[TBP]

In high school, a teacher for one of my classes told us that there is no such thing as "altruism", that every altruistic act is selfish, as the doer gets something for it.

There's a lot of truth to that, and I've read Ayn Rand making the same point.

Everything has a payoff for us. Everything, good or bad, gives us something we want. Otherwise, it wouldn't be in our lives.

Even if the reward is only the feeling we get, it still pays us too.

[GBA]

Everyone argued with him, me included. Mother Teresa was the common argument, IIRC, but she would have been in pain if she had tried to live other than she did once on her path. Her life's work made her feel good and was its own reward and beyond.

I don't know how Victoria Osteen meant what she said, but it seems to fit in with what my teacher said.

Most I know who go to Church go because they get something out of it, and go to another if they don't or stop going altogether if they can't find one where they do.

Where's the trespass to forgive in that?

[sunrise_sunset]

Ayn Rand , who hated religion, would of course think that.

Her thinking is shallow.

To suggest that helping someone is the same as cheating them because it makes the instigator ‘feel good’ defines savage, relativistic, atheism.

What are these positive feelings ? Those of compulsion and addiction, or principle and vision ?

Rand is basically a conservative version of amoral post modernism.

[AustinBill]

There are two ways of looking at that: one cynical and one a bit deeper. The reality is that all interest is self-interest. The difference is in the perception of self. If I believe that self ends at the end of my fingers and toes then I will be demonstrating that level of awareness in my choices and actions. But that's not the only possible perception. When contemplating statements like "What you do for another, you do for me", consider what is really being said about the Self.

On the subject of worship, is it to be imagined that God somehow needs us to worship Him? That if we fail to do so we're somehow harming Him?