Golden Rule?

While the Golden Rule is a great moral precept numerous teachers offered the same instruction centuries before Jesus (Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Epictetus and other records discuss the importance of self transcending love without violence we find in the Bible.

 

For example Jainism: the Jains preach a doctrine of complete nonviolence. While the Jains believe many improbable things about the universe, they do not believe the sorts of things that that permitted the Inquisition. The Inquisition may have been a perversion of the “true” spirit of Christianity. The problem is that the teachings of the Bible are muddled and self-contradictory which permitted Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five centuries. It was possible for the patriarchs of the Church like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas to conclude that heretics should be tortured or killed outright. Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews and witches. Isn’t it amazing Christians today understand the true teachings of Christianity while the most influential thinkers in history of Christianity failed?

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. considered himself a Christians, but his commitment to nonviolence primarily came from the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Where did Gandhi, a Hindu get his doctrine of nonviolence? He got it from the Jains.

 

If you believe Jesus taught only the Golden Rule and love of one’s neighbor, look at

 

2 Thessalonians 1:6-9

 

“since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might”

 

John 15:6

 

“If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.”

 

The Bible supports the Inquisition and Martin Luther King, Jr.