Do you agree that the Golden rule "we are to treat other people as we would wish to be treated ourselves" as the basis for human morality?

**Jackie** - posted on 05/20/2012

Jodi, what an awesome motto. I like that.

As for treating others how you would like to be treated, no. I don't live by that.

I'll give you two examples:

I'm super nice at the store to a cashier because she's a person and when I worked in retail, one person smiling and asking you how your day was kind of made you not want to quit lol

Two years ago (I was pregnant) and sleeping on the couch watching jewelry television at 3ish am because I couldn't sleep. I hear a knock on the door followed by jiggling of the door knob. I got up as fast as I could and ran to the bedroom. I woke my husband up and as soon as I did he heard the pounding on the door. He grabbed a gun and told me to stay there. I, of course, stayed in the kitchen so I could hear him and I had already pressed 9 and 1 on the phone. When my husband got to the door he pulled the blinds up and there was a 40 something year old man and he said "let me use your phone". UMMMMM sure come on in! Brian told him no and when the guy didn't leave he turned around and told me to call the police. He was gone by the time they got there and I was so shaken.

So, no I didn't treat him as I wanted to be treated starting from banging on someone's door at 3 am like he was the police. I realize that this is a bit of an extreme example but it just made me understand that some people in this world are....lunatics.

Jodi - posted on 05/19/2012

I live by my golden rule of "live and let live." Letting live innately carries the weight of doing no harm and infringing no rights. Live and let live settles it for me.

Elfrieda - posted on 05/19/2012

For the big stuff, yes I think it's the perfect rule: I care about the safety of others because I think my own safety is worth caring about.
For the little stuff, it's more down to personalities: you prefer to communicate this way, I prefer to communicate that way. As long as the big picture is kept in mind ("she's a person, too"), those nit-picky things can cause hurt feelings but nothing really bad will happen as a result.

Jenny - posted on 05/18/2012

As an example, I want people to be open with me and tell me if they have a problem with me, to be direct about it and not hide behind fake smiles or beat around the bush.



However it turns out that some people would rather avoid confrontation at all cost and prefer to go on pretending that everything is okay, hoping that the elephant in the room will eventually vanish.