Why do most Christians do good deeds? What is their ultimate motivation?
I've concluded that most of us do almost everything we do for some self-interested reason.
What percentage of good deeds are done by Christians because they either want to avoid hell (=personal avoidance of pain) or gain heaven (=personal gain), or because they want to gain blessings in this life (or the next one) (=personal gain again)?
Sometimes our self-interested motivation is complicated. Why do people willingly go and risk their lives and fight in wars? Often, it's because of a desire for importance or glory. In other instances, it's a desire to have a particular kind of experience. In both cases, there's a perceived gain of some kind.
What's the other possible motivation? Doing something because it's right, or because it will benefit other people.
Yet most of the time, people do what's right, or what will benefit other people, because they feel that in some way they are likely to be compensated and will eventually gain personally themselves: somehow, somewhere, the universe (or God) will reward them for so doing.
Here's a great test of the ability of Christians to be self-uninterested: How many Christians would be willing to be personally damned to hell forever if by so doing all other people in the world would get to go to heaven?
Now that's a very difficult proposition for any sane and reasonable Christian to swallow. It goes far beyond the saying "greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."
And in fact, that saying itself seems to acknowledge that there is indeed a limit to the ability of a sane Christian to sacrifice himself or herself for the benefit of others.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing that human beings are motivated from self-interested motivations. It isn't really in human nature to truly be self-uninterested. And that's a pretty healthy and necessary thing, because if human beings didn't care at all about themselves, then there would be no human race.
In fact, no race or species can survive long if its individual members have no sense of self-interest.
So, not saying it's a bad thing. Just noting that when you look at apparently altruistic acts, they almost always have a self-interested reason behind them - IF you dig deep enough.
Q: How many Christians would be willing to be personally damned to hell forever if by so doing all other people in the world would get to go to heaven?
I can name one – Jesus! Jesus was the person who was willing to be damned to hell. It was an awesome work, one that I unashamedly say I could not do. We don’t do good works to get into heaven or to avoid hell; this would be futile. Jesus did for us what we could not do.
You’re right on the mark. Even without an afterlife, though, a person may do good deeds via the self-interested motivation of feeling good about helping others.