Thursday, March 14, 2024

Tarnishing the Name of Jesus

It was a week ago tonight that Pres. Biden delivered the annual State of the Union (SOTU) message. His address was widely applauded by Democrats and by the mainstream media—and, not surprisingly, panned by Republicans and by right-wing news outlets who castigate the “lamestream” media.

This post, though, is about the Republican rebuttal speech given by Alabama Senator Katie Britt. 

Katie Boyd Britt (b. 1982) was elected the junior Senator from Alabama in 2022, defeating Democrat Will Boyd, a Black Baptist pastor. She received nearly 67% of the vote.

I didn’t remember hearing the name of Sen. Britt before I saw that she would give the rebuttal after the SOTU address, so I looked her up on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

In a July 2021 interview, Britt stated, “Jesus Christ is the most important thing in life, and that should be the foundation that everything else comes around.” I certainly would not disagree with that, but surely such a statement should include telling the truth and not bearing false witness.

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times candidly stated that “the woman sitting in the kitchen with the cross glittering on her neck lied.” After listening (on Friday) to her Thursday night rebuttal speech, that clearly seems to be the case.

And given what she has said about Jesus Christ and the sparkling (diamond-studded?) cross around her neck as she gave her speech, it seemed to me that she was tarnishing the name of Jesus.

No wonder more and more people in the U.S. are leaving the Christian faith and joining the “nones.”

Sen. Boyd’s rebuttal speech was criticized and critiqued by a wide variety of voices. For example, here is part of what historian Heather Cox Richardson (HCR) wrote about Katie’s talk in her March 8 newsletter:

Sitting in a kitchen rather than in a setting that reflected her position in one of the nation’s highest elected offices, Britt conspicuously wore a necklace with a cross and spoke in a breathy, childlike voice as she wavered between smiles and the suggestion she was on the verge of tears. 

At the close of HRC’s letter, I first learned about Jess Piper and her Substack posts under the name “The View from Rural Missouri.” Her March 8 “view” was titled “The Fundie Baby Voice.”*

But it wasn’t the voice that most disturbed me. It was the lies that Sen. Britt told in that problematic voice.

In his remarks at the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday evening, Jimmy Kimmel made these remarks about Emma Stone, who had just been awarded the Best Actress Oscar: “Emma, you are so unbelievably great in Poor Things. Emma played an adult woman with the brain of a child, like the lady who gave the rebuttal to the State of the Union on Thursday night.”**

Sen. Boyd did her best to harm Pres. Biden and to lessen his chances of winning a second term as POTUS. She may have done the Republicans more harm than good, however.

I was saddened by the touching story she told of talking last year with the girl who had been a victim of sex trafficking—and then off-put by her blaming the President for that tragic event. And then I was incensed when it turned out the incident in question took place when George W. Bush was President!

On Monday, Washington Post associate editor and columnist Karen Tumulty wrote that the “horrific story” Katie told, “at least by implication, turned out to be a big fat lie.”

Tumulty went on to note that the “Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler awarded Britt four Pinocchios for the way she twisted this tragic story to make a cravenly partisan point.”

Despite her later efforts to walk back what she had said, there was no way her listeners could have known she was talking about an incident that took place more than a decade ago. Even if it wasn’t a blatant lie, it was highly deceitful and told with the intent of harming the President.

It is quite clear, though, that in spite of her prominent display of a cross on a necklace and pious talk, she tarnished the name of Jesus and did the cause of Christ far more harm than good.

_____

  * Jess Piper lives in (or near) Maryville, Missouri, which is about 35 miles from my hometown. In 2022 she ran as a progressive Democrat to become a Representative in the Missouri legislature, but she was soundly defeated in the district that twice voted for Trump by 80% or so. I am now receiving her Substack posts and have had email exchanges with her this week.

** This was a powerful putdown of Sen. Britt’s rebuttal speech to those who had seen Emma Stone's Oscar-winning performance in Poor Things, but I do not recommend that movie except to insightful, mature adults.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

The 4-Ls: Life ◈ Love ◈ Light ◈ Liberty

The header at the top of all my blog posts contains the words “Reflections about Life, Love, Light, and Liberty.” Those are the 4-Ls that I have emphasized for years and about which I am finally explaining in this blog post. 

Some of you may have wondered why more of my blog articles are not more “religious” or more explicitly “Christian.” Many of you know that I was ordained as a Christian minister at the age of 18 and that I served for 38 years as a missionary in Japan.

