What's Good About Us?

I just reread this. I think I wrote this more for me than anyone else. So it is not the riviting commentary that you are used to. Yuk, yuk. I promise to get back to irritating liberals by next weekend.

How does one measure goodness? Many will immediately answer that question by quoting a bible passage. The more metaphysical among us might take us off on a tangent of flowers and clouds. When a friend says “Oh, she’s a really good person.” I often think to myself, “In what way?”. Does she never lie, never make others sad, never cheat or steal? I doubt that. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any adult in the world that you could say that about. So what makes us decide that a person is good?

I have learned, in my waning years, that I can be rather naive when it comes to making a good assessment of people and whether or not I should feel comfortable enough to trust their friendship. I’m sure everyone has at least one, if not several stories where someone in their lives became a disappointment and even betrayed an unspoken trust. But to give humanity a little slack, I would guess that the vast majority of the time, that person unintentionally slipped up and caused pain to others.

Anyway, since this topic has been sorta rattling around in my brain lately, I decided to check out a few online forums on the subject. The results were quite enlightening to me. So I thought I’d share some here.

Cactus Says:

For me, a good person is someone who stops to question his/her deeds and on occasion is tormented by guilt for minor things such as hurting someone's feelings... you get the jist of it. A good person would have a certain set of principles and morals and strives to live by those principles and morals.

Shalott Says:

People go through stages in their lives and while some person or teenager may seem like a bad apple, that doesn't necessarily mean that person is bad through and through. and of course, there are some things we do that can never be undone or taken back.

Nikoli:

I think it's too easy to call someone "good" or "bad" and it misses the mark. The reasons we do what we do isn't because we are good or bad- it isn't because we have a strong or weak-willed character, it's because of the skills and tools we have learned, been taught, and been indoctrinated with. In this sense I agree that morality is a key factor, but it's not that simple, as there are more things involved: I don't know precisely all the functions which go into having the ability to make a good choice, but it'd be something like reasoning, discernment, knowledge of good and bad, judgment, but even "judgment" includes a lot of other smaller skills.

Petrarch Says:

After thinking about the question on this thread a little, I'm not at all comfortable with judging others as good or bad people. I think I do have my own idea of what an ideal good person would be, which I strive to live up to (and certainly fail at it in many ways), but I don't think I have some sort of ideal standard in my mind that other people have to live up to for me to deem them good (that is if we are mainly considering people who do not maliciously and willfully do harm to others, since that really is a pretty basic standard).

Pretty heady stuff, huh? I think Petrarch said it best. We should be careful about offering judgments of others. We should only strive to be the kind of person that we conceive to be a good person. And then simply stay more alert to those who would willfully do harm to others and ourselves.

But . . .I’m just sayin’