Ask a Catholic

[henryp]

First off, I'm speaking in very generic terms.  I'm talking very casually and haphazardly about how people think rather than in 'battle mode' where every point needs to be analyzed and defended.

Where I'm saying "you" want to go (casually speaking), is that if someone says "Why be good?" they would like to conclude that an answer exists for everyone.   Because we're taught people should be good whole lives.  So when the discussion comes up, that's often the starting point.  

I've been taught we're all supposed to be good, now I just need a way to arrive at that conclusion.  
vs.
Should "good" even be a priority when deciding how to behave?

That's what I think happens with a lot of religious people, is that they start with an assumption that skips over a lot of questions that need to be answered first.  

This would explain why people are changing so little as religion falls out of favor.  Because most of the conclusions are ingrained already.  Nobody is saying "Whoops, the entire foundation of our belief system is gone, time to rebuild from the ground up."  Instead a compartmentalized area containing the God and Religion stuff is cut out, but everything else more or less stays the same.

What I think is you are suffering from the dunning-kruger effect. Trying really hard to be superior to everyone else, and while that is easy to do online in a forum, there is a long way to show yourself as anything of worth in real life. You wouldn't survive a week on earth without other humans.

I am good because it is the best for me. It pays 10x more to be good than all the trouble of being bad. Surely we all get fooled, but I prefer to give trust to other people, than to go deep into darkness. Also, I am too lazy to be evil.

I'll bite.  Superior to everyone else at what?  
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This little sequence was a mistake.  I was trying to illustrate a point, but I blew it by using a sloppy example, and people want to argue about the example's sloppiness rather than the point that I didn't really get across.
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You're good because it is the best for you.  Which means your motivation isn't being good, it's doing what's best for you.  So if what's best for you in some instances was doing bad, or abstaining from what is good, you'd do that instead, right?  If so, we're in complete agreement on what should be motivating our behavior.