Ooooh I like this
That saying is such an Anglo cultural tell, lol. Intentions are all that matter! Because, unless you die right after the realization but before the act, you are certainly gonna follow through with that intention. You might make mistakes out of incompetence, sure, but no one is perfect, and God knows that you tried to do good so it’s all good… duh.
Again though, not surprising, a cultural “tell” if you will.
Intentions are all that matter!
No, not really. I can provide like a thousand examples, starting from dodo birds extinction and ending in wars and dictatorships, where the intentions were good, but incompetence, obliviousness, greed, stupidity or/and other factors made the results range from worst to catastrophic.
Also I’m pretty sure other cultures have some variation of it too. For example in slavic countries there is the saying “make a fool pray to good and he’s gonna hurt himself” which is highlighting similar issues
Greed is an “intention” though, and the dodo case is just an exception. People are competent enough to live and even “succeed” often despite their incompetence, as seen by history. Intentional wrongdoing, particularly while competent a la Henry Kissinger for instance, has always been the enemy, not incompetent benevolence. We’ve always been able to accommodate the latter, I think.
Regardless, I meant “all that matters” when it comes to living with oneself and facing God, but incompetence certainly makes things hard for us here.
Greed isn’t an intention, it’s an attribute. You don’t really intend to go be greedy, you intend to go make money because of the greed. Sure a cartoon villain might intend to go be greedy because he’s Ebenezer Scrooge. But people aren’t generally speaking cartoons.
Attributes are the foundation that makes up the decision making that goes into willful intention.
But no one person is a singular thing, thus you literally cannot have an intention that is made up of only one attribute.
That desire to make money along with the greed of the person, is also going to be informed by things such as self preservation, hunger, thirst, desire for shelter, desire to help others, desire to hurt others, creativity, etc.
A person who makes wood cups enjoys the hobby, then sells the cups with the intention to make money to buy more wood. Then due to their greed that intention is compounded and they start a business and expand.
There is a reason the seven sins and virtues are as esoteric as they are. They are supposed to describe non-willful forces that drive people.
Is this why some Christians support Trump? They think inversely the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions?
I just realized in Doom, they literally built the road to Hell.
It always confused me to think of going to hell on a road. ACDC notwithstanding. I always pictured a trap door. Like St. Peter had a button under his desk.
Stairway to Heaven / Highway to Hell
I agree with your version of entering hell being a trap door. Heaven would look like an alien abduction.
Wanna go to a place worse than hell? Because that’s how you get to 十八层地狱 (-18th level of Hell)
Sauce? Because that ain’t the Duat:
In order to receive judgement the dead journeyed through the various parts of the Duat to be judged. If the deceased was successfully able to pass various challenges, then they would reach the Judgment of the dead. In this ritual, the deceased’s first task was to correctly address each of the forty-two Assessors of Maat by name, while reciting the sins they did not commit during their lifetime. After confirming that they were sinless, the heart of the deceased was weighed by Anubis against the feather of Maat, which represents truth and justice. Any heart that is heavier than the feather failed the test, and was rejected and eaten by Ammit, the devourer of souls, as these people were denied existence after death in the Duat. The souls that were lighter than the feather would pass this most important test, and would be allowed to travel to Aaru.
The Duat is not equivalent to the conceptions of Hell in the Abrahamic religions, in which souls are condemned with fiery torment. The absolute punishment for the wicked, in ancient Egyptian thought, was the denial of an afterlife to the deceased, ceasing to exist in the intellectual form seen through the devouring of the heart by Ammit.
Upvote tho in advance because it’s been awhile since I had the urge to peruse the Book of the Dead…
