theblackdostoyevsky

What does it mean to be a good person?

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“Good”?

In order to be, someone must needs have never done evil. One instance of evil would make every other “good” decision an attempt to atone for that evil, which would be impossible. Choices cannot be taken back, and all choices have consequences that, like pond ripples, reverberate far, far beyond the decisive action. Consider divorce. Or gossip. Or fornication. Or smoking a cigarette in front of a child. The damage is done and can never be undone. The most that may be done is that the eventual consequences of that action fall upon someone with whom they will stop reverberating, and the poison cease from that point on. That is called atonement. The debt for evil, incurred at the point of choice, must be paid. Otherwise, there is no justice. This is why it is a sorrowful thought that people dismiss belief in God or refuse to trust in Him, knowing that He is, because of the evil state of the world. God, if He be God, must be just. Therefore, all evil (or, backward) action, must find their rightful ends. That is justice. Men make bad choices and then expect a good God to simply eradicate their consequences. “Lord, allow me to eat but, please, rebuke the calories.” Foolishness. But we are all as the adulteress, who eats and wipes her mouth and says, “I have done no wrong.”

We think that because we have felt sorrow for our countless evils, because we experience remorse, because we have made attempts to atone for a vibration that, due to our own selfishness, cannot be reversed that, somehow, we are “not that bad” and, therefore, “good”. See then that even our concept of “good” is corrupt, because we hedge goodness by saying, “nobody’s perfect,” as if good can be less than perfect. No. “Good” does not mean “good enough.” It is total. It is relentless. It is whole. It is incorruptible. It is perfect. Perfect and good are not synonyms. Perfect is in consideration of degrees. Goodness is in consideration of states. You may be in perfect health, meaning whole, or you may be in imperfect health, meaning some one thing or another is dis-eased. Goodness, however, is a state. It does not exist in degrees. Either it is or it is not. The same with badness. So that, in order to be “good” one must be “perfect” in it.

And none of us is that. So, there can be no “good” person so long as the one up for consideration has ever done any thing bad. He or she is immediately and wholly bad, otherwise goodness is no more goodness. To fail in one point of the law is to fail in all of it. You may be sentenced to jail for being a robber but not a murderer, and yet, either way, into the cage you go as a malefactor and a criminal. But we like to divorce ourselves from ourselves. We say I am good today, but I was not so good yesterday, I hope I will be better tomorrow, and we call the intent “goodness”. We have devised many other such platitudes to prop up our injured and traumatized egos, to make excuses for our many lapses in compassion or our panic-stricken decisions in anger or desperation. No. We are all sinners. We are all bad. How can anyone call themselves good when even Christ Himself, when called “good master” replied, “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but God alone.” If you are not judging good by the standard of God, you do not know what goodness is and prove that your idea of it is corrupted by “the best a human being can do.” And the best a human being can do, without consciousness of God, is evil. The best he can do, with consciousness of God, is cast himself upon the mercy and grace of God and appeal to His goodness.