Being a Good Person

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Why isn’t being a good person sufficient to get you into Heaven? Why must you also have faith in a god that you can’t see?
 
Awake said:
Why isn’t being a good person sufficient to get you into Heaven? Why must you also have faith in a god that you can’t see?
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Because being a good person isn’t equivalent to salvation. Salvation is communion with God.

And really, can anyone claim to be a good person? We sin daily so how can we call ourselves good? Goodness can only be applied to us through communion with God. What secular society defines as ‘good’ is simply ‘you let me be and I will let you be’. It is a form of relativism that says what ever you do is good.
 
Serious question: why would you want to spend eternity with a being that you don’t believe in?
 
Awake said:
Well, I would believe in him if I died and sat in front of him while he judged me.
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Well, yes, you’ll believe in Him then. Unfortunately, that will be quite too late.

I suggest you start by reading the Gospels. That should give you a pretty good idea of why we believe in God.

God Bless
 
The thing is, Awake, you aren’t going to be sent to hell kicking and screaming, “Oh no, I didn’t understand, I didn’t realize this would happen, I’m sorry, give me another chance”.

All those who go to hell choose hell over heaven. They are given the choice. . .all they have to do is submit their will to God’s will.

Now this is where your ‘good person’ argument comes in. Without putting “God” into the equation, “good” becomes "Good as defined by me or by some person or group of persons based on relative, and changeable, concepts’. Putting God there, though, we have an absolute good (God is all good). . .we have His teachings too and His Spirit who guides us through the Church (Catholic) that He gave us, to help us.

So right there from the start, in accepting the ‘authority’ of the Catholic Church as being an authority, you would take the first step in submitting ‘your will’ to God’s will. Continuing to follow in obedience makes you more and more ‘acclimated’ to heaven in which your will shall be so closely aligned to God’s that it becomes the same–in other words, you truly become that ‘absolute’ good in yourself.

It’s scary to abandon what has been ingrained in today’s culture as your ‘right’ to ‘be yourself’ and to be your ‘ultimate judge and authority’ in everything. . .but today’s culture is tragically wrong on this. . .and only by rejecting its wrong and being ‘obedient’ to God will you become, paradoxically, the most ‘free’ and the most ‘like yourself’ (your true self) that you can be.

I’ll be praying for you to take that first step of opening yourself up to the possibilities of asking God to help you to find Him and obey Him.
 
Awake said:
Because I’m told that the only alternative is being damned to hell.
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But you don’t believe that, right?

Let me pose another question. If you’re hoping that you can get to heaven (why, it’s not clear) just by being a “good person”, how do you even know what being a “good person” entails? What standard of goodness will you adhere to? What does it even mean to be a “good person”? And how do you know that God’s idea of a “good person” is the same as yours?

What if, when you die, you stand in front of God and he tells you that actually you’ve been a bad person?
 
If you are a good person, I believe you will go to heaven. But what is a good person? According to who? Well, I would imagine you mean you are a good person in God’s eyes, right? Well, what is a good person in God’s eyes? If you take the time to get to know Him, you will find out.
 
Frankly,
when Jesus was asked what was important in salvation, he said the commandments. later, he summarized the Commandments into the Great commandment (in abbreviated terms): Love God and Love your Neighbor as yourself. You see, if you don’t believe in God, you can’t get past the first point. And as others have stated quite well in this thread already, if you don’t know and love God, you probably don’t have a good handle on what it really means to love your neighbor.
 
By rejecting God you also reject the distinction between good and evil. It all becomes a sort of propaganda. There is no such thing as a good person without God. The philosophy of nietzsche becomes the most logical world view. Those with the power determine good and evil and they determine the truth. Hitler had the power and therefore the Jews were to be exterminated because the did not fit with the good as it was seen by the powerful. There is nothing that says Hitler was wrong in materialism.
 
VociMike said:
But you don’t believe that, right?
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I hope it isn’t true, but I don’t know if I believe in it.
Let me pose another question. If you’re hoping that you can get to heaven (why, it’s not clear) just by being a “good person”, how do you even know what being a “good person” entails? What standard of goodness will you adhere to? What does it even mean to be a “good person”? And how do you know that God’s idea of a “good person” is the same as yours?
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At this point, I’m more concerned about avoiding hell. But as to being a good person is? I think Jesus summed it up pretty good when he said “love one another as yourself”.
What if, when you die, you stand in front of God and he tells you that actually you’ve been a bad person?
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The same question can be posed to you. What if you die and God tells you that you picked the wrong religion and actions you thought were good were actually bad?
 
paul_c said:
Frankly,
when Jesus was asked what was important in salvation, he said the commandments. later, he summarized the Commandments into the Great commandment (in abbreviated terms): Love God and Love your Neighbor as yourself. You see, if you don’t believe in God, you can’t get past the first point. And as others have stated quite well in this thread already, if you don’t know and love God, you probably don’t have a good handle on what it really means to love your neighbor.
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Well, I would disagree with that simply because I know many loving people who don’t believe in the Christian God. You can tell me they don’t actually know what love is, but I would disagree.
 
Awake said:
I’m not rejecting God. How can I reject somebody when I don’t even know if they exist?
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Your reject God by rejecting the evidence of His existance. The CCC states the following.
WAYS OF COMING TO KNOW GOD

31 Created in God’s image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of “converging and convincing arguments”, which allow us to attain certainty about the truth. These “ways” of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure: the physical world, and the human person.
32 The world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world’s order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe.
As St. Paul says of the Gentiles: For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.7 And St. Augustine issues this challenge: Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky. . . question all these realities. All respond: “See, we are beautiful.” Their beauty is a profession [confessio]. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One [Pulcher] who is not subject to change?8

33 The human person: with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the “seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material”,9 can have its origin only in God.
34 The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality “that everyone calls God”.10 35 Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith. The proofs of God’s existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason.
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