Am I a good person?

Rhetorical questions are one of the best tools an advertiser could use. They are inherently intriguing, as with the above pictured booklet. “Are you a good person?” Of course I’m going to want to find out more and, in particular, find out whether I am a good person. So I took it from the university noticeboard where it had been pinned and began a voyage that may loosely be termed self-discovery, but more accurately is A Bit Of A Rant.

I think I am a fairly good person. Philosophically speaking, nothing can ever truly be perfect, it’s all abstract. But even colloquially speaking, I’m far from anything approaching perfect. In terms of body and mind, I like to think I’m punching a little above average. Except that I can’t punch to save my life, so it’s a damn good job that my life thus far has steered clear of most fights. The lack of fighting, though, is something I’d stick down in the Good Person column for some easy plus points.

The book’s subtitle is even more teasing: “Try the ultimate test...” With a tagline like that, how could I possibly resist? Of course, there’s every chance that this will turn out to be as unsatisfying as those multiple choice/flowchart quizzes that I used to do in children’s magazines where it ends up telling you that, by the choices I’d made, the Bond villain I was most like was Francisco Scaramanga. Which, disappointingly, is the Christopher Lee film version, and not the guy from the book who peppers his speech with such joyously outdated phrases as “cool cat”, “d’you get the photo?” and this surreal gem of a threat:

“I’ll blow you to bits. Get me? And I’ll start with the little bits and go on to the bigger ones. Just so it lasts a heck of a long time.”

Clearly a man who won’t be winning any awards for Good Personhood any time soon. Up against him I’m a shoe-in for egotistical victory. So, let’s crack open the booklet and see if I’m any good.

Page 1 of the booklet with some classic Clip Art.

“Most of us differ as to the definition of ‘good’” notes the booklet. And that’s true in a way, but we’ve also built our legal system on the basis that if you put twelve people in a room and let them talk to each other they will eventually settle upon a good and moral decision. So perhaps a spot of brainstorming is required to settle what’s good and what isn’t.

But apparently not, as the booklet steamrolls ahead into the point of all this: “The Bible says that God is good, and the Ten Commandments are His standard of goodness. So, we will look at God’s Law...”

So there’s one fairly popular definition of what it means to be good. The booklet has arbitrarily decided that those rules are the ones we’ll focus on first up. And, spoiler alert, they’re the only rules the whole booklet will focus on at all, even though there are plenty of other contenders for what constitutes good behaviour in this world. Just ask Supernanny.

On second thoughts, maybe not.

Photo taken from here.

I’m not sure what a tender conscience actually is – oh no, I’m failing this test already! – but I can still evaluate how well I’ve done with regards to the Ten Commandments. They’re a funny bunch of rules, really. Some of them seem like God being quite egotistical and while we all agree that murder is definitely a bad thing, why isn’t rape included? Is that not bad enough?

1. No other gods: I don’t believe in any god, so I’ve certainly not had any other gods. But the booklet adds its own little twisting of the commandment to expand the question, so it asks if I’ve always loved God more than everything else. That’s a resounding NO! to this first commandment.
2. No idols: There a people I admire in the world – some living, some long dead – but I don’t think I’ve made gods of them in my mind. I’m counting this is as my first YES!
3. No taking God’s name in vain: I’ve used God’s name as a “cuss word” for sure. I’ve used his son’s name, his son’s mother’s name and some more recent lexical developments of the four-lettered variety. NO! on this one.
4. Keep the Sabbath Day holy: I’ve only ever been to church under force but I do try to relax on the weekends. But that’s probably a NO! here.
5. Honour mum and dad: Do I “honour” my parents? I’m not sure. But I’m generally nice to them and respectful of them and we get along fine. YES!
6. No murder: Man oh man, am I on a roll or what? I’ve not murdered any—Oh. This booklet says God “considers hatred to be as murder”. So if it’s asking if I’ve hated people then this commandment – the one where I thought I had a rock-solid advantage – must be ranked at another NO!
7. No adultery: I’ve never cheated on anybody so I’m back in the cle—Oh, what?! This also includes sex before marriage? I think this booklet is making stuff up now. Sadly, with that addendum, I’m on another NO!
8. No stealing: I can’t think of anything specific, really, but I know I absolutely must have stolen something before. NO!
9. No lying: I’ve lied many a time. But not answering these questions, so that’s got to be worth some Brownie Points, right? Right? No? Fuck. NO!
10. No coveting: Of course I’ve desired what other people have. Their DVD collections, their facial hair that looks purposeful and not awkwardly thrown onto their face, their girlfriends, their food at a restaurant, their score in the pub quiz... I mean, come on. NO! 

