Transcript

Lots of things can send a person to hell, but there's one flaw in our thinking that sends most people there, and that is what I call the good person fallacy.

What is that fallacy?

Well, I'll tell you, but since you're a good person, I'm sure you've already hit the subscribe button and you've visited us at trenthornpodcast.com to support what we do here at the Council of Trent.

Now, many people watching might think that the worst things that could d- send someone to hell would be something like atheism or a total rejection of God.

Now, while atheists make up about 4 to 7% of the world population, most people who are not religious are not atheists.

They're just not affiliated with any religion, also called nones.

A lot of these people do believe in God or they believe in some kind of higher power or supreme being, or at least they're open to the idea.

And they're not amoral, nihilistic relativists.

In fact, most people are not true relativists.

They believe in some objective moral rules, usually based on some principle like it's wrong to harm innocent people or don't violate a person's consent.

They believe in these moral rules because they think of themselves as good persons.

So, instead of being an atheist or a relativist, many people who aren't religious hold to a view that sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Denton call moralistic therapeutic deism.

They believe in a generic God or a higher power that upholds the world, deism, and they believe that this being or power wants them to be nice, it's moralistic, and this being exists primarily to serve them, and prayer is usually just a petition to this being to get what they want, therapeutic.

The almighty God under this view becomes a cosmic vending machine who only metes out justice against the worst vandals when it's appropriate.

This God just wants us to be good people.

He wants me to be a good person.

And if I get to heaven, God will cut me a break because, hey, I'm a good person, aren't I? People who think this way divide the world into two groups with fuzzy boundaries, good people and bad people, and people who think this way usually think of themselves as comfortably belonging among the good people.

Now, they don't claim perfection, they just claim decency.

They're decent, good people.

All right, now think about evangelism.

To evangelize means to share the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ.

The word gospel literally means good news, but you can't have good news without bad news.

In the ancient world, pagans were open to Christianity because life was mostly bad news.

You had a 50% chance of dying before the age of five, and if you made it into adulthood, life was a lot of toil and pain unless you were part of the elite ruling class.

But even if you lived a long, decent life, there was a good chance the arbitrary deities and religions of the pagan world would consign you to a gloomy existence in the underworld.

However, Christianity gave people hope through a God who suffered alongside His creation and would give them the free gift of unending life without suffering just by being united to Him through faith.

Now, look at our world though, especially in the West.

We can escape suffering through digital distractions, and death loses its sting for people if they think death is just slipping into the void, or if there is an afterlife, God will overlook our faults and welcome us into heaven because, hey, we're basically good people.

You're a good person, right?

God would only send you to hell if you were a truly bad person like a serial killer or a telemarketer who calls right before dinner.

And here is where the good person fallacy falls apart.

Ask the person who says if you're a good person you'll go to heaven to define what a good person is.

How good exactly do you have to be to enter into eternal life with God?

Usually the person will just give a vague definition of niceness that includes them and anyone who's better than them, and the definition is always self-serving and convenient.

If the person doesn't struggle with adultery, then to them, a good person is someone who never cheats on his wife or his spouse.

If he does struggle with adultery, then a good person is just someone who doesn't cheat on his wife a lot or doesn't abandon his family.

And they do the same gerrymandering with other sins that they downplay as being not really a big deal if they happen to commit them.

So, I'd ask these people, Well, what if you got to heaven and God said, 'Well, of course heaven is for good people.

Now, you did remember to donate 10% of your income to charity to feed starving children, right?

You can't be a good person if you don't do that.' Would it be wrong for God to slam the pearly gates in that person's face because God said he didn't donate enough money to charity and so wasn't a good person?

It's easy to think of yourself as a good person when you have a very truncated view of sin and think there's really only five serious sins, like murder, rape, grand theft, et cetera.

It reminds me of this quote from Saint Augustine, Men are prone to estimate sins not by reference to their inherent sinfulness but rather by reference to their own customs.

It frequently happens that a man will think nothing blameable except what the men of his own country and time are accustomed to condemn and nothing worthy of praise or approval except what is sanctioned by the custom of his companions.

I saw this attitude come up when people were talking about the December 2024 shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Luigi Mangione was charged with Thompson's murder, and many people online hailed Mangione as a hero, even making icons depicting him as a saint in blasphemous ways.

Now, their reasoning was that Thompson was evil, he was a bad guy because health insurance companies kill lots of people by denying them expensive medical treatments so that they can reap large profits.

What Mangione did was just give those people like Thompson what they deserve apparently.Now, I understand being frustrated with the American healthcare system.