True, some of my blog posts are clearly Christian and/or religious. But many could, conceivably, have been written by one who is neither Christian nor religious as that word is generally understood.

But with a few exceptions, most of my blog posts are directly related to life, love, light, and liberty, the 4-Ls, and those words are basic concepts of the Christian faith and at the core of my life and work.

In 1995 after I had been elected as Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin, the large educational institution in Japan where I had been a university faculty member since 1968, a local newspaper reporter asked me what I would be emphasizing as the head of what was widely known as a “Christian school.”

Beginning at least in a 1994 Christmas sermon in a school Chapel service, I talked about four words that began with the letter L in English. (Those words are known by any Japanese person with a high school education.) So that is what I told the reporter I would be emphasizing.

Not long after I was installed as chancellor, Nakamura Kunie-san, one of my supporting staff members, presented me with the following wall hanging that I kept in my office during the eight years I served as chancellor—and have had hanging above my desk here in the States ever since retirement in 2004.

On the back, Nakamura-san pasted an explanation of the simple image, saying they were the four Ls: Life (生命), Love (聖愛), Light (公明), Liberty (自由). (The Japanese words do not begin with an L sound; they are pronounced seimei, seiai, kōmei, and jiyū.*)

Most of my Japanese students were not interested in religion when I began teaching Christian Studies at Seinan Gakuin University (SGU) in 1968—and that remained so during my three decades teaching required courses in what was founded as, and continued as, a Christian school.

Not long after starting my teaching career at SGU, I came across a book titled ABC’s of Christian Faith (1968) by Union Theological Seminary professor James D. Smart (1906~82). I was impressed by that book and its unifying theme: “Life in God.”

After reading Smart’s book which emphasized that Christianity at its core was not about religion but about life, I decided that since I was teaching an introductory course on Christian beliefs, I would relate my lectures to how Jesus came not to start a new religion but to help people live a meaningful life.

The foundation of that emphasis was Jesus’ words as recorded in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (v. 10, NRSV).**

Later, love became a central theme in the new course on Christian ethics that I developed. While there continued to be considerable disinterest in religion, students were generally interested in learning about people who lived lives exhibiting Christian love.

Then through the years, I also began to emphasize the Christian emphasis on light as well as liberty, so by the mid-1990s, the 4-Ls were prominent enough in my mind to make them the focal point of my work as head of Seinan Gakuin, the educational institution with around 10,000 students and pupils.

I wanted then to speak meaningfully to the mostly non-Christian students, staff, and faculty at Seinan Gakuin in Japan. And now I want to write these blog articles so that those who are not, or no longer, active Christians will also find them thought-provoking and relevant for the living of these days.

_____

 * The image at the top of this post is the center of a large hanging scroll which I received as a gift at the end of my term as Chancellor. The Japanese words for the 4-Ls are written by stylized brush strokes and are read from top to bottom and from right to left.

** I plan to write more about Life in my March 30 blog post and about Love, Light, and Liberty over the next several weeks. 

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Beware of “Greenwashing”

We are all familiar with the term “whitewashing.” The verb whitewash used in the figurative sense means "to cover up, conceal, give a false appearance of cleanness to," and it was used with that meaning by the middle of the 18th century

But what about “greenwashing”? What does that word mean and why should we beware of what it designates? 

Greenwashing is defined as “the act or practice of making a product, policy, activity, etc. appear to be more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than it really is.” This word was first used around 1990.*1

Since it is a form of deception, we must be aware of and beware of greenwashing. This is one of the many important emphases in a new book (in English) that I have read and written a review of this month.*2

The book title is Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, and the author’s name is given as Kōhei Saitō. The English translation was issued just last month, but the original Japanese edition was published in 2020, and its (translated) title is “Capital” in the Anthropocene.*3

Saitō (b. 1987) was born in Japan but was a university student in the U.S. from 2005 to 2009 and then in Germany, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in 2015. After a few years teaching at a university in Osaka, in 2022 he became an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo.

“Ecology Is the Opiate of the Masses!” is the attention-grabbing title of the Introduction in Saitō’s book. He explains,

Long ago, Marx characterized religion as “the opiate of the masses” because he saw it as offering temporary relief from the painful reality brought about by capitalism. SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals] are none other than a contemporary version of the same “opiate” (xvii-xviii).

Before that, though, in his preface to the English edition, Saitō asserts that “greenwashing is everywhere,” and he describes that concept as “an optimistic belief in green technologies and green growth” and says that it “may be nothing more than a ploy to buy time for capitalism” (xi).

