What does it mean to be a good person? Or better yet, what does it take to be a good person? The truth is that perhaps once a upon a time, there may have been a time where we all have had an agreement or at least a common denominator as to what a good person really is.
Nowadays, we always speak about promoting and championing free thought, so our discretion is often at play when describing what we would see as a good person. However, with the ever evolving school of free thought, a different perspective has come up, one that challenges the idea that there is a good person for everyone.
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The idea presented is that a good person is someone that is good for you, as an individual or even a society. However, is there one person that can be good to everyone?
Allow me to give an example. A man was walking on his way back from work while carrying a few groceries that he’s planned to donate to a soup kitchen. Along the way he comes across a beggar whom he shuns, when the beggar asks for some spare change or one of the food items.
The man’s reaction is contemptuous towards the beggar, because the man has made his own assumptions and conclusions about how the beggar has found himself in this situation or the decisions he’s taken that have led him to be a beggar. Thus their interaction is not a pleasant one for both parties.
The man with the groceries continues on his way and he arrives to a warm welcome from the volunteers at the soup kitchen. The volunteers look at him as ‘a good person’ who considers the needs of less fortunate, but to the beggar that he crossed paths with, he is a bad person.
Often we find that it’s not goodness that people lack, but kindness. We lack things like empathy, a basic component of kindness. Which brings me to another question, has our inherent ‘goodness’ as humans depleted over time due to our encounters of the bad side of people?
I’m of the belief that good and evil can be compared to light and darkness. Darkness cannot exist where there is light.
Therefore, if those who find themselves succumbing to evil, raises the question of whether they were ever a holistically good person to begin with.
I will admit that we all good living inside our bad, and bad living inside the good. That’s what makes us human. That can only mean we all have good the potential to do good within us, however, which ever side you succumb to, determines the person you will be, especially in the eyes of many.
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