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 Posted: Tue Dec 15, 2009 12:38 pm
By the requirements of any religion, would you be able to make it to their version of Paradise? Whether a small, vague, religion in a mostly unpopulated area, or something as large as Islam or Christianity, would you be able to get into their version of heaven?
For example, if the religion you think would allow you heaven-access, requires a pure and honest heart, you really? Say when you read a book you are bored to tears over the love, then soak up the gore, or find yourself cheering on the villain. Say you see a homeless on the side of the road, and simply think, what a shame, and go on with your day, or you smile when a hated coworker is fired, and hits rock bottom. Could that imply something more, even just a shred of something not all that righteous?
Would you be able to make it to a Paradise, if so, which, and how many people do you really think could make it there as well?
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Posted: Tue Dec 15, 2009 1:21 pm
I find that this question makes me sigh at your oversight of ignorance.
It asks a question that provokes a person to answer in only one form and that form is a falacy known as the slippery slope.
For if I answer yes, then what is it that makes me better than any one singular other. And if I answer no, then how many more good deeds would be "enough" to get into this fable of a paradise in which "good works" are what are required to get in?
Secondly.....you are assuming that all versions of paradise require good works to get in, and that there is not some other special trick involved that works in people's favor. The Christian version of Heaven (for one) is a heaven that requires no such amount of good works to get in at all. In point of fact, under no version of Christianity (at least not a well thought out theology of Christianity) would succumb so easily to that same old slippery slope that you are suggesting.
It is simple to ask questions like this above, but it is essentially comprised of a a non-question that can only be answered in such a way that reveals that people think of themselves in a much higher manner than the people around them do. Even the Jerk at the office who laughed when the guy he hated got fired will answer "Yeah, because I think I'm a good person." Just like a rescent study showed that "95% of professors a a particular university believed themselves to be above average compared to their peers". It is not possible to guage your own performance in whatever task, by looking through a subjective measuring instrument, just as it is not at all acurate to ask differing people with differing measures of what is "good" and "good enough" and "bad" or "Unrightous."
In review. This question is absurd two fold.
1. Because it assumes that the requirement to get into ANY AND ALL FORMS OF PARADISE, (whatever that means) is that a person meet some standard of "goodness" that is ambiguous and undefined, which is factually untrue based on certain versions of this paradise spoken of.
and
2. Because the only possible way to answer the question is by commiting a falacy, thus making the question loaded and commiting a falacy of it's own known as the Complex Question Falacy.
So....would I get in? Yes....according to a religion or two out there I fit the bill.
But not because of anything about me that is either "good" in some sort of metaphysical way or "bad".....but because of something called grace.
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