Saitō’s main criticism is not directed toward the global warming deniers, whom he rarely mentions, but toward those who want to save the environment. Thus, his second chapter mainly disparages proponents of the Green New Deal (GND)—as I was when I made a blog post affirming the GND in Feb. 2019.

He asks, “Can a Green New Deal really save us,” and he answers his rhetorical question in the negative. Why? Because those espousing the Green New Deal emphasize “green growth,” which Saitō thinks is impossible. And now I think he is probably right and my previous support of the GND was wrong.

Politicians always have to be concerned about the next election, so affirming “green growth” is a way of appealing to those who want to combat the dangers of climate change as well as to continue receiving the support of “big business.”

But Saitō’s main point throughout his book is clearly stated in the Introduction: capitalism is the “root cause” of the current climate crisis (p. xix). Greenwashing is used to protect capitalism by making people think that the GND and the like will alleviate the ever-increasing environmental crisis.

So, why should we beware of greenwashing? For the simple reason that the New Green Deal and other similar plans for saving the planet from global warming are deceitful, for they propose that that can be done with capitalism kept intact. Still, the NGD is certainly better than maintaining the status quo.

Saitō’s analysis of the climate/ecological problem is most probably accurate. (You’ll have to read Saitō’s book or at least a/my review of it to understand what degrowth communism means and why he thinks that it is the only viable solution to the current climate crisis.)

But the solution he posits, a worldwide shift from capitalism to degrowth communism, is absolutely unrealistic. Even Saitō says, “The Earth will become uninhabitable for humankind before capitalism collapses” (p. 26).

But, sadly, with the MAGA Republicans refusing to provide additional funding for Ukraine and candidate Trump saying he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” if it attacked a NATO country that didnt pay enough for defense, perhaps nuclear warfare will bring the end of the world as we know it before the ecological crisis does.

_____

*1 From the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.

*2 The review was written for The Englewood Review of Books, which provided me with a free copy of Saitō’s thought-provoking book. My review will appear on ERB’s website next month, but you can read (here) the review article (of around 1,200 words) that I submitted to Englewood.

*3 In the first printing of the English translation, all references to global temperatures should be disregarded, for they are all incorrect. I was able to exchange emails with author Saitō about this matter, and he said it was “a stupid conversion error” that has already been fixed on the Kindle version and will be corrected in the subsequent printings of the published book.

Note: Here is the link to a YouTube video of Saitō explaining his understanding of degrowth communism. That video has had nearly 10,000 views, and there are other, and longer, videos by Saitō on YouTube. 

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Do You Know about TheGrio and the Icon Awards?

As this is Black History Month, it seems like a good time to post an article about TheGrio, which I just learned about by accident earlier this month. Some of you, I assume, know about TheGrio, but my guess is that most of you know little if any about it. 

TheGrio is “an American television network and website with news, opinion, entertainment and video content geared toward African-Americans.” It can be watched free on the internet, and it is also available on local TV in many cities across the U.S.*

TheGrio’s name comes from griot, a Western African word that designates a musician-entertainer who plays a vital role in preserving their people's oral traditions and histories.

Although I rarely watch local TV, I happened to turn on CBS on the evening of Feb. 3 and theGrio’s Icon Awards program was being telecast. I listened with interest to speeches by three of the Icon recipients, the three I am briefly introducing below.

Al Sharpton received the Justice Ikon Award. According to Wikipedia, Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. (b. 1954) is “an American civil rights and social justice activist, Baptist minister, radio talk show host, and TV personality, who is also the founder of the National Action Network civil rights organization.” 

Sharpton has been a leading, and controversial, civil rights leader for nearly 55 years now. He has also sought various political offices, including that of POTUS (in 2004), but was never elected.

At the end of his theGrioAwards speech, Sharpton said, “The only thing that I really live for is I get up with this dream: every bigot, every racist, everyone in this country that hates will say damn, he’s up again.”

TheGrio online article concludes, “He loves to have them know that they can’t stop him. He loves knowing that Black resistance to oppression is unstoppable. That’s why the Rev. Sharpton deserves the Justice Icon Award.”

Those who commemorate recent Black history forty years from now will surely remember Al Sharpton along with many other exemplary civil rights leaders such as him as well as the next two theGrio Ikon Awards.

The Scientist Ikon was awarded to Kizzmekia Corbett, born in 1986 in North Carolina. In 2008, she received a B.S. in biological sciences and sociology from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).** 

In 2014, Corbett earned a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and since June 2021 she has been an assistant professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Corbett was awarded the Scientist Ikon because of her great contribution to the development of the covid-19 vaccination, which probably saved as many as five million lives—and some sources put that figure as high as 20 million—around the world.

