Now here I’m making some generalisations about an entire world religion and an entire academic discipline! I’m essentially only considering these in terms of their implications for my own actions (plan of life), so I hope you can forgive me for generalising about these deeply complex topics and for almost certainly treading the same ground that others have already visited. And when I say “actions” and “plan of life” here, I basically use those terms interchangeably.

My overall view:
If there is a just and all-loving (= morally perfect) God, as is postulated by most streams of Christianity, then the actions (plan of life) that best serves this God must necessarily be the same actions (the same plan of life) that is independently derived from a purely secular but rigorous moral philosophy.

Some reasoning:

  • My strong feeling, which appears self-evident to me, is that a morally perfect God would certainly prefer that somebody serve the oppressed even if it comes at the expense of worshipping God. This is simply the definition of selflessness, and selflessness must surely be a necessary component of moral perfection.
  • Another way of looking at this: if living a highly moral life (whatever that ends up meaning in practice) is the best possible use of one’s life (which to me seems true by definition) then it would be unjust of God to restrict the satisfaction of such a life to the minority of people in history who have the ability to read the Bible. God cannot do an unjust act; therefore, having access to a Bible or being born into conditions that support living as a Christian cannot be a necessary condition to living a highly moral life.

Consequences:

  • So, scripture might indeed be a source of moral wisdom and guidance to live a life in line with God’s will, but it is certainly not the only source of this wisdom and guidance.
  • And thus, if you arrive at a truly strong and defensible system of moral philosophy without even giving God or the Bible a second thought, then this system should be equally as acceptable to God—and thus equally as moral, since God is morally perfect—as doing your best to live your life in line with God’s will.
  • (And in the same way, if you begin with scripture and end up with a hypothesis for the morally ideal plan of life, then this plan—if it is indeed a valid one—should survive the strictest scrutiny from secular moral philosophy.)
  • So you might optimise for goal A or you might optimise for goal B, but you end up taking the same set of actions in either case, and you can in fact use B as a criterion to measure your progress towards A and vice versa.
  • Sure, you can get the details of moral philosophy wrong and end up doing no good or even doing harm. Moral philosophy is very difficult! But I think the same consideration applies to interpreting scripture too (as history shows).
  • So both approaches basically reduce to figuring out the consequences of what it means to “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Matthew 22:39) which appears to me to be the deepest encapsulation of both Christianity and secular moral philosophy (having given both serious, though naturally flawed and limited, thought).
  • Once you arrive at “Love your neighbour as yourself”, there are many different paths you can take in terms of practical application. But this is the criterion by which all resulting paths are judged, regardless of how you arrived at this statement.

No matter where I begin, whether a secular or religious position, I end up with “Love your neighbour as yourself.” And no matter which path I follow subsequently in terms of practical actions, the only way that I can measure my progress is by returning to “Love your neighbour as yourself”.

It’s like a singularity in physics, such as the Big Bang; no matter where you begin, you find that this is the ultimate frame of reference, and you can only measure progress with reference to it.

And to clarify: I mean “Love your neighbour as yourself”. I think the final two words in that sentence are the most important ones. I do not mean the truncated but oft-quoted “love your neighbour”; anyone can do that. “As yourself” is the hard part.

(When it comes to interpreting “your neighbour”, I admire the approach of William Wilberforce who referred to the story of the Good Samaritan. That is, “your neighbour” means “literally everybody, without exception”.)

But if this phrase is so important, why then is this the second thing that Jesus says, not the first? As the NIV phrases it:

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

One possible solution is that the first logically and necessarily leads to the second (“the second is like it”). If we’re trying to understand space, we begin with “planets move in XYZ way” and while it is worthy and necessary and fruitful to spend time on that, it is done at least in part as a means to the practical implications “here’s how we can travel to the moon”. (I was going to come up with a gardening analogy here, so I could title this post “All roads lead to loam”, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.)

Another possible solution, which really is another way of expressing the first solution, is that the two commandments are actually identical. Jesus loved to speak in riddles and would usually give two or three parables to express the same point (salt of the earth, lamp on a stand, city on a hill). The more I think about the first commandment, the more I lean towards the view that it really does mean the same thing as the second statement.