Copyright 1998-2007 by Donald R. Tveter, http://www.dontveter.com, commercial use is prohibited. This material cannot be quoted at length or posted elsewhere on the net or included in CD ROM collections. Short quotations are permitted provided proper attribution is given.

As I was growing up I had a scientist's desire for an explanation of the world that made sense. I was raised Catholic and since their viewpoint did not make sense I gave up on them and started searching for something that did make sense. Ultimately I found it in born-again Christianity. They had an explanation that did make sense although most of the time they state their ideas so badly that outsiders like scientists can't make any sense of it. I also found that Catholic doctrine added in non-Biblical ideas that are essentially Hindu-Buddhist-like and this makes finding sense from the Catholic perspective especially hard (NOTE). Because Bible believers do such a bad job of expressing their view of the world to unbelievers, especially to the most rational and scientific people in the world I've undertaken to try and do a rational explanation of the Biblical view of the world.

Let me make the Biblical viewpoint very clear: God is a nice guy, he will give us anything we want but the first question on the wish list is this one:

There are only two choices. First, you can take the attitude: "I want what I want and I'm going to get what I want no matter who gets hurt". This is selfishness and in Biblical jargon selfishness is called sin. If the Biblical side would at least say "selfishness" most of the time instead of "sin" outsiders would at least have a good chance of understanding but they don't and this is one little way that a communications gap develops between believers and unbelievers. The second choice is that you can take the attitude that you are going to love everyone and put them first not yourself. God then breaks ties by coming up with a plan for everyone and everyone should go along with that plan. Everyone on Earth takes the first choice first, everyone is selfish at least part of the time and even doing so just part of the time makes you guilty of being selfish period. The good news is that if you get sick and tired of being selfish and you REALLY REALLY WANT to give it up then God will gradually make you over into a better person and when you reach Heaven you will be perfect. You get what you want: you will spend eternity in a place filled with people who REALLY WANT to put everyone else first. Likewise, everyone who wants to be selfish will spend eternity in a place filled with people who believe in being selfish. So everyone gets what they WANT and this is the issue to be faced on Earth. Another short way to put it is this:

Earth is your chance to try out selfishness and if you like it you can keep it and if you don't like it you can ask God to take it away and He will.

Quite often you will have Bible believers tell you that you are going to Hell because of this, that or the other sin that you've committed here on Earth. THIS IS NOT TRUE. Whatever you've done CAN, and WILL BE, completely IGNORED if in the future you're going to be perfect. Anyone who wants to be perfect is not going to cause any problems in Heaven, so why not let them in? On the other hand people who want to keep on doing the bad things they've been doing on Earth will go to Hell not really because of what they've already done but because of what they would be doing in the future.

The situation has two nice analogs. First, here on Earth we have prisons that keep the worst offenders from hurting other people and ruining their lives. It ought to be pretty obvious that letting really nasty people run around loose will only result in tragedy after tragedy. The same applies to the Universe as a whole, God is not letting anyone into Heaven who is going to mess things up for anyone else. It simply would not be Heaven if there were people there causing mischief, so they have to be kept out. There are plenty of people who think that God loves people so much that it is "obvious" that God would not toss people into Hell. But it should be equally obvious that people who refuse to behave themselves can't be allowed to run around loose and hurt other people. Let Hitler and his associates into Heaven and they would spend their time persecuting Jews. Let in unrepentant members of the Klu Klux Klan and they will persecute blacks. Let in unrepentant Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland and they will want to settle scores that go back hundreds of years. Let in unrepentant Islamists and they will go around crashing planes into buildings. At the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks many people were saying how upset they were that God let the hijackers crash the planes into buildings. Why did he let this happen? Why didn't he stop it? Maybe this proves there is no God! Well, the time is coming when God will stop such things from happening and he'll do it by not letting into Heaven ANYONE who would even so much as JUST THINK (!) about doing such a thing. Now your sins are probably not as dramatic as any of the above but any sort of unkindness, rudeness, self-centeredness, pride or arrogance is just not allowed. Even these little sins would make Heaven unheavenly.