Please click here to read the article about the reason Corbett was chosen for the Scientist Ikon and listen to her acceptance speech last November.

The recipient of the Inspiration Ikon Award was Dwayne Johnson. I never thought I would post a blog article in admiration of a man whose main claim to fame is professional wrestling, for I am the very opposite of a fan of that “sport.” 

Johnson’s father was a Black Nova Scotian and his mother (whose first name is Mataniufeagaimaleata (!) but she went by the name Ata) is Samoan. Both parents were professional wrestlers.

Citing Wikipedia again, Dwayne Douglas Johnson (b. 1972), “also known by his ring name The Rock, is an American actor, businessman, and professional wrestler. He is…widely regarded as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time.”

Recently, however, Johnson has been in the news because of teaming up with Oprah to raise and provide much-needed financial and housing relief for the many people suffering from the Maui, Hawaii, wildfires in 2023, the deadliest U.S. wildfires in at least 100 years.

Here is the link to Johnson’s impressive (and brief) acceptance speech for his Inspiration Ikon, which was also awarded in November 2023.

Black History Month every February is an important time to recognize prominent African Americans of the past as well as contemporary Black people of distinction who are shaping Black history that will be remembered decades from now.

_____

  * This is the opening sentence of the Wikipedia article on TheGrio (often written as theGrio)—and it needs to be updated as African-American is now not generally used as a hyphenated word nor used as much as Black. Here is a link to theGrio’s webpage with their explanation about themselves—and I encourage you to take a look at that website. (Note that Grio is pronounced grī/ō.) I was a bit surprised to learn that it is available on channel 62-2, a free local channel, here in the Kansas City area.

** I was interested to see that, for my granddaughter Naomi is currently a student at UMBC. 

Saturday, February 10, 2024

A Tribute to My Mother

My mother was born 110 years ago in February 1914. Her birthday was on Friday the 13th, right between Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, which was 105 years earlier on Feb. 12, 1809, and St. Valentine’s Day, which had been celebrated on Feb. 14 since 496 A.D.

In 2017, I posted A Tribute to My Father,” on July 25, the day before the 10th anniversary of his death. Now, just before the 110th anniversary of my mother’s birth, I am posting this tribute to her.*1    

Helen (Cousins) Seat (2005)

To tell the truth, from my boyhood until the end of their lives, I held my father in higher regard than my mother, although certainly I never had any notable conflict or disrespect for her. I am glad now to be sharing this long-overdue tribute to her.

Helen Lena Cousins was born in rural Mercer County, Missouri, the third child (and third daughter) of J. Ray and Laura Kathryn (Hamilton) Cousins. In 1925 the Cousins family moved to Worth County, Mo.

Mom and my father were married in 1935, two years after they graduated from high school in Grant City, Mo.—the same high school I graduated from 22 years later. She passed away 13 days after her 94th birthday in 2008, having lived most of her long life in Worth County.

There is so much I appreciate about my mother, beginning with my pre-school years. Neither of my parents had any formal education beyond high school, and Mom had not been a very good student as a girl. (She had to repeat one grade in elementary school, but that was partly because of illness.)

As a woman of her times, she was a traditional wife, mother, and homemaker in the best sense of the word. She was a good housekeeper, an excellent cook, a skillful seamstress, and a successful gardener. But more than anything else, she excelled in encouragement and support.

In my life story book, I wrote that Mom “seemed to know how to encourage/support very effectively my desire to learn.”*2 Thanks to her, I had learned to read and to do arithmetic so well that a week after I started elementary school, I was promoted to the second grade.

Through the decades Mom’s unwavering support and encouragement continued not only for me and my younger sister but also for her six grandchildren, whom she loved dearly.

In 1966 when June and I left with our two children for Japan as missionaries, taking with us Mom’s only grandchildren at the time, she never complained. I deeply appreciate her (and my father’s) understanding and prayer support of us during our missionary career in Japan which didn’t end until 2004.

The following words of tribute to my mother were heard by the family members and friends who gathered on March 1, 2008, for her funeral and listened to the sermon I preached on that occasion. I am glad to share just a bit of that sermon with you Thinking Friends now.*3

In it, I said that because of Mom’s quiet encouragement, my sister Ann became a medical doctor and I was able to earn the Ph.D. degree. But she was never pushy; she never tried to tell us what we ought to do. With only rare exceptions, if any, Mom always believed in us and always encouraged us.

