Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Love Your Neighbor AS Yourself

Source: No Longer Servants but Friends by Edward C. Zaragoza. pg 74.
Keywords: love, neighbor

"We are to love our neighbors as ourselves. This little word 'as' is very interesting. 'As' means identification or equality. So if we love our neighbors as ourselves then we identify with another. Their joys are our joys; their sorrows are our sorrows; their needs are our needs; their dreams are our dreams. If we are to talk about loving our neighbors 'with' ourselves, we only mean cooperating with them. We may just work with them. Thus, unless we love our neighbors as ourselves, unless we identify with them, there is no real imperative to love them. We can help them or ignore them. Either way, we maintain a level of distance that makes friendship difficult."

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