More Important, Benevolence or Belief?

[PsychoSarah]

Then maybe we should consider this verse before our government considers cutting back on food stamps, unemployment, etc.:

"Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away." Matthew 5:32

What a can of worms that verse is. It is intended to encourage people to be charitable towards the needy, but it inevitably also encourages people to take advantage of the kindness of others for personal gain beyond survival.

 

[dlamberth]

What a can of worms that verse is. It is intended to encourage people to be charitable towards the needy, but it inevitably also encourages people to take advantage of the kindness of others for personal gain beyond survival.

The good it does helping those in need far and away outweighs those few who takes advantage of the kindness of others.

.

 

[PsychoSarah]

The good it does helping those in need far and away outweighs those few who takes advantage of the kindness of others.

.

You would hope.

 

[OldWiseGuy]

Then maybe we should consider this verse before our government considers cutting back on food stamps, unemployment, etc.:

"Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away." Matthew 5:32

All things considered I think the government is doing a pretty good job of helping out.

 

[dumpsterdiver45]

Do good people go to hell if they don't believe? Do believers go to hell if they are not good? Will those who live good lives be rewarded regardless as to what they believe? Will bad people go to heaven so long as they believe?

Just curious as to what people think is more important.

I think you're making the same category error organized Christianity makes--assuming that belief of the saving sort is a simple 'blab it n grab it' power of the human will. Faith is assent, however small, to let go the familiarity and comfort of the material realm we're surrounded with and commit to the unseen power that has drawn humans to relationship with God since man has walked upright. Doing good or evil are quite secondary, though good does bear a relationship to belief/faith while evil doesn't: belief/faith and doing good follow from inner truth, while evil follows from a falsification of being.

But salvation in the sense I believe Christ intends is only peripherally related to doing good. We do good and evil from the natural state of our own souls. To step forward intellectually and believe in the sense Jesus seems to intend is different; it requires assent to the death of the soul, agreement to approach a furnace of truth clothed in the kindling of our corruption. Paul saw this clearly when he noted "...I die daily." in Cor 15. Although good should increases in correspondence to faith (because the forging of faith is a regenerative process which produces higher levels of truth in being, from which a higher quantity of good would naturally follow), benevolence is performed from the naturally true (cleansed) portions of the soul--they have no saving value per se apart from their shared relationship with faith to the spiritual condition of the individual.

Because Christians are taught to be elitist, most reject this because it suggests that non-Christians, even atheists, show obvious signs of spiritual birth in the practice of benevolence. The organized Christian paradigm necessarily rejects this, unfortunately.

There's also the problem of defining good....good by whose standard? Good appears to the rest of us generally as such, but is often done from self-serving motives. Much good is performed in order to benefit or profit from it. I think we're all going to be surprised and ashamed when the day comes we learn the true standard of good and evil and our actual (distinct from supposed) relationship to it.