This page includes a dialogue forum for comments on the topic of decolonizing the Golden Rule and shifting to framing ethics with the Rainbow Rule: “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them. It also includes a pdf of the slide show shared in a session with Gray Cox, Ram Subrmanaian, and Rev. Sara Jolena Wolcott at a session on “Decolonizing the Golden Rule: Towards a Rainbow Rule for the Global Ethic”at the 2023 Parliament of World Religions, Chicago.
The pdf is available here and the blog thread for discussion is below.
2 responses to “Decolonizing the Golden Rule at Parliament of World Religions — A Dialogue Forum”
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Hello Gray Cox… the Friends Meeting on the Golden Rule this morning was powerful. Thank you for the query.
I wanted to share that here at the Parliament yesterday, I heard a very relevant story from a Native Zimbabwe man who had been trained as an Anglican Priest. He spoke at a presentation on Ecovillages in India that provided retreats and learning for people from all cultures and faith traditions to come to rural India to learn from small scale sustainable farmers and business people who were practicing earth-based low carbon ways of working and earning a respected living on their rural land.
The priest’s story was that people
In his congregation were Christians during the day at church and connected to their African spiritual nature-based roots at home, which he explained was a way of saying that they had integrated the best of what Christianity had to offer and held fast to their lands and their traditions and honored the spirits of their plants and animals and rivers and fields and especially their elders and ancestors. They took what they liked from others and combined it with what they held dear for themselves.Wonderful work. Gray, thanks for your book, and I will endeavor to introduce you to my brother-in-law who is doing internet law (and wrestling w AI issues).
MBSbit.ly/TransmissionMeditation
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At the Parliament of World Religions, in a Quaker Worship for discernment about the Golden Rule/Rainbow Rule contrast, we reflected on the following Queries:
1.) In what ways does my tradition adopt versions of the Golden Rule to provide algorithms for calculating correct behavior by imposing the values of me and my community on others?
2.) How might this be related to ways I and my community may have engaged in kinds of colonizing activities that are unjust, violent, and/or ecologically dysfunctional?
3.) In what ways does my tradition offer versions of the Rainbow Rule to frame practices of dialogue for collaboratively discerning wiser ways of living with others as guided by emergent objective values?
4.) How might these dialogue practices serve to move past the institutions of past colonization and current efforts to create a “Smarter Planet” in order to promote a genuinely Wiser Earth?One of the comments that arose out of the silence was from Ram Subramanian, a Gandhian friend from India who shared a very clear example of the way in which a very well intentioned agricultural scientist was frustrated by her inability to persuade a local farmer to adopt hybrid seeds for better production — and “for his own good!” — precisely because she found it hard to see why using his heritage seeds and exchanging them locally provided a kind of freedom and independence he valued much more than any marginal (and likely only temporary) improvement in quantities of production. There is a clear historical continuity and shared commitment to the Golden Rule found in her “do gooderism” and that of the missionaries in the mid-1800’s who sought to convert Indigenous people in the Americas “for their own good” by “killing the Indian to save the man”.
Turning towards examination of my own life’s work, I was led to consider carefully how I, in turn, may be trying to convert people I disagree with politically — and do so “for their own good” — without first listening really deeply to their voices and how they would most like to be treated.
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2 responses to “Decolonizing the Golden Rule at Parliament of World Religions — A Dialogue Forum”
-
Hello Gray Cox… the Friends Meeting on the Golden Rule this morning was powerful. Thank you for the query.
I wanted to share that here at the Parliament yesterday, I heard a very relevant story from a Native Zimbabwe man who had been trained as an Anglican Priest. He spoke at a presentation on Ecovillages in India that provided retreats and learning for people from all cultures and faith traditions to come to rural India to learn from small scale sustainable farmers and business people who were practicing earth-based low carbon ways of working and earning a respected living on their rural land.
The priest’s story was that people
In his congregation were Christians during the day at church and connected to their African spiritual nature-based roots at home, which he explained was a way of saying that they had integrated the best of what Christianity had to offer and held fast to their lands and their traditions and honored the spirits of their plants and animals and rivers and fields and especially their elders and ancestors. They took what they liked from others and combined it with what they held dear for themselves.Wonderful work. Gray, thanks for your book, and I will endeavor to introduce you to my brother-in-law who is doing internet law (and wrestling w AI issues).
MBSbit.ly/TransmissionMeditation
-
At the Parliament of World Religions, in a Quaker Worship for discernment about the Golden Rule/Rainbow Rule contrast, we reflected on the following Queries:
1.) In what ways does my tradition adopt versions of the Golden Rule to provide algorithms for calculating correct behavior by imposing the values of me and my community on others?
2.) How might this be related to ways I and my community may have engaged in kinds of colonizing activities that are unjust, violent, and/or ecologically dysfunctional?
3.) In what ways does my tradition offer versions of the Rainbow Rule to frame practices of dialogue for collaboratively discerning wiser ways of living with others as guided by emergent objective values?
4.) How might these dialogue practices serve to move past the institutions of past colonization and current efforts to create a “Smarter Planet” in order to promote a genuinely Wiser Earth?One of the comments that arose out of the silence was from Ram Subramanian, a Gandhian friend from India who shared a very clear example of the way in which a very well intentioned agricultural scientist was frustrated by her inability to persuade a local farmer to adopt hybrid seeds for better production — and “for his own good!” — precisely because she found it hard to see why using his heritage seeds and exchanging them locally provided a kind of freedom and independence he valued much more than any marginal (and likely only temporary) improvement in quantities of production. There is a clear historical continuity and shared commitment to the Golden Rule found in her “do gooderism” and that of the missionaries in the mid-1800’s who sought to convert Indigenous people in the Americas “for their own good” by “killing the Indian to save the man”.
Turning towards examination of my own life’s work, I was led to consider carefully how I, in turn, may be trying to convert people I disagree with politically — and do so “for their own good” — without first listening really deeply to their voices and how they would most like to be treated.
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