Since Mom always took great pride in her children and their accomplishments, "we thought that nothing would have pleased her more today than for Ann to furnish the music and for me to preach the funeral sermon.”

Through the many decades of her life, Mom was a faithful Christian and church member. She “was constantly thinking of others—mainly her husband and children, but others outside the family and around the world, as well.”

Mom was also never one to complain—about her work or her health. She didn’t read a lot, but she knew by nature what Norman Vincent Peale wrote about in The Power of Positive Thinking.

At times in her later years when she was not feeling well and someone would inquire about her health, she would usually reply, “I’m getting better.”

After sharing those words in the funeral sermon, partly because the end of her long life was marred by progressive dementia, I said that “now she really is better—and in a better place, the place that Jesus had prepared for her.”

_____

*1 Ten years ago, on 2/13/14, I posted “One Hundred Years Ago,” but only a few sentences at the beginning were about my mother’s birth on 2/13/1914.

*2 About six weeks ago I published A Wonderful Life: The Story of My Life from My Birth until My 85th Birthday (1938~2023). One definite reason why I have been so bold as to refer to my life so far as a wonderful life is because of my mother.

*3 I certainly don’t expect many of you to take the time to read all or even any of that sermon, but if you are interested, here is the digital link to it. In March 1959, 49 years earlier, I also preached the sermon at my mother’s mother’s (my Grandma Cousins’) funeral when I was still a twenty-year-old college student—but already an ordained pastor. 

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

90 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT (=Doomsday)!

A week ago (on Jan. 23), the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced the setting of what they call the Doomsday Clock. Contrary to my expectation, the clock was set the same as last year: 90 seconds to midnight (with midnight representing “doomsday”).

For 75 years now, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been announcing the setting of the Doomsday Clock. That nonprofit organization was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and former Manhattan Project scientists. They introduced the Doomsday Clock two years later.

The first setting of the Clock was seven minutes to midnight. In 1949, with the explosion of a nuclear device by the Soviet Union and the beginning of the arms race, it was reset to three minutes before midnight.

The testing of the hydrogen bomb in 1952 led to resetting the Clock in the following January to just two minutes before doomsday. Relations between the U.S. and the USSR improved over the next few years, though, and in 1960 the hands on the Clock were moved back to seven minutes.

Over the next decades, the Doomsday Clock kept going up and down, reaching the farthest from midnight, 17 minutes, in 1991. But in 2002 it was back to seven minutes and has never been further since. In 2015 it was back down to three minutes where it started in 1947.

In January last year, the Clock was set at 90 seconds. the closest to midnight it had ever been, and it was kept at that setting last week. I expected it to be set even closer to “doomsday” because of the threat of expanding, and perhaps nuclear, war in the Levant.*

The threat of nuclear war was the main basis for setting the Doomsday Clock for the first 60 years. In 2007, however, climate change was added to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as another portentous threat to humankind, and the hands on the Clock were set at five minutes to midnight.

The announcement regarding this year’s setting of the Clock stated that there were four main considerations for determining that setting: 1) the many dimensions of nuclear threat, 2) an ominous climate change outlook, 3) evolving biological threats, and 4) the dangers of AI.**

How should we respond to the current setting of the Doomsday Clock? This question surely demands our thoughtful attention. Let me suggest three things:

1) Don’t ignore the Doomsday Clock. It would be easy to shrug off the Clock’s warning because of denial, indifference, or the unwillingness to face seriously the present predicament the world is in—or even just due to the pressure of meeting the demands of our everyday lives.

2) Don’t let the Doomsday Clock get you down. Depression, of course, is the result of feeling “down” for whatever reason. Too much attention to the Clock can certainly cause depression. Just as we shouldn’t ignore the clock, neither should we think about it “all the time.”

3) Work actively to elect candidates of the better political party, that is, the party working more consistently to deal with the dire problems besetting the whole world.

On the website linked to in the second footnote, we are told that the threats the world is currently facing “are of such a character and magnitude that no one nation or leader can bring them under control.”

They go on to state that “three of the world’s leading powers—the United States, China, and Russia—should commence serious dialogue about each of the global threats.”

Further, they contend that those three countries “need to take responsibility for the existential danger the world now faces. They have the capacity to pull the world back from the brink of catastrophe. They should do so, with clarity and courage, and without delay.”

I am not at all optimistic, though, that the three countries mentioned will even begin to do most of what is necessary to move the hands on the Doomsday Clock farther from midnight.

