REAL ART FLASHBACK
Easter Grinch

I wrote this a year ago:

First, it’s pretty easy for me to be good. I’ve had an easy life. I have wanted for almost nothing. I have a loving and emotionally supportive family. I am well educated. Nothing particularly bad has ever happened to me. I deserve none of this. I have gotten this wonderful life because of luck, because of the circumstances of my birth. Second, if my ability to easily be good is, by and large, due to luck, any notions of absolute individual responsibility for good and evil become, at best, problematic. Third, Heaven and Hell, the absolute reward and the absolute punishment for good and evil, become absurdly simplistic, absurdly unfair. As the great philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell writes, “eternal punishment is inhumane.” I have discovered that I can no longer believe in Hell, as no just God would ever condemn souls to such a place. I have realized that I no longer care about Heaven—why should I be rewarded for the circumstances of my birth? I’ve already received ample reward here on Earth. Furthermore, doing good has become to me an end unto itself, with its own rewards. Because I now know that I, too, am capable of great evil, it is now much easier to forgive those who have wronged me. Abandoning the prison of the Heaven/Hell concept has allowed me to become a more enlightened person, a more moral person.

Click here for the rest. And hoppy Easter.

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