By Mark Azzara
Dear Friend,
What’s the opposite of doing evil? Doing good, right? Except that we have really twisted the word “good” (or “goodness”) into something that no longer even vaguely resembles the truth. We define “good” as the opposite of bad rather than the opposite of evil. We try to do good on our own and are satisfied if the result makes things better (i.e., less bad). And we then take personal satisfaction in having done something good after redefining good by our own standards. But we also have reduced good to a place on a list that goes terrible, poor, fair, good, great, which leads to the gigantic lie we repackage as a motivational axiom: “Good isn’t good enough.” In both cases, our understanding of good is flawed because we have forgotten that “God alone is good.” Try living up to that standard and see how well you do.
All God’s blessings – Mark
Problem is there’s absosmurfly nothing new about this. What the Greeks caller “arete” and the Romans “virtuus” (wherefrom we rather sloppily derive the word “virtue”) referred to “suitability for a particular purpose.” When we gave up on the idea that all human beings had the exact same purpose (sometime around Plato), I’m not at all certain that, post-teleologically, the notion of a gereral category of “goodness” even makes any sense.