CONTRA FATUM

Sometimes the commandment to "love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:31) is understood as implying that you should also love yourself, or that you cannot love others if you do not love yourself first. Hence the  door is opened for a mediocre bourgeois morality: I cannot love others if I don't love myself first, which means I at least need a place to live, a good bed, food on the table, a job, a car, and... The result is that we forget our neighbor.

James J. Tissot - Pharisees ask Christ about the Greatest Commandment "`Teacher, which [is] the great command in the Law?' And Jesus said to him, `Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thine understanding -- this is a first and great command; and the second [is] like to it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself; on these -- the two commands -- all the law and the prophets do hang.'" (Matt 22:36-40, YLT) I've stumbled into some discussions lately about Christian ethics (so-called). It's the usual 'yes, love, but ...' thing. For some reason some Christians want all kinds of rules, besides the commandment to love others. The bible, these people say, is a 'moral authority'. Hence they sometimes reiterate Matt 22:36-40, where Jesus explains a Jewish Pharisee that the great(est) commandments in the Law is to love God and your neighbor. But in order to know what it means to love God, the arg...