But I am quite sure there is much more possibility of that being done under the Democratic Party in the U.S. rather than by the MAGA party, which includes so many xenophobic people who, among other things, are also global warming and pandemic deniers--as well as deniers of the clear results of the 2020 presidential election. 

_____

  * I previously wrote about the Doomsday Clock in August 2020 (see here) and mentioned it briefly (here) in March 2018. Some things now are much the same, but there are some distinct differences also.

Note too that the Doomsday Clock elicits attention from around the world. See, for example, this Jan. 17 article from the Hindustan Times, an Indian English-language daily newspaper based in Delhi.

** See here for the official “2024 Doomsday Day Clock Statement” and related information. 

Saturday, January 20, 2024

The Challenge of the Golden Rule

The Golden Rule is something “everyone” knows but hardly anyone follows to a significant degree. In this post, I want to think with you about the meaning and practice (or lack thereof) of the Golden Rule and the challenge it presents in one concrete problem facing USAmerican society today. 

The Golden Rule in Christianity and Other Religions

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” (Matt. 7:12), words of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, have been referred to as the Golden Rule since the 17th century. Similar words, though, were said/written in other religious traditions before and after Jesus.*1

Of special interest is the statement of Hillel, the esteemed Jewish rabbi who died about 10 years after Jesus’ birth. He reportedly said, “What is hateful to yourself, do to no other.”

This negative version of the Golden Rule, sometimes called the Silver Rule, is often expressed, “What you do not wish done to you, do not do to others.” Similar words are found in ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts, as seen in this image: 


It is interesting that the words of the five major religions seen here, the Muslim words are closest to the words of Jesus. One source states, “According to Anas ibn Mālik (d. 712), the Prophet [Mohammed] said: “None of you has faith until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself’.”

What about the Platinum Rule?

Some people are critical of the Golden Rule and say it should be replaced by what they call the Platinum Rule: “Treat others the way they would like to be treated.” This shifts the focus from what you want to what others want.

Jennifer Furlong, a motivational speaker and advocate for personal growth gave a TEDx talk titled “The Golden Rule Not so Much, Platinum Rule Rocks.” In that talk, she declares that the Golden Rule is terrible relationship advice and urges people to use the Platinum Rule instead. *2

There is certainly merit in this emphasis on the (poorly named?) Platinum Rule. Thinking about what others want or need and seeking to respond to those wants/needs is a worthy challenge for us all. But so many people don’t even come close to meeting the challenge of the Golden Rule.

Let me illustrate this with one contemporary issue.  

The Golden Rule and the Current Immigration Crisis

The number of immigrants crossing the southern border of the U.S. is one of the most contentious issues facing our nation at present, and it raises a lot of red flags for many. A shutdown of the government almost happened because of the strong disagreement between the pro- and anti-immigration legislators.

Further, before long the Republican House of Representatives will likely impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Republicans have repeatedly accused Mayorkas of failing to enforce the nation's laws as a record number of migrants arrived at, and crossed, the U.S.-Mexico border.

The clamor to “close the border” is actively supported by many conservative White evangelicals. But how does one obey the Golden Rule and turn away people, including families, fleeing violence and starvation?

One tragic example is that of a Mexican woman and two of her children who drowned last week seeking to cross the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass, Texas. Mexican authorities requested help from the U.S. Border Patrol, but they were denied access to the area by the Texas State Police and National Guard.

So, if you were there in the place of that mother, what would you want others to do to/for you? Of course, you would want them to do all they could to rescue you and your children.

How could people claim to follow the Golden Rule but do nothing to help those seeking refuge from violence and extreme economic hardship?

Some have claimed that we are human beings, not human doings. That may be true, but be sure to note that the first word of the Golden Rule is do.

_____

*1 The Wikipedia article gives a helpful summary of the variety of ways the Golden Rule has been expressed by numerous religious leaders and secular scholars. 

*2 That 2017 talk was loaded on YouTube, and to date it has had around 12,000 views. It is a bit ironic, though, that in contrast to what once was usually the case, gold is now worth considerably more than platinum. Even at the end of 2017 an ounce of gold was worth $1,300 but an ounce of platinum was worth only $940.

*3 See this article posted on January 16. Although it is about a bridge some 300 miles southeast of Eagle Pass, I also suggest you read this Jan. 17 article titled “Fellowship Southwest joins bridge walk to draw attention to broken asylum system.”

P.S.: Here is a 1967 Wizard of Id comic strip by Johnny Hart: