WHY DO GOOD?

I asked an atheist, “Why do you practice virtue if you don’t believe that there is such a thing as an objective moral law?” He answered very candidly:

• I live virtuously because of what it does for me. It provides psychological rest, enabling me to feel good about myself. It also improves my relationships.

Although this is true, I tend to think that his pursuit of virtue carries some deadly cargo. How? It seems like our pursuit of virtue is contaminated by our all-too-human desire for significance or righteousness. In “The Significant Life,” attorney George M. Weaver identifies the ubiquitous drive to establish our self-importance:

• Individual humans are not concerned so much about the survival of the species as they are about their personal survival or significance. In order to push ourselves beyond our confining space-time limits, we as individuals try to set ourselves apart from the rest of humanity. It is unsettling to admit that one is average or ordinary – a routine person. (7)

Weaver documents this in many ways:

• Salvador Dali once said, “The thought of not being recognized [is] unbearable”…Lady Gaga sings, “I live for the applause, applause, applause…the way that you cheer and scream for me.” She adds in another song, “yes we live for the Fame, Doin’ it for the Fame, Cuz we wanna live the life of the rich and famous.” (7)

Perhaps one reason we never achieve our longed-for significance is that it always comparative. We need to be more significant or to have more recognition than the next guy. Writer Gore Vidal had been very transparent about this:

• “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” (58)

Eventually, its seems that this drive to establish our significance/righteousness tears at friendship, dividing instead of bringing together. The jealousy displayed by comedian Al Jolson is also reflective of the human condition:

• According to his biographer, “He once had a team of performing elephants fired because he thought the audience liked them too much.” (59)

Trying to achieve our worth, significance, or even virtuousness can become brutal and abusive. When life is about maintaining our “psychological rest” or our “good feelings” about ourselves, we can do some destructive things to ensure that these “good feelings” continue.

And it doesn’t seem to matter how successful, important, or honored we become, we always want more. The richest man in the world, John D. Rockefeller, was asked how much more money he would need to be happy. He answered, “Always a little bit more,” demonstrating that humanity is in pursuit of an unattainable goal.

In “Fame, The Psychology of Stardom,” psychologists Evans and Wilson argue:

• What we try to create… is some illusion of permanence. The desire for permanence drives people to carve their name on trees and rocks, just like the handprints on Hollywood Boulevard. We need to have an impact on life – to leave something behind us when we go. (19)

It is not enough for us to simply enjoy what we have. Our quest for “psychological rest” demands us “to leave something behind us when we go.” We even have to convince ourselves that we are leaving more behind than others. Weaver cites President Lyndon B. Johnson as an example of this:

• According to one commentator, “It is a curious footnote to history that long before he ran into trouble, Johnson had turned central Texas into a living monument to his heritage and his journey to the summit (the L.B.J birthplace, the L.B.J. boyhood home, the L.B.J. state park, the L.B.J. ranch and more).” (22)

The craving to be a somebody – to feel good about oneself - takes many forms besides the pursuit of virtue. It can embrace virtue or even vice. Weaver writes about other attempts to leave one’s mark on the world:

• In 2005 Joseph Stone torched a Pittsfield, Massachusetts apartment building… After setting the blaze, Stone rescued several tenants from the fire and was hailed as a hero. Under police questioning, Stone admitted, however, that he set the fire and rescued the tenants because, as summarized at trial by an assistant district attorney, he “wanted to be noticed, he wanted to be heard, he wanted to be known.” (44)

Evidently, this drive for significance is so powerful that it can overrule the moral dictates of conscience. One mass-murderer gunman explained in his suicide note, “I’m going to be f_____ famous.” (45)

This perverted drive for significance can even override all other affections. On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman, a zealous fan of the Beatle, John Lennon, first obtained his idol’s autograph before gunning him down. He explained:

• “I was an acute nobody. I had to usurp someone else’s importance, someone else’s success. I was  ‘Mr. Nobody’ until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth.” At his 2006 parole hearing, he stated: “The result would be that I would be famous, the result would be that my life would change and I would receive a tremendous amount of attention, which I did receive… I was looking for reasons to vent all that anger and confusion and low self-esteem.” (47) 

By attaching himself to fame of another, Chapman was able to elevate himself. Was it “low self-esteem” or merely Chapman’s way to achieve what everyone else is trying to achieve – importance and self-value? Weaver adds that:

• More than two hundred people confessed in 1932 to the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. (50)

If we fail to be famous, at least we might have a crack at being infamous by attaching ourselves to fame. Could this pursuit for significance also explain why females throw themselves at the Rock Stars and the rich and famous? After all, we do not seek autographs bums but from the successful and the famous. Why? This elevate us, adding to our importance? (I like to boast that Charlie Manson had been my roommate for a few days!)  

And doesn’t our craving for recognition, even for immortality, also find its more common expression among people-pleasers? Isn’t this just another way - through the esteem of others - that we achieve significance? And then we become resentful and jealous when we fail to obtain this desired commodity.

I’m suggesting that all of these drives for worthiness, recognition, approval, significance, moral adequacy, success, and even for negative notoriety are connected. But what is the common glue or the underlying cause that gives rise to these various manifestations of the drive for adequacy? Underneath, we feel morally inadequate, unworthy, and insignificant and, therefore, try to compensate for this nagging awareness. We experience guilt and shame and try to cover these destabilizing feelings with the tokens of success and significance – applause and approval. We wear designer clothing to cover up our sense of inadequacy. And when we are bested in our quest, we feel diminished as did Gore Vidal by the success of his friends.

Do we feel morally threatened? Is our sense of adequacy and worthiness threatened when we fail to live up to our moral standards? Yes! This would suggest that we are not born with a blank moral slate but a parchment filled with moral laws. In “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis observed that even the atheist cannot escape the moral law that has been written on his heart:

• Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promises to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining, “It’s not fair.”

Even though the atheist does not acknowledge an objective moral law, he inescapably acts as if he does. One evidence of this is the defensive excuses we make when we are accused of doing wrong:

• If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is we believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so—that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility.

We also compensate for our sense of moral inadequacy by trying to live a virtuous life, even if we don’t believe in the independent existence of virtue. I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with this. However, if we are pursuing virtue for the wrong reasons – primarily to prove that we are good and morally adequate people – it will backfire on us and everyone around us. It will also make us intolerably self-righteous if we deem ourselves successful at proving our adequacy.

Instead, virtue must be pursued for virtue sake and not because it elevates us for the moment. (Often, the drug that elevates will also bring us crashing down.)

But why were we created to be obsessively driven to achieve significance and moral adequacy? We weren’t! We were created in such perfection that the first human couple went naked without any shame. What happened? They rebelled against God and refused to confess their sin. And this became the ultimate moral and relational Big Bang. It blew us apart from our life-sustaining relationship with our Maker where achieving significance had never been an issue. We were, therefore, banished into the very state of autonomy that we had so longed for and have been suffering ever since, awaiting the return of our Creator-Savior-Healer.

THE ENDLESS ATTEMPT TO PAY FOR OUR WRONGDOINGS

Trying to pay for our sins is like trying to chase down a moving train. Even if we run as fast as we can, the train continues to distance itself from us. We never catch it.

This is the problem of self-atonement. Whatever payments we might make are eclipsed by our ever-increasing debt. Paul explained that this was also Israel's problem:

• “For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness of God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.” (Romans 10:2-4)

However, this is not just Israel's problem. It's the problem of everyone who does not know the Savior Jesus, who has made a complete payment for our sins.

Without Jesus, we feel compelled to establish our own atonement system, through which we convince ourselves that we are good people, when we know that we are not.

Some place their hope in achieving notoriety and fame, even infamy, to become that Someone they can live with, the person who need not any longer feel ashamed of themselves.

In The Significant Life, attorney George M. Weaver provides many examples of the absurdity of our quest for self-atonement:

• Salvador Dali once said, “The thought of not being recognized [is] unbearable”…Lady Gaga sings, “I live for the applause, applause, applause…the way that you cheer and scream for me.” She adds in another song, “yes we live for the Fame, Doin’ it for the Fame, Cuz we wanna live the life of the rich and famous.” (7) 

Our attempts to validate ourselves can even appear more ludicrous:

• In 2005 Joseph Stone torched a Pittsfield, Massachusetts apartment building… After setting the blaze, Stone rescued several tenants from the fire and was hailed as a hero. Under police questioning, Stone admitted, however, that he set the fire and rescued the tenants because, as summarized at trial by an assistant district attorney, he “wanted to be noticed, he wanted to be heard, he wanted to be known.” (44)

Evidently, this drive for significance is so powerful that it can overrule the moral dictates of conscience. One mass-murderer gunman explained in his suicide note, “I’m going to be f_____ famous” (45).