In 2020, my wife unintentionally gave birth at home, and so I called 911 while our son was being born.

Laura rode in an ambulance to the hospital, and we got a bill for $13,000 for labor and delivery.

I then called the insurance company and said I wasn't going to pay because I performed the labor and delivery myself at home.

I literally caught my son as he was being born.

They then reprocessed our claim and charged me $13,000 for the labor and delivery of my wife's placenta in the ambulance while she was on the way to the hospital.

So, it is frustrating.

I get that.

But it doesn't justify murder.

Every healthcare system has to ration healthcare because it's a finite resource.

In countries with government-controlled healthcare, bureaucrats deny you treatment to save funds, which are just profits by another name that government mismanages.

Or the government politely urges you to delete yourself to save money, as I showed in my recent episode about so-called medically assisted dying in Canada, which accounts for nearly 5% of all deaths in the country.

But more importantly, be very careful when you confidently relish in a bad person getting what he deserves.

You and I are also bad people, and it would be terrifying if we got what we truly deserved.

At least that's the Christian understanding of evil, which stands in contrast to the modern and Marxist view, which says that the good people are the poor and the oppressed, whereas the bad people are the rich and the oppressors.

You see this in liberation theology, which I've critiqued in a previous episode.

That isolates sin among the wealthy oppressors and turns the poor into idols who don't need salvation from sin.

But the Marxist version of the good person fallacy ignores the truth that, from God's perspective, we are all bad people.

For example, it's easy to judge the rich and say they're evil for not using their extra income to help the poor.

But how many times have you and I failed to help the poor with our extra income?

The atheistic philosopher Peter Singer made this very point with an example from his book on practical ethics.

Here's how I'd summarize it.

Imagine you're walking by a pond and you see a child drowning, but you decide not to save the child because you didn't want to ruin your dress pants by wading into the pond and then having to pay to replace them.

Most people would consider you a moral monster for letting a child die because you didn't want to spend $100 replacing a pair of pants.

But Singer says the same thing happens every time we spend money on luxuries that could've gone towards medicine or food to save a dying child.

Now, at this point, people make lots of excuses for why the rich can be blamed for not helping the poor, but average people cannot be blamed.

However, all of these excuses can be incorporated into Singer's analogy.

For example, some people say, Well, everybody spends on luxuries, so I'm not a bad person if I do it.

Okay, imagine you aren't alone by the pond and hundreds of people are walking by ignoring this drowning child.

Does that make your indifference to his death any better?

Or people say it's a healthcare CEO's job to provide lifesaving treatment, and denying that treatment for profit is not the same as not donating money to the poor.

Okay, let's say there's a negligent lifeguard by the pond who is the only one that can save a very big drowning person, to mirror someone who needs expensive medical care in the analogy.

Once again, how does the lifeguard's negligence change the fact that you didn't want to spend $100 to save a child from drowning?

Or people say a greedy CEO kills lots of people, but an average person doesn't cause much harm by not donating to charity.

Okay, imagine a rich person could save hundreds of children on a sinking ship further out in a lake, and he chooses not to do that because it saves him money.

Once again, how does that justify you ignoring the drowning child right at the shore of the lake because you didn't want to spend a little bit of money?

Now, my point is not that all sins of greed are equal or that not donating to charity is morally equivalent to murder or child neglect.

That's not the point that I'm making.

Singer used this example to argue for utilitarian ethics, and hopefully in a future episode, I'll show why this particular ethic is fatally flawed and these thought experiments don't support it.

In our lives though, we should do good and avoid evil, but we are not monsters just because we do not do the maximum amount of good that's physically possible.

That's one of the critiques of utilitarianism.

Instead, I bring up this thought experiment to shut down the self-righteous crooning of those people who think that they are the good people who get to rejoice over the death of an alleged bad person who was also a husband and father, and whose health insurance company also saves thousands of lives through the healthcare that it does provide.

If you want to gloat over that, then remember these verses from Scripture.

First, our Lord's warning from the Sermon on the Mount.

Judge not, that you be not judged.

For with the judgment you pronounce, you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.

There's lots of people around the world who would look at you and I and see wasteful, rich people in comparison to them.

And then there's what's written in Ezekiel 18:23-24.

'Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked?' says the Lord God.

'And not rather that they should turn from their ways and live?

But when the righteous turn away from their righteousness and commit iniquity and do the same abominable things that the wicked do, shall they live?

None of the righteous deeds that they have done shall be remembered.

For the treachery of which they are guilty and the sin they have committed, they shall die.' A friend once asked me, Is it easier to get to heaven if I'm a good person?

