All religious belief is a subset of human thinking. Including all morality that originates in religious beliefs. It's a funny thing.

Even the Essential Commandmant? Yep.

In Christianity it goes like this: "Love thy neighbor as thyself".

Believers assign this to a Voice of Authority (THE Authority, they say). So is there a practical version, based on observable benefits, that inspired this? an unsupernatural expression that contains it?

Yes, and I think it goes like this (ready? this is big!):

"Be curious and full of lovingkindness. And tell jokes."

Wait, some of you say, the secular and religious versions are already merged, in this: do to others what you would have them do to you.

Nope. That's OK, but it's a flawed and incomplete re-statement. What if your innocent do-unto undoes someone? What if your would-have-them is not what they want?

No, any top commandment that would accurately mirror and embody humanity's most productive, just, and comfort-rewarding habits must feature love. And prominently contain funny, too.

Wait. I am getting too far ahead. Why curiosity? and why curiosity first? (I assume you are curious.)

If we do not have or at least pretend to show interest in each other we will not achieve depth with our love. Love without depth gets us to ungulant level at best (deer, not dear). After 20 years of marriage I am still curious about my wife (in ways that are at times pretty funny. And the answers I get are also funny. Sometimes.) And I know she finds me quite curious.

Plus funny without curiosity doesn't work. Try this at home: ask your teenage children: "want to hear a joke I heard?" See?

Love all by itself might be beautiful, and certainly harmless, but it will be impersonal. And lacking in detail.

And curiosity must come first so we can learn what is and is not love.

Curiosity and lovingkindness join together to make a Good Place, for an individual, a family, a group, a society. Things get done with friendly efficiency when people want to know, and care about each other's outcomes.

So why do we need humor? Why funny, co-equal with those other two?

According to Alan Bellows, in his book "Alien Hand Syndrome" (Hachette, 2009), almost all humor follows this formula:

"Did you hear the one about the series of illogical events that occurred involving a duck? * They turned out to be congruent in some unexpected way!"

We then experience what should be terrible side effects, as we "get" the joke -- grimacing, abdominal spasms, choppy/noisy exhales, all involuntary -- but the accompanying flood of endorphins makes laughter wonderful. (And contagious. Don't get me started.)

Why?

No, seriously, why? Floods of endorphins normally make sense, like during and after sex (makes a LOT of sense, promulgation-wise), the relief after escape-from or victory-in battle, the satisfaction after a good meal, pride after some kinds of strenuous accomplishment, exhilaration when we bond during group singing, and so on. These things have self-evident benefits for us.

What does funny get us?

Read again the duck structure above. What do we "get" that makes for this powerful chemical feel-good reinforcer? Our ancestors, the ones who "got" jokes, and felt good about it, survived. The other, duller ones? Not so much. Laughter is visible troop behavior, and this shares the "get it". It contages.

(OK damn it stop ducking the question, what do we "get"?)

Patterns.

What we get is better at seeing subtle, unexpected connections. Atypical relationships that make weird sense. Makes us alert, gets us to connect the dots. Like when innocent grass has lion eyeballs. (oh look! that Acacia tree is licking its lips! hey, wait a minute!)

But there's more.

Jokes make us more human. Smarter. And it fuels curiosity (so you know what the bartender said next? Shall I tell you?) and lovingkindness (hey, we ALL get this! ha ha ha! and aren't we all sort of silly, really, like that bartender?). So many jokes are about humans as odd-ducks, and explain us to each other, deflate us, satisfy our curiosity about each other, and increase affection. More so when we laugh with each other, but with a proper and kindhearted dollop of abstraction we bond when we laugh at each other, too.

The Great Mandala, see? Without funny, we are mere deer. Deer are curious and affectionate, in that ungulate way, but they are unchanging, autonomic. (Plus they eat expensive landscaping, which is definitely NOT funny.) They don't see the forest for the trees. But if they could get each other's jokes, who knows?

What we know so far, says John Morreall, the founder of the International Society for Humor Studies (a serious endeavor), is that only three kinds of animals can be said to laugh: apes (including us), dogs (get yours to play pretend-to-chase and see for yourself), and rats. (My money is on bears, raccoons, and dolphins, too.)

Notice the tribal connection? Carni- and omni-vore packs who get good at patterns excel at staying alive.

Plus this teach-by-laughing-at-jokes thing is very efficient. To store tons of data for all possible patterns is prohibitively expensive, cranium-space-wise. Once NEW patterns change -- and they always do: goodbye Hallucigenia, adios Megaladon, arrividerci Dodo, and who remembers the Sahara forest? show of hands? -- then what?

Makes more sense to pass on pattern recognition skills per se. We few, we lucky few, for whom pack bonding becomes sophisticated and brain engineering reaches sufficient mass, well, look out. The species that combines co-operation, intelligence, mutual affection and knock-knock jokes is unstoppable. Curiosity, love and and humor is the all-weather breakfast for the genus-on-the-go.

Now for the hard part, the part that is NOT funny for some people of faith.

I assume Believers in Utter Inerrancy left at the 2nd paragraph. But even liberal Christians who see how any successful promotion of Love Thy Neighbor is a Good Thing, who aren't too touchy about their own Authority's, um Authority, nonetheless balk at making God irrelevant for a moral law we deem Essential.

And some might say "Greg, you only  think and feel this way because you were raised in a church and a synagogue and you have a religious society reinforcing the Golden Rule."

To this I say: Maybe so. I don't know. But neither do you. And I think most of the evidence supports my POV. Nevertheless I can't dismiss your point.

But I can say "thank you, religions!", and thanks to all the struggling, religious homo sapiens of yore who leveraged, nay, usurped the natural tendency of humans to defer to authority, and promoted all earlier versions of this ultimate guideline as Law From On High, long enough for secular societies to develop, for science to assert itself, so we can now connect Love Thy Neighbor -- a commandment of tolerance and lovingkindness, a rule that undermines selfishness and tyrannical Authority, and replaces it with Inner Authority -- with what humans actually do when we are successful.

Go ahead and credit God. You earned the right, religion, because the arc of Grace has been toward justice and mercy, both of them the direct outcomes of curiosity, love and humor. (Some pretty awful religious missteps notwithstanding.)

But Believer, please be curious about, show lovingkindness towards, and find humor in us non-believers, too. Love ALL your neighbors, and I will endeavor to do so as well. Because it makes sense. We all benefit.

I say a Secular Way that upholds generosity of spirit doesn't "win" even if it begins to predominate, and you don't "lose", even if it diminishes your fervent Belief. We fulfill your mission.

Don't fear us. If we all follow the Essential Law** we are all anointed ones, dripping with a gentle wallop of whipped cream, in on the joke at last. We all await the next pie, the unexpected twist, the sly switcheroo that helps us see the better pattern, the more complete picture, of ourselves, each other, of life itself.

Life is the set-up, we are the punchline. Homo Sapiens Sapiens Gigglensis.

Ba-dum-tsh.

 ^{* Why a duck? The answer starts at 3:36, below:}