"Treat others as you would like to be treated" works so long as the other party does the same. "Do good to those who spitefully use you" simply rewards them for harming you. Otherwise they rely on faith in a force that can balance out results according to merit (although that creates its own issues for those who believe that we cannot earn anything on merit with god).
"Do not harm those who do you no harm" or "do good to those who deserve it" is a much better ideal to start from, in that it allows us freedom to help those we choose and is more likely to lead to helping those who deserve it while avoiding those whose actions harm us. It also frees us from feeling guilty over things like thought-crime by prioritizing behavior and outcomes.
"Do not harm those who do you no harm" or "do good to those who deserve it" is a much better ideal to start from, in that it allows us freedom to help those we choose and is more likely to lead to helping those who deserve it while avoiding those whose actions harm us. It also frees us from feeling guilty over things like thought-crime by prioritizing behavior and outcomes.
"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
