It's a parable, and thus open to interpretation. The way I see it, the parable was Jesus' way of telling this man that he was focusing on the wrong point. The man seems to be asking "is there a limit to the people I should be nice to?" And perhaps he was thinking of non-Jews as not being his "neighbor." So Jesus tells him a story and his point seems to be "instead of trying to sort out who is or isn't your neighbor, be a neighbor to everyone who needs one." It is, as you alluded earlier, a version of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Jesus, on a couple of occasions, seems to promote the idea of being proactively "good" to others. Even to the extent of helping those who harm you. The story of the good Samaritan seems to be in line with this.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