I told him, That's like asking, 'Is it easier to get to the moon if I use a trampoline?' From our perspective, it might look like you're getting closer to the moon by jumping on a trampoline.

But from the perspective of someone on the moon, they The highest jumper on Earth is no different from anyone else, and that's how God sees our purely human efforts to attain heaven.

None of them earn us eternal life with God.

Even if we take comfort in being better than some vile people, that doesn't make us good people.

We can be bad even if others are worse than us.

Instead, if we truly mourned our sins, we'd be ashamed to ever be in God's presence.

Many people think that they're a decent person, but they'd be horrified if someone saw their internet browsing history or watched a film strip of their internal thoughts in their mind.

If we're scared to tell our sins to a priest in confession, how much more worried should we be to bring them before the infinite God with just our good person feelings as a defense of our righteousness?

So the next time you hear someone say they don't need God or they don't need religion because they're a good person, well, ask them to define, press them to define what it specifically takes to be a good person, and why not some higher standard than what they give you?

Why not a good person gives 10% of their income to the poor?

Ask them if they want to trust in this arbitrary good person standard to save them when they stand before the all-holy God on judgment day, who can put all their evil thoughts and actions and iniquities in front of them at the judgment.

Do they really want that?

As Christians, we don't earn salvation by being good people.

We receive salvation by being God people.

We accept God's gift of salvation through a minister of the church who baptizes us.

This washes away our sins and makes us adopted children of God.

We then live out a supernatural faith that works through love, as Saint Paul says in Galatians 5:6, and we choose to not reject God's salvation through grave sin, also called mortal sin.

Now, someone might say, Well, I'm a good person, because even though I'm not religious, I don't commit mortal sins like murder.

If a Catholic can go to heaven even though they commit minor sins like buying luxuries instead of donating all their money to the poor, then why can't I go to heaven if I just avoid the major sins like they do?

The answer is that you and I cannot strictly earn heaven like a mercenary, but you and I can joyfully receive heaven as a child of God.

Consider this example.

If an artist draws a terrible portrait of me, I will not pay him.

His work does not have the value, it does not merit the full payment.

The same is true when we bring our merely human works to God and expect Him to repay us.

Isaiah 64:6 says, We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.

We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

But if my son draws the exact same painting, as subpar as it is, I might even give him a wage.

I might pay him.

Even though he doesn't deserve it, I might reward him because I love him.

If he's wise enough, he doesn't boast about how good his drawing is.

He boasts about how good I am as his dad.

That's why Saint Paul says in First Corinthians, No human being might boast in the presence of God, and, Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord.

God sees the good that we do and the evil we avoid through His grace while in union with Christ, and He loves us as His own children for doing that.

That's why He says to us, Well done, my good and faithful servant.

On a quick aside, this doesn't mean there is no hope for people who die apart from belief in Christ.

All it means is that if a person is saved, it is not because he is a good person.

It is because he responded to God's grace in some way, even a way that he didn't understand in this life, and God graciously saved him in spite of the person's ignorance.

Romans 2:14-16 says, When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.

They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

I've done a previous episode about Catholic views of salvation you can check out below, and I've addressed the possible salvation of non-Catholics in my book, Why We're Catholic.

I'm not gonna go into these issues exhaustively.

I simply bring them up to head off objections that claim God saves good people who aren't Catholic or that Catholicism teaches good person salvation.

Neither is true.

All salvation comes from Christ, whether we know it or not.

Salvation does not come from merely being a good person.

That's insufficient.

We cannot hope to be saved by saying to God, Well, at least I wasn't like that guy.

Pope Pius XII put it well in a 1946 radio address.

To know Jesus crucified is to know God's horror of sin.

Its guilt could be washed away only in the precious blood of God's only begotten Son become man.

Perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.

Smother that, deaden it.

It can hardly be wholly cut out from the heart of man.

Let it not be awakened by any glimpse of the God man dying on Golgotha's cross to pay the penalty of sin.

And what is there to hold back the hordes of God's enemy from overrunning the selfishness, the pride, the sensuality, and unlawful ambitions of sinful man?

Will mere human legislation suffice, or compacts and treaties?

In the Sermon on the Mount, the divine Redeemer has illumined the path that leads to the Father's will and eternal life, but from Golgotha's gibbet flows the full and steady stream of graces, of strength and courage that alone enable man to walk that path with firm and unerring step.

If you'd like to learn more about sharing or learning about God's offer of salvation and the good news of the gospel, I recommend the booklet, God's Love For You, that I'll link to in the description below.

Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.