Swiss_Cheeseman, please kindly shut up. Whether you agree with what I'm trying to say or not, calling another board member a retard isn't acceptable unless that is close to the truth (in this case, it isn't; he is fairly ignorant about things outside of his religion, as he said himself, but that doesn't make him a retard).
In many things the society of the most industrial states has chanced to positive in the last 300 years, but there is still, after so many years and so much technical knowledge, the same level of foolishness of people. I mean the cruelty of mankind against man.
Why wants our society the people to think that a abundance of goods is all we need for felicity?
The greed for more money and might is in all of us, ever. I am not any better, but I'll try, and all I can say is that reading the bible helps.
It's deeper than money, Thyphoid; money isn't that old of a concept, relatively speaking. What you talk about existed before money was invented; money has just come to represent it to a large extent.
It's about wanting something more (ambition). This in turn is, I think, directly related to "success" (whatever that is). Throughout history, the cultures that have been less ambitious have always been taken over by more ambitious ones (ie. China invading Tibet in the 1950s).
Is ambition then bad or good? On the one side it's certainly good if you consider our current progressive culture to be an example of success; cures for horrible diseases are being invented, and we are learning more about our world, all because of ambition. On the other hand, with ambition, the goal that we are reaching toward can never be reached; no matter how successfull humanity as a whole becomes, the universe will always be so
infinitely larger, so one may ask, what is the point of it all? Whatever you do with your own life will be forgotten in several thousand years, no matter how famous you become right now, and in the long span of time your life probably won't even MATTER at all (and don't think that GOD cares all that much; if "He" exists, "He" has far too much of the rest of the universe to care about, not just people, but every single distant galaxy, all the billions of them).
Is it then better to simply do what makes
you happy, whether that is helping people or harming them? That's why some of you Christians out there do good things, anyway, right? It's for yourself, whether because
you want to get into heaven, or because helping people gives you pleasure. For me it's the latter. Helping people gives me more pleasure than hurting them, because if I hurt them (or failed to help when I could) I feel a nagging guilt later on, which in my opinion is often not worth it.
Would you do "good" (heh... let's see you try and define that word) deeds if you absolutely hated the prospect? I wouldn't; I do good deeds when I do them because they give me a certain satisfaction.
Well, I've probably lost everyone by now, but whatever...
I won't give you any answers, but hopefully I gave at least a few people some questions.
P.S. You don't have to "read"
the website that I linked to. It's like a FAQ, just scroll to the bottom of the main page and click on the questions that interest you (probably everyone here has wondered about at least some of the questions on that site), and don't read the other stuff if you don't want to.
P.P.S. Whoops, I just realized that this post is probably a bit out of place on this board. Ah, well, the deed is done, for good or for ill.
h34r:
