One Golden Rule

What Would Jesus Invest In?

Sermon on the Mount by Carl Block (1877)

Merry Christmas!

You know what’s given me a lot of hope after getting real depressed after reading Memoirs of a Superfluous Man? You guessed it: Jesus Christ.

I read a book review of The Rise of Christianity on the same website where I first learned about Henry George. Super interesting, I recommend it. In the book review, it is argued that Jesus was the first guy to popularize that man ought to love one another. The book review further argues that Jesus’ message was sort of a once-in-a-species event. And boy was it viral!

I’ve heard it said before that once the idea of human sanctity got a foothold, there’s no escaping the long, slow working out of its implications. While I suspect there were many loving people before Jesus, the love movement seems to have started there. I think the working out of human sanctity, which is really just saying that humans should love one another, is indeed winning the fight over time.

By the way, and there’s part of me that rolls my eyes when I say this, because I’ve heard it a million times in chruch growing up, but did you know that there were 4 different words for “love” in Greek? I kinda like the term of “human sanctity” rather than “love”, when talking about a paradigm shift in our species, though. The “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” kinda just nails it.

If you go back 2,000 years, the cool kids didn’t even have to pretend to be nice to your face. They could kill, enslave, despoil the Earth without ever needing to fund a single, under-privileged, youth scholarship! And no one expected anything otherwise.

That even the bad guys in all our stories have justifications for their behavior, but are either deluded hypocrites or psychopaths, signals how pervasive the assumption that humans ought to love humans is.

Not saying progress has gone smoothly and without set backs, nor am I saying that Christianity has been the only source of progress, but I think Christian missionaries have done good work, overall. The entirety of their message may not be for me, and whether or not there’s a party in Heaven when we die, that’s…unclear. (I’m beginning to think Paul in the New Testament kinda started muddying things up when he started applying a lot of his Jewish scholarship onto Jesus’s message?? Who knows! I’m not going to be researching that! Just some holiday hot takes from a 40 year-old, half Jew, ex-Christian homeschooler here!)

I think, once you agree that all human are sacred, you eventually come around to realizing that one human, or a group, ought not own another. Perhaps you eventually realize that one human, or a group, ought not own the Earth and exclude the others.

Yours truly,
Max