To make it simple, respect your neighbour is better than love your neighbour, for it is clearer and easier to do. Life is hard enough without being self-defeating.
Christianity and Judaism command that love for others must totally depend on love of God and therefore belief in God. That is an added burden. Instead, respect your neighbour—not for the sake of love or God, but for the sake of respect. Respect for respect’s own sake. God’s ideas make what seems to be a good command hard and even impossible. It is hard to love enemies and strangers. If loving a bad person while hating the bad in them is very difficult, then having God as the main consideration—and the reason you must love enemies and bad people—is an added difficulty. So, if it is hard just to love a bad person while hating their bad traits, it is impossible if you feel you must do this for God and not for yourself or your life.
Why did Jesus and the Bible say, “Love your neighbour as yourself” and not, “Walk in the other person's shoes and help them the way you would be helped”? Or even, why not say, “Love anybody you meet as yourself”? Or better still, “Love the person who needs your help as yourself”? If it is just about the person you come across, then the implication is, “Don’t love Maisie in the next country, for you have no connection to her.” And you are saying, “I will only love Maisie if I meet her.” This is really about you using the other person as a project to help. It is not really about the other person at all.
Neighbour is definitely chosen for a reason. It essentially means just love people in your community or religion. People largely do choose their neighbours in a very general way. The neighbour is the person living next to you.
Love is too subjective as it is, which is why it causes more problems than you would expect. Vague phrases like love thy neighbour only add fuel to the fire.
Love does not have to be a thing, power, or substance to be real. In a sense, it is more real than the ground under you. It is real in how an action can be real. Christians say God is love, which shows they undermine that teaching. Love, as an attitude toward another, is too subjective—but so is love as action, for you need to subjectively assess what the person needs. That is the difficulty, and nothing changes the fact that only John knows what John needs, how much, and in what way.
A God, Jesus, or religion that commands you to love is doing harm. You do not clearly know what they mean by love. Love is not simple. Why not respect a person just doing their best - to the light they have? What do you need to be told to love, or worse commanded to, for? God and Jesus are faith entities - their teachings are not necessarily correct or proven. To impose say Jesus' idea of love on somebody, to love them in a way he wants but not them, is shameful.
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