The Golden Rule: It’s Universal, but Is It Golden? 

I’m sure you’ve noticed that most religions have, as a core principle, The Golden Rule:

* Christianity – “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (the Bible, Matthew 7:12) 

* Judaism – “What is hateful to you, do not to others.” (the Torah) 

* Taoism – “Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own.” (T’ai-Shang Kan-Ying P’ien) 

* Hinduism – “One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self.” (the Mahabharata)

* Buddhism – “A state that is not pleasing or delightful to me… how could I inflict that upon another?” 

* Confucianism – “What you do not wish done to you, do not do to others.”

* Islam – “None of you has faith until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” (Imam an-Nawawi’s Forty Hadith)

And most of the great ethical philosophers advocated the same idea. Two examples:

* Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative – “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”  

* John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism – “Always do whatever will bring the greatest amount of well-being to the greatest number of people.”

There are, of course, nuances of difference. And they provide for interesting discussions among nit-picky intellectuals. But it seems to me that they are all fundamentally the same. They describe an ethical principle so universal that it could be located deep inside our consciousness, perhaps in the reptilian brain.

Equally universal, it seems to me, would be the number one tenet of the Golden Rule: Thou shalt not kill. And yet, if you listed the top three accomplishments of religion over the ages, you’d have to say that justified murder/genocide is one of them.

Why?