All of these examples reflect the fact that humanity is aware of an internal need to prove that we are okay, even worthy. To achieve this sense of worthiness, we will even seek to masochistically sacrifice ourselves. And sometimes, this involves the sacrifice of others.

Benedict XVI wrote about this perplexing masochistic phenomenon. He noted how Western culture, en masse, has turned against itself and its Christian heritage:

• This case illustrates a peculiar western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological. It is commendable that the West is trying to be more open, to be more understanding of the values of outsiders, but it has lost all capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure…Multiculturalism, which is so constantly and passionately promoted, can sometimes amount to an abandonment and denial, a flight from one’s own heritage. (Quoted by Jean Bethke Elshtain, First Things, March, 2009, 36)

Why has the West become so masochistic? Make no mistake – masochism rewards its sufferers in many different ways. It convinces them that their sacrifices have made them okay and entitled them to a sense of worth, even moral superiority.

Deep inside, even the leaders of Western Europe know that they are morally deficient. What do they do about this destabilizing inner sense of unworthiness? They desperately attempt to achieve a sense that they are really okay. How? By sacrificially inviting into their countries the very ones who want to destroy them.

Father Douglas al-Bazi, an Iraqi Catholic parish priest from Erbil has denounced the Western refusal to accept reality about Islam:

• “I’m proud to be an Iraqi, I love my country. But my [Muslim] country is not proud that I’m part of it. What is happening to my people [Christians] is nothing other than genocide. I beg you: do not call it a conflict. It’s genocide… When Islam lives amidst you, the situation might appear acceptable. But when one lives amidst Muslims [as a minority], everything becomes impossible…. Wake up! The cancer is at your door. They will destroy you. We, the Christians of the Middle East are the only group that has seen the face of evil: Islam.” http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/we-did-what-we-learned-attacking-christians-muslim-persecution-of-christians-august-2015/

Why does the West refuse to see this and to sacrifice their people as a result of their willful blindness? Because they have rejected the one true source of atonement and forgiveness, and now must achieve their own atonement!

Jeremiah had warned Israel about this very danger, the danger of trusting in their own manipulations to achieve a sense of okay-ness and worth:

• This is what the LORD says: "Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh [his own achievements] for his strength and whose heart turns away from the LORD. He will be like a bush in the wastelands; he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him.” (Jeremiah 17:5-7)

Our Absurd Attempts to Fill the Emptiness

The French mathematician and philosopher Rene Pascal had observed that we have a God-shaped vacuum within, which demands to be filled, and God promises to intimately fill it:

• I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the LORD… I will plant her for myself in the land; I will show my love to the one I called 'Not my loved one.' I will say to those called 'Not my people,' 'You are my people'; and they will say, 'You are my God.'" (Hosea 2:19-20, 23)

King David also anticipated this eternal and divine filling of the vacuum:

• You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. (Psalm 16:11)

Closer still, looking towards this salvation, we can savor the presence of our Savior:

• Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Peter 1:8-9)

However, it is not just Christians who long for this painful emptiness to be filled. Rather, the entire history of humankind testifies that we have been desperately trying to fill the void by proving our significance or worth. We have sought money, power, accomplishments, influence, and popularity in a futile attempt to fill the vacuum.

Perhaps there is no sight quite as ludicrous as humanity in pursuit of something – some recognition, house or piece of clothing – that will satisfy but never finding it. Yes, we find it for a few moments, but then, again dissatisfied, we hunger for more. When the richest man of the world was asked, “How much more money will you need to be happy,” he answered, “Always a little bit more!” Such satisfaction is always elusive.

In The Significant Life, attorney George M. Weaver provides many examples of the absurdity of our quest for self-importance to fill the crying vacuum:

• Salvador Dali once said, “The thought of not being recognized [is] unbearable”…Lady Gaga sings, “I live for the applause, applause, applause…the way that you cheer and scream for me.” She adds in another song, “yes we live for the Fame, Doin’ it for the Fame, Cuz we wanna live the life of the rich and famous.” (7)

Writer Gore Vidal had been very transparent about this:

• “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” (58)

Clearly, this drive for significance tears at friendship, dividing apart instead of bringing together. Comedian Al Jolson had also reflected our pathetic condition:

• According to his biographer, “He once had a team of performing elephants fired because he thought the audience liked them too much.” (59)