This test seems designed to invite you to fail, with its highly aware definitions of the commandments, doctored to incorporate a broader range of misdeeds to guilt you. I’ve scored a miserable two out of ten on the scales of goodness as put forth by God, then. Huh. Maybe I’m not a good person after all.

“God will punish all murderers, rapists, thieves, liars, adulterers, etc.” That’s not quite the news I was hoping for. It’s nice to see rape is finally in God’s firing line, although that’s of little solace to me when – under the new definitions of murder and adultery – I’m to be punished for all the other crimes listed here.

“He will even judge our words and thoughts” Oh well now I’m truly screwed. There’s a scene in Steven Moffat’s Coupling, where it is pointed out that if aliens wanted to destroy the human race all they need do is make women telepathic. As soon as they could read men’s minds, they would do away with them pretty swiftly. And women can be quite forgiving, too – so if grumpy old God has access to the thoughts swimming around in my skull then I’m doomed.

There was a little sliver of hope that God’s omnibenevolence (a word too big for this booklet) might mean my punishment won’t be all bad. That thought is soon shot out of the sky when the booklet tells me that it’s God being good that means he’s allowed to go full-on Judge Dredd on every murder, rapist, thief, liar, etc. that He can lay his omnipotent hands on. If he did anything else, he’d be corrupt.

While I’m toiling away in whatever punishment God doles out to me, I’m sure the slim number of people left who’ve obeyed every single commandment will be having fun. But the Bible commands them to be “perfect” which, as I might have already mentioned, is basically an unobtainable ideal that can be strived for but never actually achieved. Nobody, then, is perfect. But hang on a moment, they’re probably still Good People.

“But God says [they’re] not.” Ah. Well... could he be wrong?

“One of you is lying.” Hold up there, matey. People can be wrong without lying. They can make mistakes without maliciously distorting the objective truth. But there’s no time for this debate, not when we can be reminded that this God fellow can’t ever lie! Ergo you/I/we are/am the one lying (not even mistaken) about being Good (oh yes, with a capital G).

Our bad, huh? And for that, it’s the Lake of Fire for us because we’ve gone and broken the rules here and the penalty is obviously death. Man alive, is this God or Draco? It’s a bit harsh.

“Listen carefully if you want to live.” It’s an ominous warning and bares some resemblance to a quote from The Terminator. This booklet is made a thousand times better if you can imagine Michael Beihn saying it to you in a dark club as Arnold Schwarzenegger goes postal.

For somebody so uptight about breaking this rules, God’s solution was pretty out there: become a man called Jesus, suffer and die on the cross for everybody’s sins and rise from the dead. This is, quite frankly, the best news the booklet has come up. God, with his forgiveness and resurrective powers, has finally thrown all us sinners a bone. Presumably all we have to do now is stick to those commandments.

Surely it’s possible to be a Good Person if you’ve broken the law before. There’s a metric fuckton of “born again” Christians who are really pinning all their hopes on that, so let’s hope so. But, instead of a straight answer, who’s up for a bizarre cryptic analogy?

“Would you sell one of your eyes for a million dollars?” (Probably not. Is this how the original pitch went for Indecent Proposal?)

“Would you sell both for $50 million?” (More likely, although yeah – I am quite attached to them.)

“I’m sure you wouldn’t. Your eyes are priceless,” (A kidney, on the other hand, is quite handy to have around if a dire financial situation springs up.)

“...yet they are merely the windows of your soul. What then must your life (soul) be worth?” (Quite a bit, I’d wager.)