The second analog is Communism. One of the Communists' favorite slogans was: "From each according to his abilities to each according to their needs." This is pretty much an atheistic version of the Biblical perspective. Of course the reasons Communism can't work are first that the general population consists of selfish people who will only very rarely put anyone else first, almost always they put themselves first and you can't make a perfect society with such people. Second, the people in a Communist government who in theory should be putting everyone else first put themselves first, they try and get as much as they can for themselves from every possible source and the interest of the general public is ignored. Then too, even if they wanted to put everyone else first they just don't have all the necessary information to make the right choices. Only God knows enough to come up with the right solution for everyone.

The Biblical perspective also explains why God does not appear to be "out there" at all. God is saying, "OK, fine, you don't want to do things my way, go ahead and do things your way and see if you like it. As long as you don't want me around I'll just stay out of your life". On the personal level we get to discover that in a life without God you end up empty, miserable, depressed and without hope. We get to find out that we can only find meaning, purpose, hope, love, joy and peace through a relationship with God. God fills people up, no one else and nothing you can do will fill you up. In fact without God everyone suffers spiritual death. At the level of the world we get crime, lies, wars, diseases, hate, divorce, natural disasters, taxes, crooked governments and all sorts of problems WE have to solve. We get to find out that human attempts to fix these problems never quite work.

I can't resist trying to be more technical about it. You can only construct a happy peaceful society when every person in that society puts everyone else first and there is someone available to break ties and arrange for a meaningful life for everyone. It's a case of "it's better to give than receive". If you have selfish people in a society then some one person or group of persons will want something, say a piece of land while some other person or group of persons will want the same thing and neither side will ever give in. The classic example of this is that the Jews want a certain piece of land in the Middle East while the Arabs also want it. Both conditions cannot be true, it is as if the Jews want a world where the logical proposition A is true and the Arabs are trying to make not A true. Or think of two waves interfering destructively. Or there was the second episode of Star Trek, Where No Man Has Gone Before where the Enterprise goes into the energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy. Two crew members develop psychic powers and battle it out to be the one in control. What's going on in the world is this: when you're loving and giving and serving other people it's as if the universe gets stronger and better and happier and held more tightly together. But if you're selfish things start to fall apart and unhappiness and pain results. I suspect that someday there will be a branch of science that deals with the spiritual and then this idea will be expressed as a differential equation and a mathematical theorem. Until that time comes we can only use words or analogies. I think there is another theorem to prove as well. IF there was some other way in which people could be happy without God I do think God would let some people live that way without Him if that's what they really wanted. But as it stands that doesn't work, only a relationship with God is fulfilling enough to keep a person going and the absence of God will result in spiritual death. Quite often many of the Biblical rules about behavior appear to be almost arbitrary but they are all founded on the concept of what really works. God's plan really works and none of the others can possibly work.

To sum it up: God is a really nice guy and he will give you whatever you want. If you want to have things your own way - if that is your highest priority - God will give you a world filled with people who believe just like you do. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that such a world will be Hell, it will be Hell whether or not there are flames and/or darkness and/or devils with pitchforks. And on the other side, everyone who wants to love God and love their neighbor will get that too. Nothing could be more fair.

The above has been an over-view of the situation, it was designed to be short and rational however to get a really complete picture of the situation a lot more needs to be said.

One of the most difficult concepts for outsiders to grasp about the Biblical viewpoint is that everyone is guilty and therefore everyone deserves hell. The typical person thinks that they are good enough for Heaven. People think God grades like they do in school where 90-100 is an A, 80-89 is a B, 70-79 is a C, 60-69 is a D and below 60 is failing. But that is NOT how it works. With God only 100 is passing and no one except Jesus has ever managed to get 100. People have an intrinsically selfish nature and this disqualifies EVERY ONE of us for Heaven. Take a careful look and you can find selfishness in everyone else, so what is the chance that you're perfect? All of which might make you think nobody ever gets into Heaven but that is not the way it works. But again if you onlyWANT to get rid of your intrinsically selfish nature God will strip it away so in the future you can be perfect in Heaven.

Another thing I've noticed is that people can admit to "bad" behavior some of the time but then they blame it on someone else: "It's not my fault, the other guy did so and so and he shouldn't have, so it's all his fault, not mine". They figure their bad behavior should not be counted against them. A wife gets angry at her husband because he spends too much time at the office and neglects her and the children. A husband gets angry at his wife because he thinks he's entitled to relax a little and watch a football game rather than help her with whatever. Kids get angry because they want something or other and the parents say no. All of this is wrong. EVEN IF the other person is clearly wrong just getting angry because you are not getting what you want IS WRONG.

