IS IT MOCKERY OF GOOD TO DO IT WITHOUT REPENTING SIN FIRST? SINNERS
BANNED FROM DOING GOOD?
The Catholic Church says that sinners can do good works while refusing to say
sorry to God. It is like telling God you will do good works when it pleases you
and that right and wrong or what he wants does not count. Even the Bible agrees
that such works are trying to take God for a fool (James 3:10,11). The Catholic
Church then is after money and power and is feeding off our hypocrisy to get
them. It only cares about its own agenda and is disguising that agenda as God’s.
Instead of righteousness it preaches a gospel that tries to cover manure heaps
with snow and pretend there is no manure there. The holier you become as a
Catholic the more crafty and deceptive you are.
Venial sin is sin that is not a complete rebellion and break from God. It is
serious but not that serious while mortal sin is hatred for God and total
separation from him and is very very serious and takes you to everlasting
torment in Hell. This idea comes from the Catholic Church. Protestants following
the Bible reject it as nonsense holding that all sin is opposition to God and
complete disdain for his laws.
It seems you cannot be condemned for saving a life because you do it in a state
of sin especially if the sin is very minor. You could say though that it is not
the good work that is the sin but the sin is a separate matter - how you try to
use the work to declare that what is good is up to you and not God. So you
insult God because the work is good and you have put it in the dung. The bigger
the sins you carry or the bigger you want them to be then the bigger the insult
to the good work.
To do good and refuse to sanctify that good and make it real good by casting all
sin, even if it is only all venial sin you have got, out of your heart would be
a mortal sin and casting ridicule when that good is major. For example, it is a
mortal sin to ridicule a person for saving a life. When you internally and in
your heart ridicule your own saving a life or something that ridicule must be a
mortal sin. You would desecrate the act and seek the praise it will bring you.
That means when you save a life, it is only the mocking and the evil of stealing
praise that you want to do. You are saving the life as a means not an end. It
becomes like a side effect! By doing a big good work while having any kind of
unrepented sin is mocking that work. It’s a mortal sin in the sense that it
could be such a tremendously special thing to do and you refuse to let it be.
The bigger the unrepented sin you desecrate your good work with the worse the
desecration.
Anybody could have to do a big good work. You have to be ready by repenting of
venial sin as soon as it is committed. This is in case you will have a big good
work to do. So not repenting and preparing properly for the possibility of the
big good work would be a mortal sin.
If you refuse to do something easy and reasonable in order to save others from
death with the right attitude then how seriously is the willingness to mock the
act in your heart? It is still hugely evil to mock such good results and the
saving of the lives.
So if you have a sin and don’t want to repent does that mean you ought not to do
the big good work? If you have to save a life and you are in sin what happens?
Is it better to save the life while adhering to the sin? Or is it better not to
save the life for by doing it in sin you only desecrate the act? Would the evil
you adhere to forbid you to do the good work?
The answer is that it is evil how you mess all over the good work so
sacrilegiously but refraining from doing the good work with the intention of
honouring it would also be a sacrilege. Either way you are trying to mock good.
A good intention whether you do or don't is impossible. Clearly the doctrine is
not concerned so much about human life but about what virtue means. It is about
hypocritical religious goodness. No truly good person believes there is a
problem with saving life in sin even if he concludes you should do it. He
concludes that it is like a necessary evil under the circumstances!
Let us put that aside for the sake of argument. What if saving a life when you
hold sin in your heart is forbidden?
Will God will order you to save a life even if your attitude grossly desecrates
the good deed? No for he controls life and death but he supposedly has no
control over how you choose evil. Belief in God then legitimises religious
extremism. Even if it does not look extremist it still values it.
Even if God orders you to save the life regardless of your vile attitude what is
happening is he is weighing the value of life against the value of doing things
with a respectful attitude to goodness. A question is being raised, "Should I
refrain from doing good just because I will do it without a good holy motive and
to honour it?" That such a question will come up in such a grave matter implies
a bigger concern for God and virtue than life! That alone is evil in the
non-religious and humanitarian sense.
Religion says sin is not bad for it hurts people it is bad for it offends God
and is defiance of his law. So though hurting people can be a sin it is not the
hurting that is bad but the disobedience. Dentists have to hurt people. So for
religion it does not follow that the life should necessarily be saved. Religion
sees sacrifice as better than happiness. The atheist who painfully sacrifices
his last moment to give away his last whiskey that he would enjoy so much to a
stranger is regarded as doing good and considered better than he would have been
if he had taken it himself.
Religion sees no problem with God hurting a person in order to make them more
patient even though the pain may be worse than any benefit in improving the
person. So if you want to do a good work and you don’t want to give up your sin,
it is better to refrain from it because you are mocking good. You are also
making yourself feel good about the work you have done though it has been laced
with sin and looks good. You are making yourself blind to the evil of sin. In
such a case, it would not be a further sin to refrain from helping. The Church
says that blindness and being attracted to your own evil is worse than any evil
even somebody’s death. Then, the more good you do in a state of sin the worse
the blasphemy is.
Again if virtue only matters and not people this is not necessarily correct as
we have seen. Also, the repenting is still considered more important than the
life. They agree then after all that if you are in sin you cannot desecrate good
works by doing them.
But some would say that if you repented and then saved the person there would be
no problem. You might say an action is not really good even if it helps others
if you do it in contempt for virtue and do it to try and offend God by creating
a goodness in defiance of his. Let us ask, "You didn’t open up the door of your
heart to love and cleanness. It is a sin to do good then for the motive is not
really good. You are showing more concern for good results than good motives
whereas if motives do not come first then there is no point in talking about
right and wrong. But surely even then it is a new sin not to save the person?"
It is not a case of having to choose between two sins. You have to reject both.
Jesus said God comes first so if you have to let somebody die to prevent
yourself separating further from God you have to do it. For Christianity, people
exist for God and not God for people and their welfare doesn’t matter in itself.
Even if God commands concern for others the importance of people’s welfare is
still being devalued.
Venial sin in Catholicism is serious sin that does not cut you off from God such
as a white lie. Mortal sin is serious sin, such as homosexuality, that does cut
you off. The venial sinner should not do good and the less good done the better.
God tells us we must never ever sin and that if saving a life would be a sin for
us through conscience or circumstance then it should not be done. So God would
prefer you refraining from a good action than carrying it out to profane it. It
is endlessly worse if it is a mortal sinner and not a venial sinner.
Do not forget that in Christian teaching nobody wants to give God all the love
he deserves and he gets only imperfect love from us so we all are sinners and
never totally holy. That has huge implications for the authenticity of our good
works.
The Church says that when Jesus accused the Pharisees of committing a sin that
will never be forgiven that he meant that they would never repent of it being
too stubborn. Jesus condemned their self-righteousness. He spoke of a Pharisee
who thanked God for helping him to be so good and said that the Pharisee was bad
in the eyes of God. Clearly doing good works when you are a sinner turns you
into that kind of do-gooder hypocrite. So the good works are dangerous. You are
better off being very very bad in the obvious way. The message is being very bad
but not obviously is more dangerous than being obviously very bad.