Life As Performance Art 194

Here is my latest answer to one of the many lasme questions on Quora: "Meh, “Good things come to good people”; you say? Wishful thinking. Too many good people have suffered martyrdom for their virtue and goodness. Beginning with Jesus, whose death, for us Christians anyway, also presaged the hope of new life and redemption consummated in his resurrection, and for his apostles, all of whom came to a dreadful and ignominious end. Or how about all the Christians slaughtered in the Roman Coliseum, or the innocent so-called witches, heretics and Jews who were burned to death during the Inquisition in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, or the Jews butchered by Hitler’s Nazis, or the millions more slaughtered by Stalin and Mao? How could this fatuous thinking possibly explain the assassination of such as Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King? I am not going to get into useless arguments about karma or comparative religion, but we really need to revisit some of our old assumptions and really learn to think and reflect carefully on such matters. We live in a world that often is neither kind nor fair, and it is only through the work, witness, lives, and sacrifices of those who have the vision to work and walk and live towards something better that anything is ever going to improve. If we really want a fair and just world, then that is something we are each going to have to work, struggle and sacrifice for. In the meantime, we had might as well give up on those fantasies about good things happening to good people, because there is absolutely no evidence to justify this kind of sloppy and lazy thinking." All I can add to this is the untested magical thinking of those who insist that they believe in karma. That Hindu and Buddhist nonsense that states that all the good we do comes back to us, just as all the evil we do comes back on us. I call this magical thinking, and there is no evidence that goodness is going to be like a good luck charm that will help us get through life. It could, but there are no promises, no guarantees in life. I also object to the self-centred and cowardly kind of thinking behind doing good for our own benefit. We do good because it is the right thing to do, and only because it is the right thing to do. Remember Murphy's Law, which says that no good deed goes unpunished. Perhaps not always or exactly true, but I enjoy quoting it from time to time as a corrective to that bland saccharine sweet Pollyanna thinking, which really isn't thinking at all. just another bromide, and really, Gentle Reader, we are worth better than bromides, and yes, let's continue doing the right thing, no matter how much we suffer for doing it, because every bit of good that is done from a pure heart and honest motives will help move things towards the change that we need in our world, the very change that can only be set in motion by people brave enough to become the change that they want to see in the world.