The golden rule
Universal for all – The golden rule
Reader’s Letter in the Tagblatt Newspaper Tuebingen 17.09.2015
Where do human rights come from? The ten commandments already had not been dictated by God on a mountain of course. Kings, priests and prophets wanted the people to believe that they had come from God so that these commandments should obtain higher authority and would more likely be observed. In addition, they invented heaven for the reward of the good people and hell for the punishment of the bad people. With the first three commandments they after all wanted to strengthen their hierarchical and patrimonial power.
No society would be able to function, if everybody would lie, steal, and kill. Therefore this core of the commandments had been existed long before Moses in other cultures, for example in the Egyptian book of the dead, in the law book of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, in China, India and America…
Mostly however these commandments had been applied only to the own people, the chosen people. The others however had been allowed to be lied, robbed and killed. Even in the name of God. 2 Mos 20: 5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them; for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me,
The new thing with the human rights is that they are applied universal to all the people of the world. In some regard the human rights stand in contrast to the ten commandments. Already the first commandment is in conflict to the “freedom of confession”. In the tenth commandment women, donkeys and slaves are mentioned in one sentence as property of the man.
Only during the time of the enlightenment, in the 18th Century, slavery, capital punishment, barbarian punishments and torture had been abolished and women had been supplied with equal rights…due to reasonable judgement and human commandment. These rules should be forced through by earthly judges and earthly punishment.