No, this is not real Christianity, though it may be a popular misunderstanding of it. One of the fundamental tenets of Christianity is that salvation is not earned by being “good” enough, but is a gift of grace made possible by Christ.
Oh, and eternity isn’t “a time” at all.
Yeah, it doesn’t get as much talk; but it is the subject of Psalm 73.
Because there is no such things as “Justice” and “Fairness” in the Universe.
The Octopus releases millions of eggs. Maybe one grows to adulthood. The rest are food. The tree releases hundreds of seeds. Few grow into trees. Some are eaten, some rot. There is no justice or order in this. A sun explodes into a supernova and wipes out all life within many light years. The storm blows and animals and insects are washed away or buried in mud. God did not ordain which ones should live or die, it simply is.
“All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
[QUOTE=Jesus]
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:8)
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[QUOTE=James]
whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For he who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder." If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker. (James 2:10-11)
[/QUOTE]
Hence the need for grace.
In other words, in Christianity there are no good people so the question is moot.
Everyone with half a brain, whether they’re religious or not, knows that some disasters are a product of personal choice. (“Fido died because you never remembered to feed him.”) A look at the Darwin Awards provides plenty of evidence of this.
That’s of course far different from saying that every bad thing that happens to you is punishment for something you did wrong. The book of Job (which IIRC is believed by many scholars to be the oldest thing in the Bible) starts out by showing a genuine good man getting the metaphorical shit kicked out of him.
Running throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition is a recognition that people don’t always get what they deserve (at least not in the short term, or in this life)—although there’s also a strain, in tension with the first, that says “Be good instead of bad so that God will reward you instead of punishing you.”
[QUOTE=pianodave]
What’s the point of denying yourself pleasure when you never know when you’re going to die? So, steal that wallet. Take those drugs. Rape that woman. Seize the day!
[/QUOTE]
The point of denying yourself some pleasures is that they hurt other people, or they hurt you, or they interfere with some greater good.
I went to catholic school and don’t rememeber a connection ever being made to our behavior and what might happen to us in this world.
Or rather, there was one perfect man and we hung Him from a cross.
But “there are no perfect people” is not the same as “there are no good people”, or the same as saying that any of us can’t improve.
This greater good thing gets me. Are all greater goods created equal? Do the people helping the starving in Africa get judged the same as those helping the homeless in New York? Does one person who helps a thousand people get lauded more than another person who helps only five? What if those five discover a cure for cancer that helps millions? These are just examples.
If you say I need to stop trying to quantify goodness, when it can’t really be thought of as a number game, then I would argue that without a system of measurement, there’s really no way to logically prove to people that they deserve heaven/hell while another person doesn’t. It would be arbitrary, based on some nebulous, ever changing concept of the perceived relative power of good and evil. And if that’s true, then it becomes ever more clear that religion is only intended to deceive, to tell everyone exactly what they want to hear, so that they don’t make trouble while the powerful stay safely in power.
Judaism recognizes that we are not perfect. During Yom Kippur you atone for specific sins as well as sins you are not aware of. Yet we can still be good enough to be written into the Book of Life for next year.
If in Christianity the default is hell unless you get salvation, I’d say that by default we are not even good - because why send good people to hell?
Take out the divine aspect, and what do you get? If this is what someone would call a perfect man, I hope the writers that wrote on his behalf got it mostly wrong.
Bad things only happen to people who overuse paragraphs.
Wait, this “perfect man” you talk about, is he the one who compared non-Jews to dogs? Or was he the one who destroyed a fig tree because he was hangry?
Because people can be bad and the universe isn’t the kind of thing that gives a shit.
Don’t be bad.
And not only this, but a lot of the “random” bad things that happen to good people are directly related to the actions of other people, who have just as much free will as good people do. That bus Todd got hit by? Todd did nothing wrong, he used the crosswalk, he waited for the walk symbol before stepping out into the road. But it wouldn’t have happened if bus driver Larry hadn’t allowed himself to get distracted by his cell phone while driving down that road at that time. Amy gets mugged - because Gary decides to steal. Billy loses a leg in a car crash because John over in the other car decides to drink a lot and drive. Kelly, Brian, Jake, Steve, Mary, and Harry all die and Ava and Jaden are left orphaned because Jack and Dianne decide to shoot up a McDonalds.
Most bad things that happen to people involve their own choices or other people’s choices. Some disease (but not STDs, or environmentally caused cancers that wouldn’t have happened if a company didn’t break rules, or diseases induced by lifestyle choices) and weather related disasters are truly random, but not much else is.
Yes, I see a bad things happening to people that are often self-inflicted, or brought on by somebody else. But I also see a lot of good things and choices people make that improve their lives and others.
But for most people, theirs, and other people’s choices are not going to be responsible for their death. No, here, nature will see to it her perfect record of being the perfect killing machine gets us all, and none of us get out of this world alive, and for the majority of us, our choices and others, didn’t play a factor.
Chinese philosophy (Daoist) perspective:
Your distinction between good and evil as seperate forces is not real, and so it’s foolishness to say a person or event is one or the other. These so called opposites are actually complementary and interallated aspects of an indivisible whole- good always contains an element of evil, evil contains an element of good, and each gives rise to the other in an ever transforming natural world.
Here, have a relevant fable:
Once upon a time, there was a farmer in a small village in China. He didn’t have a lot of money and had only a single an old horse to plow his field.
One day, the horse ran away. Everyone in the village exclaimed, "Oh, what a horrible thing to happen!” The farmer said simply, “We’ll see.”
A few days later, the horse returned home, leading a few wild mares back to the farm as well. The neighbors shouted out, “Your horse has returned, and brought several horses home with him. What great luck!”
The farmer replied, “We’ll see.”
Later that week, the farmer’s son was trying to break one of the mares and she threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. The villagers cried, “Your son broke his leg, what terrible luck!”
The farmer replied, “We’ll see.”
A few weeks later, soldiers from the national army marched through town, recruiting all the able-bodied boys for the army. They did not take the farmer’s son, still recovering from his injury. The fighting was brutal, and most did not make it back alive. Friends shouted, “Your boy is spared, what tremendous luck!”
To which the farmer replied, “We’ll see.”
We often define good as sacrifice. Not hard then to see why thats bad for the good person specifically.
Basically everything bad can be thought of a stepping stone to something good
Random Chaos theory in a basic nutshell.
Once all that existed was God, metaphorically an eden with an apple tree, an eternal and static force almost like a block of ice made up of individual h2o molecules. The force, almost robotic in nature. The existence of this force has a side effect in creating parallel universes, also which sustain others, engaging the start of flowing time outside of that universe until one of these “molecule” like parts of God suddenly and without warning became aware. This awareness had a side effect, the sudden formation of bubbles and the big bang in our 3rd dimension…and therefore, random chaos.
The awareness molecule (as it’ll be called for lack of better wording/understanding of this “force”) because it is an aware self conscious thinking entity, has a side effect causing random chaos which is linked to spacetime. It is what we call the devil. It is the apple of knowledge because of it’s awareness to say “hey, wtf?”. Rising amongst it’s brethren to be against this static force, to say there is more than this. Feeding what it perceives to be the truth, the forbidden knowledge.
Random chaos can cause good things to happen ( a human perception) or can cause bad things to happen. It created our universe and ultimately us. The side effect of being self aware as if eating the apple from the tree of knowledge.