and say give it to someone else; perhaps he is following the golden rule too, but that’s entirely irrelevant.

16

well the lord hasnt shot out of the sky and made his purpose clear to me, unless you count shooting out of the sky and having somebody rich write it down for you. (no matthew mark luke were not rich, but their dark age monk transcribers were)

i think it means god made the things that affect the plans of humans, no human plans can completely change this design of the universe. we need to study those effects and not expect some literal meaning from the bible to come true in a way that science says it wont.

eating crackers for no reason is different.

in order to see if the guy is in the ‘same situation’ as you, you have to analyze the situation. maybe jesus defined ‘others’ to mean plants and animals, in which case the ensuing hunger strike was actually the apocalypse and we are living in the hellish aftermath.

any good christian can imagine being an evildoer and then one day realizing they will not be one anymore. they still have that shameful past, and on that same day, their heart dies. i dont think they would want a new one from a good christian if they had combined the actions of the evil-badheart guy with their own thoughts.

plus, all the stories in the bible about good samaritans, they talk about a little sacrifice for a big gain (money for life is little, life for life is rough). if in order to save the guy on the side of the road, the samaritan had to almost equal the suffering of the guy on the road in order to help him then i think the bible would have treated it much differently.

the fact is, virtually every time you have to sacrifice to help others, its a little sacrifice and a big gain and therefore not much of a question. if you get stressed out thinking about whether or not you should commit suicide to help someone then i think god will give you the thumbs up on that.

plus i didnt say bad people deserve less, i said good people maybe deserve more since the good that will come from them will mostly likely be better than from anybody else, even you with your good heart. i dont think god would mandate that though so i guess its irrelevant.

somebody has to get it. again if there was a great community leader id give it to him, but i dont think god would hold you accountable for being first in line, somebody has to be.

perhaps jesus emphasized this big rule and said to always follow it and even went a little overboard in his descriptions since nobody had ever accepted thoughts like this before? and then maybe the church added and embellished them way overboard because a golden rule following population is easier to smash and demoralize with your iron fist.

fact remains, if we all followed the rule, and if all of these difficult situations were resolved by killing all parties involved brutally, the world would still be a much better place overall.

17

Fact?

Since when?

Have you any evidence of this, since it is certain and claer that not all are following the rule …

Why not that we can attain a better world if all follow the eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth rule instead?

18

because violence causes violence.

Violence to discipline violent behavior solves nothing.

The golden rule if it were accepted on a broad scale would cease the need for violence.

19

chanbengchin,

I find your argument to be specious at best. First, you assume and argue that the golden rule allow’s us to play God.(make life/death decisions) Having set up the straw dog, you then proceed to argue that we can’t (or won’t) make those life/death decisions and therefore the golden rule isn’t humanly possible. Just where did you find the insight that the golden rule require’s us to be as God?

If all you are trying to say is that humanity is imperfect (as to creator), so what? The wisdom of the golden rule implies our imperfection and ask’s us to rise above our baseness. No where does it ask us to be as God.

JT

20

have criminals proven that they are afraid of being punished? cause thats how eye for an eye works. it tries to scare people. therefore, if this is morality, then in all the cases where a criminal knows that he wont be seen or caught by any humans, then he knows he wont be punished and therefore is encouraged to commit the crime.

promoting an eye for an eye is like saying everything evens out, but only if you get caught. so dont get caught.

it just doesnt sound as wholesome as preaching that what you do has the same effects on others as it has on you. if you accept other peoples pain as your own then you dont have to get caught in order to vicariously feel the pain. the thing we should be promoting is brainwashing people into vicariously feeling the pain of their victims on their own. we shouldnt have to actually inflict it on them again, it makes them avoid the authority, not the guilt.