Email to my dad about the Golden Rule

...We drove past a five thousand year old stone circle today and I thought about you. This is a very very old culture and I´m finally starting to understand its acquired wisdom: they actually live by the Golden Rule. I think that the Golden Rule is the Big Answer in spirituality and life: treat the rest of the world exactly like you´d want to be treated, because there really is nothing different between me and you. We all have certain desires and feelings, and your love and desire to be loved, to be challenged, to have good food, and to be healthy are exactly the same as my desires and feelings.

The mechanism of evolution works on civilizations exactly as it works on organisms: things that work stay, and things that don´t eventually die off. Luckily, living by the Golden Rule works for all groups: it certainly works for families -- and what is the rest of the world but an extended family? It just takes time and luck for a group to evolve to that realization, and even more luck for the group not to be destroyed by force. Which, I think, is the only way to kill the Golden Rule. There´s absolutely nothing we can do to speed up the whole evolution process. We just have to live by the Golden Rule ourselves. That´s my one thought about morality...