God and the Golden Rule

The Golden Rule and the Oneness of God

By John Taylor; 1 March, 2006

I wish to talk today about how reciprocity, the Golden Rule, relates
to Oneness of God.

Last time, we looked at how life thrives, innovates and maintains
consistency of past with future by means of sexual reproduction. By
means of sex, organisms for billions of years have conserved the best
of past experience while adapting to change and accommodating
innovation. In humans, sex is controlled and domesticated by the
family. The institution of the family is how humans maintain history,
consistency over many generations. For that reason sexual morality is
the first concern of the law of God. Sex informs its very structure.

A striking example is the Ten Commandments. The Decalogue starts with
three laws maintaining the oneness of God; one, it forbids other Gods,
idols, two, it disallows taking God's name in vain, and three, no work
permitted on the Sabbath. After these three spiritual laws, it
immediately proceeds to obedience to parents. Then, "thou shalt not
commit murder," and third, adultery is forbidden. That is, two out of
these first three social laws are designed to maintain the consistency
of family with a jealous God who shows "steadfast love to thousands
who will love me and keep my commandments." (Deut 5:10, RSV) It would
be impossible to tease sex and family out of this legal system; even
the Oneness of God and our love for Him is framed in sexual terms; God
is pictured as a "jealous" Deity, one who will avenge Himself when
spurned. To say "God is love" has consequences, and not all are always
pretty. But there is a clear reason for it all, and that is
consistency.

Some essays ago we noted a good point about consistency that a Muslim
intellectual made, that in many respects we keep our private faith and
ideals separate from our public, community life, that we do not force
our beliefs into the public forum where they are not welcome or
appropriate, however the principle of consistency requires that we
live up to what we believe, that we reflect in word and deed the best
of our private ideals in all aspects of life. Conversely, the needs of
society should be an intimate concern of our inner life too. Such
consistency is a requirement of justice.

The moral philosopher who dealt with this most incisively was Joseph
Butler, who argued against hedonists' tendency to draw artificial
dichotomies, to divorce private pleasure from public service. Arguing
on scriptural grounds, Bishop Butler held that both sides enhance one
another; what is bad for personal enjoyment is bad for the public
good, and what is good for one upholds the good of the other. His
prose is admittedly terse and difficult but I think it repays what it
demands of the reader. He says,

"And since the apostle speaks of the several members as having
distinct offices, which implies the mind; it cannot be thought an
unallowable liberty; instead of the body and its members, to
substitute the whole nature of man, and all the variety of internal
principles which belong to it. And then the comparison will be between
the nature of man as respecting self, and tending to private good, his
own preservation and happiness; and the nature of man as having
respect to society, and tending to promote public good, the happiness
of that society. These ends do indeed perfectly coincide; and to aim
at public and private good are so far from being inconsistent, that
they mutually promote each other... we were made for society and to do
good to our fellow-creatures, as that we were intended to take care of
our own life and health and private good: and that the same objections
lie against one of these assertions, as against the other." (Butler,
in Meldon, 240-1)

Butler makes clear a connection that we often forget between the term
"organic" and the analogy of the body politic, of the human race as a
single body. "Organic" is not just a catch phrase, it means literally
as interdependent as an organ of the body. Your skin or your heart or
any other bodily organ cannot get up and walk away from you. If it
did, it would die and the whole body would die. That is organic unity.
Similarly, Butler defines human nature in organic terms; the natural
is whatever is "proportionate to our nature." Virtue, then, is the
very architecture of our nature, of the soul and of politics. Butler's
belief that we are made for virtue, that virtue is natural to both
public and private is something to bear in mind as the fast begins
today. I not only can do this, I was created to bear it; I am at my
best now, in the tough times, and this good has to be good in the long
term for the world too. That is what I will tell myself.

We also mentioned earlier that this principle of consistency is a
cornerstone of mathematics, for example in laws like that of
transitivity. The transitive law decrees that when A bears a relation
to B and B bears it to C, then A has the same relation to C. The
principle of oneness of God is transitive, for insofar as I reflect
the One, and you reflect the One, we are both one at heart, at the
deepest level of our being. In other words, love. We love God,
therefore we love one another.

