[mybrid]

Every culture has some version of the golden rule yet religions claim to originate it. Most of what was studied in this article is common across all religions. Calling such practices "religion" is like calling smiling "religion". Religion co-opts nature and then, for a fee, hands it back to you. Human nature is not religion, religion puts an artificial price on that which should be enjoyed sans grift.

[paisawalla]

If you think human nature (i.e. the free and ordinary expression of a person unperverted by social conditioning) comprises something like "do unto others and you would have them do unto you," I have several billion pieces of bad news for you. There is no evidence for this, and the only rebuttal you could have to all the counterexamples will be some form of No True Scotsman -- "yes, those people acted badly, bad that's their conditioning, not their True Human Nature..."

[meheleventyone]

But by your own definition none of those billion can be expressing their human nature since all of them have been subject to social conditioning.

What I think the OP is getting at is the concept of universal human traits. There’s a big old list of them compiled by an anthropologist here: https://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm

The thing to note is that the golden rule could be a universal as much as murder is. Which is to say the golden rule is continuously reinvented by humans but not necessarily followed by them all. What factors in this are innate versus conditioned are opaque.

[paisawalla]

> The thing to note is that the golden rule could be a universal as much as murder is.

Which is not a helpful understanding of human nature at all, which is my point. What I am trying to argue against -- and maybe this is not the intent of the original commenter -- is the idea that the Golden Rule is an innate and inevitable expression of our nature, but say, the horrors of Communism are not.