Christopher Hitchens in his book god is not Great addresses impossible tasks put forward in the Bible.

“The order to ‘love thy neighbor’ is mild and yet stern: a reminder of one’s duty to others. The order to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ is too extreme and too strenuous to be obeyed, as is the hard-to-interpret instruction to love others ‘as I have loved you.’ Humans are not so constituted as to care for others as much as themselves; the thing simply cannot be done.” [p 213]

The obvious answer to that is: just because a thing can’t be done shouldn’t mean it is not worth striving toward, however, taking it as a command and feeling like a failure when falling short would be a mistake.

My answer is a bit different. I agree with Hitchens that we are not constituted to care for others as much as we care for ourselves. I firmly believe we should care for ourselves above all others. Here is the step that makes self-love work for me. To care for myself, I need to know myself. To know myself I need to think about what makes me happy and what makes me sad. I have found that it makes me happy to make others happy and that if I make another sad, it makes me sad. So there you have it. If I make you smile, if I give you something nice to think about, if I give you a fond memory; it is purely selfish on my part.

PS: I recommend god is not Great for more evidence that Satan wrote the Bible, though, to be sure, Mr. Hitchens does not believe in Satan any more than I do.

 The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin was published in 1859. Nearly 150 years later there are still those who prefer to believe that the story in Genesis is fact rather than myth. They even believe that all the species on earth as we know them today were piled into Noah’s ark.

The sad thing is that they so focus on these myths that they loose sight of any value these early stories might have on our current life. I think a good lesson from Genesis might be that we should rest every seven days and from the ark story we might learn that all of the creatures on earth are of value and should be protected from extinction.

 When Christians become obsessed with believing that Jesus was God and that believing in him for salvation is more important than following his teachings, they have missed the point of his teachings. It is the “preachers” who told stories of virgin birth and walking on water to convince people to follow them that cause people to miss the true value of the Jesus’ teaching.

 The Bible is full of excellent advice, excellent philosophy for living, the greatest of which may be “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Oh, and for those who believe JC walked on water, I suppose I should point out that when Jesus talked of thy neighbor he was not talking about just those who live next door. When he said we should love our enemies, he was not talking just about enemies but about everyone.