From “Reviving the Golden Rule: How the Ancient Ethic of Neighbor Love Can Heal the World” by Andrew DeCort
In 1859, John Stuart Mill noted in On Liberty that our most important moral convictions easily become “dead beliefs” and fall into what he calls “the deep slumber of a decided opinion.” Because we agree with them, we don’t feel the need to understand or act on them. We simply check the box.
Mill mentions how Christians can affirm that loving our neighbor is the revealed will of God in Holy Scripture. But rather than embracing this as “a living truth,” we endorse it as a “dead dogma.” Mill insists that unless our deepest convictions are “fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed,” we will affirm them as beliefs but forget what they actually mean and fail to practice them. They will become a “shell and husk…outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it.”