LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR COMMAND HAS NO DEPTH AND IT DOESN'T HELP
According to God, who said it through Moses and Jesus in the Bible, you must
love your neighbour as yourself.
It does not really help in the big questions.
Society may think it is best protected if it executes murderers. Society may
think it is best protected if it jails them in a nice prison. Society may think
it is best protected if it dumps them in a dungeon. Nobody really knows. If
people are deterred by the punishments, they are not going to tell us.
And what about how to punish and deal with sociopathic children?
Christians do not pay much attention to love your neighbour as yourself in
practice. For example, if Charlie forgives unrepentant James for beating him up
without mercy and refuses to press charges though it is a good option, the
Christians praise this. They have no concern for Charlie being so stupid, They
take a smug happiness in the thought of James getting away with it and maybe
somebody else getting hurt at his hands.
Another example, is how people may say that I can annoy my neighbours by making
a lot of unnecessary noise for it is my house.
Another example is how you marry which means you are going to treat one
neighbour (your spouse) as yourself and the others as secondary.
The rule fails to help with issues like, "Should I kill myself to provide my
organs so that five people will survive?"
"Should I have an abortion to save my health?"
"Should I blackmail Ann not to use the birth control pills for they will kill
the human persons she conceives or should I replace the pills with tic tacs?"
"Should we enable cars to travel only at 40 kph max to save lives ended on the
roads when life matters more than convenience?"
"Should smokers be put to the back of the list when looking for hospital
treatment to let those who are sick though they do not abuse themselves be
looked after first?"
"Should I shoot my wife for working at an abortion clinic and killing all those
unborn babies?"
Which of these is loving others as much as myself? Hundreds of issues could be
added to the list.
Like Jesus, the Christians like to sound as if they are speaking wisdom while
they are saying nothing helpful at all. Christians claim the command to make
themselves look good but they do not use it as a measuring stick for their
lives. They ignore it and then instigate hatred against anybody who deplores it
or questions it. If disobeying it doesn't do them much harm then why should
scoffers of the commandment be hounded and criticised?
Love thy neighbour is not helpful. But it has a better chance of helping an
atheist or naturalist than a believer. The believer has a lot of strange sins
and evils to believe in. For example, the believer could regard you as doing
harm or siding with satanic deception for not believing that Mary was the Mother
of God. The atheist will be more liberal than that or should be.
The more complicated your ideas of what people should believe and do are the
more impractical the rule becomes. In fact, people who believe in silly things
such as that two men who had oral sex together once are grave sinners for doing
so though they harmed none can't expect us to take them seriously when they
preach the love of neighbour and especially if they claim to be serious about
putting it into practice! They are putting theological beliefs before people.
Countless different examples could be given instead of the ones I have given.
When the atheist marries, the atheist does not inflict torment on himself about
the decision whether or not to use condoms as a Catholic would. The atheist is
able to love himself and therefore others better than the Catholic.
People often say they believe in God and encourage the belief in their children
because life would be harder to endure without faith. That flatly contradicts
the very authority who says we must love our neighbour as ourselves. This rule
is very hard. It should make faith harder not easier. The authority making the
rule is stated to be God in the Bible.
God says we are to love him totally but not to love ourselves or our neighbour
totally. We are to love God totally and love our neighbour as ourselves - that
is less than God. To love God for comfort is to love comfort not God. If we love
God, we will love him for himself even it kills us. If he cannot give us any
benefit for this love we must still do it.
Rules and messages allegedly from Heaven with no depth are about making people
feel good and not about making them good.