:up:

A sane reading of Jesus's Golden Rule includes its context as part of the larger Christian ethic to inform its meaning. In Matthew 7, Jesus asserts:

Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

The Golden Rule should be understood in this context about what "good" means -- this clear indication that Calvinists are deeply stupid and wrong about "total depravity" because Jesus clearly states that humans generally do in fact know what "good" means and aren't confused about the matter, so that God's idea of "good" does in fact align with the universal human idea of "good" (the natural law) on a basic level. The Golden Rule is thus not an abstract, ontologically empty formula, like, "Do WHATEVER unto others that you'd subjectively prefer be done to you" but is instead saying to do good (which may be punishment in some cases because justice is also a good) unto to others clearly and unambiguously. It isn't, "Treat your neighbor according to some abstract formula" -- it is to love your neighbor with this fully informed specific concept of love.