In a previous post I was looking at some of the options post-modernism offers. In my search, maybe I should listen to one of the more common views. From what I see on TV (the news, Oprah, Entertainment Tonight) and hear from other people, it starts with a general Judeo-Christian approach that acknowledges the idea of right and wrong by stating that God is going to judge us for our actions on earth when we die. From there it takes on more of a post-modern feel when, except for murder and robbing a bank, it can’t really define what right and wrong are. But somehow, God uses the big scale in the sky to weigh my good actions against my bad actions. If I have done more good things than bad then I get to go to Heaven. If not, well, too bad, off I go.

My first question is, “where does this idea about God come from?” With eternity at stake, is there any religious authority that can claim that this is how God is? It sounds more like a combination of Judaism and Buddhism. Maybe it’s adapted from the 10 Commandments of the Old Testament — today it appears we can pick and choose specific commandments though because the ones about God aren’t very popular. I haven’t murdered anyone (yet) but if you look at the standard as given, my scales tipped for the worse a long time ago.

Similar to the previous post, my second question is, “how could I ever know what God’s standard is?” The idea of a heavenly scale sounds great at first but when I start trying to define what “good” and “bad” are and how much different actions “weigh” then things start to get pretty complicated. How will I ever know if I’ve made it to that 50.000000001% mark? Which begs the question of what decimal point will God round to? Does He round up or down?

Is it possible that this very popular idea is an attempt to make God fit into our own definition of “fair”? But how fair is it? What about the person that starts trying to do good the last ten years of their life? That’s a whole decade but is it enough time to do enough good to outweigh all the bad that they’ve done in the past? Is someone in that situation just out of luck? And what about young people? I’m sure a rebellious teenager can rack up quite a few bad points pretty quickly. I hope they’ve done more good while they were children or else I guess they’re out of luck too.

Maybe this whole scale thing isn’t as “fair” as it seems.