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Old 09-11-2003, 02:47 PM   #52 (permalink)
Tirian
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Quote:
Originally posted by 3leggedfrog
Tirian
hmm ok please go easy on me with this one but a it could have been her goal to show that is she good to the christian god. her reward was his/her approval. also one could argue that she was looking for "browie points" to get into heavan due to the fact that the life she was living was close to the end and her standard of living was very poor. We can speculate that she wanted a better afterlife.
Yes I agree - we could speculate those things, but would we be right ? No, because this is a parable. Jesus was simply telling a story to illustrate some points he was making. Because it is a work of fiction (so to speak) the author is allowed to give the character any motivation he wishes. In this story the whole point is to illustrate selflessnes, so we know she was not motivated by selfish motives.

As per a real life good deed story...

sipsake said it best...

"Just because a selfish motivation can be found for any given situation doesn't mean that the situation was selfish."

It doesn't mean it was not selfish either, but since we can't really judge anothers motivation, than we cannot prove that all good deeds are badly motivated.

Logically I see it like this... Just because we cannot prove an object to be square, does not mean we have proven it to be round.
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