"If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for
he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God
whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he
who loveth God love his brother also." (1 John 4:20-21)

In the moral sphere, this transitive law of One God of love is often
called the Golden Rule. It encapsulates all the outer forms of
religion and every expression of spiritual life. "For all the law is
fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself." (Gal 5:14)

A while back I was surfing the Net semi-randomly and came across some
comments in a student newspaper by a pastor at Brock University. At
their pastor's booth during opening ceremonies he had handed out
little rulers labeled "Golden Rule" to incoming students. He expressed
shock and dismay at the number of young people who did not understand
the pun "Golden Ruler" simply because they had never even heard of the
Golden Rule in the first place. He pointed out what Baha'is know well,
that it is as close to a universal moral teaching as you could ask
for. The good pastor then offered a nice sampling of quotes from a
variety of religions and philosophical traditions. I then surfed over
to a site devoted to the Golden Rule and found many more examples,
including a pair of counter examples. Only two denominations are known
to reject the Golden Rule completely, the Church of Satan and the
White supremacist "Creativity Movement." (cf. religioustolerance.org)
In spite of this startlingly broad agreement among faith traditions,
the fact remains that if most people have never heard of the Golden
Rule, the result is the same as if they had all disagreed with the
rule. Passive consent can often end up the same as active rejection.

I do not think things could have come to this pass if a majority
realized how intimately linked the very concept of One God is with
justice and the Golden Rule. Everybody has heard of the word "God,"
and something like eighty percent accept His existence, at least
theoretically. Yet can you even say the word "God" without knowing
well what the Golden Rule is? I think not. Why is it called "Golden"
in the first place? Is the Golden Rule a gold colored ruler that you
can hand out to bystanders in the street? Um, no. I think it is called
golden because it is like the philosopher's stone. A touch of it and
it transforms base metals into gold; a touch of the Golden Rule and
unworthy human motives are made bright, precious and valuable as gold.
Gold is a symbol of love, and God is love. Alexander Pope put it
poetically in his Essay on Man,

"Ev'n mean Self-love becomes, by force divine,
The scale to measure others' wants by thine."

To say "God is love" is to talk of the Golden Rule at work. Unlike a
Philosopher's Stone or Midas's touch (a technology to transmute matter
could conceivably be invented one day), love is already here, it
always works, we are made to use it, and its effect is inevitably
good, without drawbacks. In the form of the Golden Rule, love has a
miraculous ability to do nothing but good. By contrast, the story of
King Midas is perhaps the earliest example of dystopian fiction; it
teaches that the ability literally to change objects into gold would
be a curse rather than a blessing. Like all material gifts, taken to
an extreme it crushes the value in all else.

Divine love is the perfect philosopher's stone because it is born in
Oneness of God. It unites naturally, justly, organically, harmonizing
as it unifies. It works the fabric our lives together like a weaver
intermingling vertical and horizontal thread, warp and woof, to make a
single design in cloth. Our human will and that of God intermingle to
make a single fabric called providence. This creative collaboration
has also been compared in scripture to writing.

"All this ...the Lord made me understand in writing by his hand upon
me, even all the works of this pattern." (I Ch 28:19)

Material love and temporal thought, on the other hand, do not weave
things together in the way of the Golden Rule, they dissect, split
apart, killing what they analyze. This imperfection is the result of
their being incomplete, for they need the love of God. It is at this
Golden point where the Master's concept of Oneness begins. For Him, to
love the vision of truth is to plug into an infinite power source that
illumines and vivifies the entire creation. The love of God is a sun
illuminating all things,

"The lights of earth are all acceptable, but the center of effulgence
is the sun, and we must direct our gaze to the sun. God is the Supreme
Center. The more we turn toward this Center of Light, the greater will
be our capacity." (Promulgation, 15)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com