After that ocular tangent, the booklet then says asking God to let us in because we think we’ve been good is like offering a friend ten cents when he’s given you a car as a birthday present. “You would be very insulted by such a pathetic offer of payment.” I’m not sure I would, actually. If I was giving somebody a gift like an expensive car, I’d probably not be the sort of monumental dickhead who expected some sort of equal value gift. And, what’s more, if somebody offered ten cents I’d be more inclined to say “Don’t be so stupid, I gave you this gift. You owe me nothing, although I wouldn’t mind taking it to the Nürburgring some day.”

The booklet reckons that the ten cents would then make the car a purchase rather than a gift. Which is, as we know, utterly untrue. I gave my grandma a book for Christmas, she gave me a few twenty pound notes. She hasn’t bought the book, we’ve just exchanged gifts. Ignoring this common sense, though, the booklet rages that giving God this ten cents (which I think is a metaphor for the little bit of good we’ve done compared with all those times we weren’t) is a “terrible insult to Him, in light of His sacrifice”.

Bollocks.

It was His sacrifice and He, being all-knowing and such, should probably have seen this coming. (And what of the ridiculous sacrifice I have to make by capitalising the H of “him” or the G of “god”? My shift key is taking a bit of beating here.)

Anyway, what does this mean? Because only a little bit of goodness is a huge insult to the guy, we should have been good all our lives. Except that we can’t change what we’ve done so it’s all horribly pointless. At which point you might realise that we might as well break any of God’s Laws if we’re already way beyond saving because this grand deity doesn’t take personal insults very well.

“The only thing we can do is humble ourselves, repent of our sins...” Let’s just get this straight, then. There are two approaches to this sinning business, then, when you’ve already done it.

1. Make up for it by never sinning again and being really good.
2. Grovel and ask for forgiveness until the day you die.

If somebody was really keen on people being good, you’d think they would opt for Number 1: you can’t change the past but the future is still up for grabs. Not God, though. The grovelling will do fine, like he’s some sort of demented medieval king who gets off on power. And if you sin again? Well you can probably get around it with even more grovelling at his knees while he wears a self-satisfied smirk and purrs to himself.

“If you want to trust in your own goodness, then you are saying His agonizing death on the cross was in vain.” Well you say that, but I’m opposed to the death penalty, so if I had my way His death would never even have come about. Despite that, I still find it completely bonkers that I can’t just get on with being good which is, let’s not forget, what He apparently wants. But before the booklet’s done, there’s another cracking analogy!

Your sins have taken you up to 30,000ft, probably, and you’ve got to get out of the plane. “You don’t merely believe in the parachute – you put it on. People don’t ‘jump’ without Jesus.” And yes, I find it hard to argue against this one: I probably would put on the parachute. So it does actually make sense that you would have to put your faith in Jesus to save you. (Except it’s literally a case of faith, rather than the more demonstrable effects parachutes have had over the years.)

To cap it all off, the way to avoid Hell is say a prayer confessing your sins to God, trusting in Jesus to save you and obeying everything you read in the Bible which, by the way, should be all of it. Presumably that includes all this stuff, too:

One of the last things this booklet has to say is that “God doesn’t want you to go to Hell.” Well He could have fucking fooled me, what with Him being the self-centred, self-aggrandising bastard with a false sense of entitlement that He apparently is.

Although.

There is one other possibility. Imagine a terrible group of people – the sort that no loving God would create, let alone endorse – who want everyone else to act in a way that they perceive to be right, regardless of how everyone else actually feels about it. A group of people who want to crush people’s freedoms of thought, speech, expression and behaviour because they just don’t like it. A group of people who take the ignorance of how the world came to be, how the world works, and what happens when we die, and create some quick and easy answers to enforce their lifestyles on every other poor bugger who wanders their way. (Especially the buggerers, they don’t like anything too kinky.) Such a horrid collective would probably write small guilt-tripping publications designed as an opening salvo of brainwashing those whose behaviour they would like to change. And they’d include their name on the back page, of course. Perhaps they would call themselves something like Breathing Dihydrogen Monoxide. Or something a bit snappier.

If such a group of people happened to exist then I kind of hope that there is a God, just so He can rest their wretched little souls.