Ok, so this may be on more of a tangent than you were thinking of, but it just so happens that I think about decision making a lot due to the fact that I am the worst decision maker ever. On the religious/moral side of decision making, I believe that you are choosing to accept God and his teachings with your decisions. Ultimately, in living a successful 'Christian' (not even necessarily Christian) life, your personal goal would be to grow closer to God through attempting to fulfill his teachings. Hence, a person would strive to make decisions that would put a point up in the "good" column. However, rarely in live is anything ever so simple. How often in life do decisions come down to clear good versus evil choices? If they did, I would like to think that my life would be much easier. More often than not, the reason a decision needs to be made is to choose what sacrifices to make and what benefits to gain. Each decision will end up with some good and bad in a normal, imperfect society. I'm trying to think of a really good example that will make all of the above seem like more than the ramblings of a girl who shared the backseat of Honda Accord with her sister and a bunch of stuff for over six hours today, but I can't find one that wouldn't take a lot of explaining, lol. To sum things up so I can go to bed, I don't know how many people can make a black and white, good and evil decision without having experienced both good and evil. I think I am agreeing with you when I say that people learn something about good and bad with every decision that they make, and this ever-expanding sense of good and bad is the source that shows us that there are decisions to make. I like to think of good vs bad as the foundation. On the foundation though then comes things like peer pressure and mistaken judgment that one could argue interfere with pure good vs. evil decisions. I have no idea if this makes the slightest bit of sense, but I'm going to bed so I can go to work tomorrow...maybe I'll look at this again when I'm more coherent.
Re: my thoughts...lantaballAugust 7 2005, 16:41:01 UTC
see i like all that, and i agree it's never just good vs. evil. that's precisely why i say everything comes down to good or evil. because if we sit and try to figure out what is right or wrong, good or evil then we'll get too confused. rather, we don't actually make decisions based on weighing influences, circumstance and cost-benefit analysis. really we're all led be a spiritual leading. now that may not be spiritual leading the most spiritual sense. one person's spiritual leading may be a lust for money. another person's spiritual leading may be simply to help others [i say simply to dissociate taht altruism from any other implication of christianity, etc.]. now, once you choose to allow Christ into your life, it's not that you now only have one spiritual leading, but ur spiritual leading is always defined by Christ. when you are always led by Christ u can be sure ur going the right direction. the things that interfere [u mentioned peer pressure and mistaken judgment] are products of another spiritual leading. the point is, we don't really make the decisions ourselves. we are always giving ourselves up to something else, the thing to do is to give urself up to the one true God. even people who say "i want conrol over my own life" are giving themselves up to a non-Godly [evil] temptation/spiritual leading.
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