What the Sermon on the Mount Got Right, But What the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Religions Get Woefully Wrong
If the 10 Commandments had been practiced with ALL people and for ALL people, they would have been good,
BUT notice that Jews, Christians, and Muslims for thousands of years
only required that enemies NOT violate those commands and that they themselves only needed to practice such moral behavior within their own select religious group.
In contrast, believing that God had ordered them to do so,
the Jews, Christians, and Muslims regularly
lied,
stole,
and slaughtered their enemies.
And still do so even now in the 21st century.
Read about constant Jewish abuse and theft of land, of water, of resources, in Palestine-Israel, etc.
Jews sometimes massacred every man, woman, child, and infant in the Bible because they believed that God ordered them to do so.
David, supposedly the “man after God’s heart, massacred whole villages, killing every person. And he did this to STEAL their loot.
And in the Jewish Bible in Exodus, if after a Jewish slave owner beat a slave almost to death, yet the slave didn't die in less than 2 or 3 days, no Jewish owner was punished because the slave was the Jew's “property”!
Strange isn’t it, that the Hebrews were so thankful that they escaped slavery, but then they enslaved others.
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Muhammad robbed caravans, had at least 500 Jewish men beheaded, and then enslaved all of the women and children:-(
And Muslims have been doing likewise, for the most part, ever since.
Some nations of Islam didn't even ban slavery until the 20th century!
Creedal Christians in history constantly lied, stole, abused, slaughtered..
Read what they did in “Jesus Wars” back in the 4th century--see the historian Philip Jenkins famous book, Jesus Wars.
Other horrific examples include the present Christian war by Russia, who has invaded Ukraine, with the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church calling for the war, much as devout Christians 1,000 years ago called for the evil Crusades.
Many others show these same immoral and unjust actions by Christians--the English Civil War, the 30 Years War, the American Civil War, the French Religious Wars, the Great War, Vietnam, the British Opium War against China where they forced that nation to take opium!
So ironic the American un-Civil War where dedicated Christians even vandalized, wrecked Southern churches, stabled their horses in them, etc. Heck, one Union soldier even stole a Southern family's Bible and took it back to New England. These devout Christian soldiers after invading, stole clothes, weapons, horses, food, etc. nearly every day.
See, in all of these historic and modern cases, Christians thought it was only wrong to steal from each other, but that God gave them the “right” and “duty” to steal from the enemies, even if the enemies were also Christians.
In contrast, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, states that humans ought to “love their enemies,” do good to their enemies…
This one reason that the secular writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and the Buddhist monk Thick Nhat Hanh, and many other human leaders consider Jesus' Sermon on the Mount an ethical precept of deep truth.
CAUTION: “Love” here doesn’t mean emotionally like or approve of!
As Martin Luther King Jr. so clearly pointed out in one of his speeches, to “love one’s enemies” means one has benevolence toward them. For instance, King certainly didn't like the KKK who attacked him, who firebombed his home, but he chose to have hope that if cared for, these bad people might come to the truth and change.
Moral truths are universal.
If stealing is wrong between my neighbor and myself, it is also wrong for us to do it to civilians and soldiers of an enemy nation.
This is why war is, by far, the most evil of all human actions. Invariably in every war, humans on both sides regularly lie, steal, abuse, rape, and slaughter, as well as violate the other commandments.
Let us hope and act to proclaim Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.
In the Light of the Good, the True, the Just, and Altruistic Caring,
Dan Wilcox
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