I saw this guy this morning, must have been about 70 or so, maybe older, who lives in Libya. Scene of the latest natural disaster. When he should perhaps be enjoying the fruits of a long life, surrounded by family, instead he was weeping at the loss of four close family members. Heartbreaking. The image remains.
As I plough on through "The Fifth Dimension" by John Hick, there was a passage about the so called "Golden Rule".
Just to share, here it is:-
In contrast to this, it is the basic teaching of all the world religions that we should behave towards others as we would wish others to behave towards us. This has appealed to the human conscience in every part of the world and in every generation: ‘One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to oneself’ (the Hindu Mahabharata, Anushana parva, 113:7); One should go about ‘treating all creatures in the world as he himself would be treated’ (the Jain Kritanga Sutra, I, 11:33); ‘As a mother cares for her son, all her days, so towards all living things a man’s mind should be all-embracing’ (the Buddhist Sutta Nipata, 149); ‘Do not do to others what you would not like yourself’ (the Analects of Confucius, XII: 2); A good man should ‘regard others’ gains as if they were his own, and their losses in the same way’ (the Taoist Thai Shang, 3); ‘That nature only is good when it shall not do to unto another whatever is not good for its own self’ (The Zoroastrian Dadistan-i-dinik, 94: 5); ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise’ (Jesus in Luke 6:31); ‘What is hateful to yourself do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah’ (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbath 31a); ‘No man is a true believer unless he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself’ (Muhammad in the Hadith Ibn Madja, Introduction, 9); ‘Lay not on any soul a load which ye would not wish to be laid upon you, and desire not for anyone the things ye would not desire for yourselves’ (the Bahá’í Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, 66, 127); and going behind the post-axial faiths to ‘primal’ religion, ‘Grandfather Great Spirit, all over the world the faces of living ones are alike. With tenderness they have come up out of the ground. Give us the strength to understand, and the eyes to see. Teach us to walk the soft Earth as relatives to all that live’ (Sioux prayer, in Roberts, p. 184). This is the common moral outlook of the great traditions.
For me, all this points also towards sharing the suffering of others, empathy, in some strange way seeing and knowing all others as ourselves. It often strikes me how I myself can move on from any particular suffering of another, yet the one who suffers remains with their pain and anguish. Moving on - remaining.