There are a lot of people who think that doing good deeds will get them a place in Heaven. Indeed they will argue that a really "good" person like Gandhi who did so much good for the Indian people will get in on the basis of his good deeds. Gandhi's public image is most notable. However what was his private life like? I don't know but maybe he beat his wife. Or ignored his children so he could spend time in public view getting the adoration of the masses. And if he was seeking the adoration of the masses he was wrong. Any fault like these keeps you out of Heaven. If Gandhi wanted to be good he should have turned to the God of the Bible and preached God's good news but he didn't. If God let Gandhi into Heaven and then Gandhi started mis-treating people in some way Heaven would not be Heavenly, it would be Earth all over again. Doing a few good deeds or even A LOT of good deeds is not enough, you have to BE PERFECT ALL THE TIME and you can only be that by doing what God wants absolutely ALL the time.

So again, if your focus is you, EVEN PART OF THE TIME, you're wrong. If you got to Heaven and your focus is you, your selfishness would show up, you would mis-behave and you would be quickly thrown out. Fortunately God knows ahead of time who to keep out. What's right is to forget yourself and put everyone else first and then God schedules something good for you as well as everyone else. The only people who get let into Heaven are those who want to get rid of their selfish nature and trust God to the point where they always do what He wants.

A second difficult concept to grasp is just how easy it is to lose points off the goal of 100, God's standards are exceedingly high, so high it seems laughable to the world. The question of how good you have to be came up in a posting on the Daystar Discussion Forum I offered an answer using a couple of the tiniest acts of selfishness I could come up with. The two were littering on the sidewalk and speeding on the highway. Littering on the sidewalk did not get any attention in the forum but I'm sure it produced a lot of laughs. Let me explain littering first. If you drop that piece of litter instead of disposing of it in a trash can you are making the environment look bad and force someone else to pick up your litter. Littering is essentially a statement coming from deep inside you that says, "To hell with everybody else, let them pick up after me". It's coming from that selfish nature.

Speeding on the highway did evoke a lot of attention. One guy asked if 7% over the speed limit would put him on the highway to hell. So I had to explain the situation. The highway engineers have determined what a safe speed is given the road conditions so they set a speed limit so that it significantly reduces your chance of having an accident. Speeding produces an increased chance of an accident. An accident is liable to hurt you as well as hurt members of your family who may even be safely at home. If you hit someone else then that person and their family members are hurt as well. God says we are supposed to be putting everyone else first, doing what we can to make them happy, not make them unhappy. Since speeding hurts, you should not do it. I also had to say that it is not exactly speeding that is the terrible thing, it's the selfish attitude the speeder has that's the problem. It's the attitude of "To Hell with everyone else" that is the problem. Speeding is only the outward sign of the selfishness on the inside.

But what if you've got to rush somebody to the hospital? Speeding would be the right thing to do IF driving conditions permitted it, that is if there is little traffic, a smooth road, few curves and no obstacles. This illustrates the fact that it is the motivation for the act that makes it right or wrong.

Then there is also the famous commandment, "Thou shall not steal". Why stealing is wrong is pretty obvious, taking from someone else will hurt them and make them unhappy and our goal should be to make other people happy. So the right thing to do is give not take. So normally people think givers are good. But not always. Again you need to look at the motivation. Giving because you honestly want to help other people out is a fine thing to do. Giving so you will get praise from other people is again selfishness.

(Need an anything not done in faith is sin paragraph.)

I've stated the situation here in terms of "How do you want to relate to everyone else?" and that there are two choices for everyone, which could be summed up as either "be selfish" or "be un-selfish". A lot of rules follow from the idea that un-selfish is best, the most famous of these are the Ten Commandments. I think quite often Biblically oriented people lose sight of this and go on and on about this, that or the other thing being a sin yet fail to recognize that there is a general principle that determines what's right and what's wrong. Having a list of sins handy is indeed useful however because when a situation comes up you don't have to bother thinking about what to do. Will it cause happiness or unhappiness now and in the long run? You only have to consult the rule book. But people can put too much emphasis on rules, in the end your goal is NOT to be a rule-follower, your goal is to love everyone to the point where you would not want to do them any harm, you should only want to do them good and you should only do what God wants you to do.