Charles R. Lightner

Many scholars and, I suspect, many teachers and clergy have adopted an unfortunate means of distinguishing between the two statements that we can describe as “do” versus “don’t do”. The “do” statement is typically given in such terms as: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The “don’t do” statement is typically given in such terms as: “That which is hateful to...

In the literature of Golden Rule thinking there are two principle points of departure. The first simply assumes an agreement between the author and his readers on what the rule actually is. We all just know, don’t we? The second approach implicitly acknowledges that the subject is more complicated than that and tackles the problem of specific definition. Assuming away the proble...

I’ve written on the issue of intention in several prior posts. I’ve just read a paper by Daniel Berthold of Bard College in which he compares the views of Kant, the Utilitarians and Freud on the Golden Rule. Berthold lays out the problems with the Golden Rule as seen by Freud and the answers to those problems as understood by Kant and by the original utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and J...

Bruce Chilton writes in his paper, "Jesus, the Golden Rule and Its Application": “Love of God and love of neighbor were basic principles embedded in the Torah. Jesus’ innovation lay in his claim that the two were indivisible. Love of God was love of neighbor, and vice versa” “He (Jesus) linked the Rule to the transformed society the prophets had predicted.” “Because the neighbor...

Professor Csikszentmihalyi, now of UC Berkley, contributed the paper on Confucianism to the Neusner-Chilton volume. He makes it clear at the outset that the questions asked of the writers for this volume have no clear-cut answers in Confucian thought, history or interpretation. “The most commonly cited examples of the Golden Rule in China are from the Analects…of Confucius…Jesuit m...

Richard H. Davis, prolific author and professor of religion at Bard College wrote the contribution to the Neusner-Chilton volume that addresses the Golden Rule in Hinduism. He is careful in titling his paper to signal that a single sentence that appears in a much larger and complex literary work must be viewed in the context in which it is found. Davis identifies a passage from the...

The Neusner-Chilton volume contains two papers on the Golden Rule in Buddhism. The second is by Professor Charles Hallisey, then of the University of Wisconsin, who, like Scheible, concentrates on the south-Asia Theravada tradition. Hallisey prefaces his analysis with the acknowledgement that the historical and cultural diversity of the Buddhist tradition makes: “...a single genera...

Professor Kristin Scheible, then of Bard College, is a scholar of Theravadan Buddhism and wrote on the Golden Rule in that tradition for the Neusner-Chilton conference. She raises two points in her first few sentences that are both crucial to the Buddhist view of life and differentiate it from traditional western religious thinking. 1. The idea of reincarnation as a continuous and ...

Th. Emil Homerin, Professor of religion at the University of Rochester, wrote the paper on the Golden Rule in Islam for the Neusner-Chilton conference and volume. Professor Homerin opens his paper noting that “pre-Islamic Arabs regarded the survival of the tribe, not the individual, as most essential”. The influence of that tribal primacy is echoed in the discussion of the Islamic app...