For some, the closest they can come to immortality is the acclaim of the crowd. Even the fantastically successful never outgrow this quest. Napoleon laughably boasted:

• There is no immortality but the memory that is left in the minds of men… History I conquered rather than studied.” (12)

People attempt to fill the vacuum of insignificance in many different ways, even those who seem to have made it. Weaver cites President Lyndon B. Johnson as an example of this:

• According to one commentator, “It is a curious footnote to history that long before he ran into trouble, Johnson had turned central Texas into a living monument to his heritage and his journey to the summit (the L.B.J birthplace, the L.B.J. boyhood home, the L.B.J. state park, the L.B.J. ranch and more).” (22)

If the vacuum had been created to be satisfied only by a divine relationship – a relationship with our Maker and Savior - filling the vacuum on our own is merely another form of masturbation.

Our attempt to fill the vacuum can appear even more absurd:

• In 2005 Joseph Stone torched a Pittsfield, Massachusetts apartment building… After setting the blaze, Stone rescued several tenants from the fire and was hailed as a hero. Under police questioning, Stone admitted, however, that he set the fire and rescued the tenants because, as summarized at trial by an assistant district attorney, he “wanted to be noticed, he wanted to be heard, he wanted to be known.” (44)

Evidently, this drive for significance is so powerful that it can overrule the moral dictates of conscience. One mass-murderer gunman explained in his suicide note, “I’m going to be f_____ famous.” (45)

How pathetic but also how human! Some have the resources to pursue significance in a socially approved way; others do not. Is there really much of a difference between these two groups?

This drive for significance can even override all other considerations. On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman, a zealous fan of the Beatle, John Lennon, first obtained his idol’s autograph before gunning him down. He explained:

• “I was an acute nobody. I had to usurp someone else’s importance, someone else’s success. I was  ‘Mr. Nobody’ until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth.” At his 2006 parole hearing, he stated: “The result would be that I would be famous, the result would be that my life would change and I would receive a tremendous amount of attention, which I did receive… I was looking for reasons to vent all that anger and confusion and low self-esteem.” (47)

Absurd? To the max! But are we more rational? Superficially, we might look better than others, but are we really better? Both groups are narcissistically pursuing an impossible goal and have rejected a God who has promised to elevate us in a way that only He can. Instead, we have opted to go our own way, even if it means addiction to things that cannot satisfy. Perhaps we are all Mark David Chapmans struggling to fill the vacuum with whatever the available means, even if it means social disapproval:

• More than two hundred people confessed in 1932 to the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. (50)

The need for self-importance is so powerful that people are willing to pay almost any price for it. However, observing the meaninglessness of this pursuit, some have converted this absurd quest into a quest for virtue. It might take the form of a moral-crusader.

The religious leadership of Jesus’ day also sought to fill the vacuum, but with impressive religious displays instead of the real thing – the unshakable love that comes from God, the source of all being and self-definition, the one who can definitively tell us who we are and affirm it. Jesus continually exposed the do-gooder perversion:

• "Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full… And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.” (Matthew 6:1-2, 5)

Instead of courting God, they courted the approval of man to their own detriment. While God offered us an eternal marriage where we would find fullness of joy, we rejected this offer for the immediate but fleeting esteem of man.

What if we considered our pathetic condition - pursuing things that can never satisfy but enslave and addict? What if we were able to see that our absurd strivings are universal? Perhaps we might see that we have lost our way.

Adam and Eve lost their way. They had sinned and refused to confess it. Instead, they took matters into their own hands and thought they could escape God’s scrutiny and cover their shame with fig leaves. We have been doing this ever since. However, our fig leaves are dollars, PHDs, possessions, and recognition. Should we not instead be asking:

• How can I escape my jail of meaningless striving? How is it that humanity is characterized by the same futility? Is there any remedy? What must I do to connect with the Savior? What response does He want from me?

According to the Bible, the way up is the way down, humbling ourselves to confess our sins, recognizing that we are utterly incapable of filling our own vacuum. Here’s how the Apostle John put it:

• If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives. (1 John 1:8-10)

Confessing our sins is also to confess that we are unable to fill our vacuum. When we humble ourselves in this manner, He will lift us up.

Toxic Love

Toxic love is a modern take on love that equates love with not giving any offense. And it is toxic. Instead of love, it breeds avoidance and intolerance.

One organization committed to tolerance is refusing to tolerate any change or even new people. Why? Because they have had irresolvable conflicts with some members in the distant past!

But conflict is to be expected in any organization or even any relationship. Besides, shouldn’t we even welcome conflict? Doesn’t conflict promote growth?

Why then does this organization run from conflict? As one board member explained, the members are too concerned about being nice. Therefore, instead of dealing directly and honestly with conflict and differences of opinion, their commitment to niceness and to not hurting others’ feelings has led to avoidance. Why avoidance? We avoid those situations and relational problems we cannot resolve. This is intolerance, but a “loving” person cannot tolerate the fact that they are intolerant.

The board member explained that instead of re-examining their myopic understanding of love and radical tolerance, they remain secretly defensive and intolerant of any possible threats. While, on the surface, they remain very nice people, their membership is dwindling.

I’ve encountered the same kind of thing in the NYC Public Schools, which made great efforts to be nice to the students. On several occasions, I was reprimanded for giving students accurate but needed feedback. However, the administration interpreted my words as damaging the students’ self-esteem.

I wasn’t a permanent feature there, so I was able to avoid pursuing the required Masters in Education degree. But from what I had heard, it was largely an instrument of indoctrination in politically correct ways to nicely manage the classroom. However, despite the hours of additional education, many of our NYC schools have become jungles where the number one goal is survival and not education.

Parents also believe in being nice to their children. Instead of requiring that they call their parents “Dad” and “Mom,” niceness has led parents to discard the traditional titles in favor of “Bill” and “Betty.” Children who had once been regarded as an indispensable addition to the family, are now regarded as objects of parental self-fulfillment. And if they fail to fulfill, then they are not fulfilling their purpose.

Training of children has given way to friendship with children by parents who want to be nice and appreciated. As a result, they are raising demanding monsters who have not learned respect. Is it any wonder that Western nations now average 1½ children per family! Who can handle any more!

This “niceness” of toxic love can be noted in many areas of Western society. Preserving niceness has become such an overriding concern that justice suffers.

In Germany, 15 were wounded when one Afghani refugee reportedly desecrated a Koran:

·       Four police officers, two badly, and 11 refugees were wounded in the clash. Seven police vehicles were also damaged during the riot that took around four hours to come under control. According to the officials, the person who tore pages from the Holy Quran had arrived from Afghanistan. Police took him into custody for his own safety. In other words, they arrested the one who violated Sharia blasphemy law, not the rioters. http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/08/germany-refugees-riot-stone-police-over-torn-quran-15-wounded

The one who violated the “niceness code” was arrested, even though he hadn’t broken a law. Contrary to the requirements of justice, the rioters were not arrested.

Examples of toxic love abound. Western leaders cannot proclaim often enough that Islam is “a religion of peace,” despite all of the evidence to the contrary, even while their own nations are being endangered by this deadly form of “peace.” In fact, Western niceness has gone the extra mile by labeling anyone who doesn’t practice niceness as “Islamophobes.” Western nations have even criminalized un-nice words, even when these words represent legitimate warnings about terrorism.

We need to see ourselves as good, tolerant, and accepting people, especially of people whose ways differ from ours. For this reason, we are susceptible to revolutionary ideas promoting toxic love.

David Horowitz, a former Marxist, is now appalled by Marxism and Marxist strategies. In particular, he cites Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:

·       The Alinsky radical has a single principle – to take power from the Haves and give it to the Have-nots… a destructive assault on the established order in the name of the “people.” (Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model)

Have these radical changes actually helped “the people?” Well, we can’t ask the 100,000,000 who have been slaughtered in the process. However, each one of these experiments of utopian niceness has proved to be unsustainable nightmares.

Why then are Westerners continuing to talk about the radical change of income redistribution and all other forms of entitlement programs? Why haven’t they learned from the past? In The Black Book of the American Left, David Horowitz has observed:

·       Radical commitments to justice and other social values continue to be dominated by a moral and political double standard. The left’s indignation seems exclusively reserved for outrages that confirm the Marxist diagnosis of capitalist society.

Why does toxic love fail to examine itself? There is just too much at stake. Horowitz continues:

·       This is the classic revolutionary formula… [they] get to feel good about themselves in the process.

Feeling good about ourselves seems to trump thinking accurately. Horowitz’s assessment is born out in many other areas.

In The Significant Life, attorney George M. Weaver argues that our quest for self-importance, which often takes the form of toxic love, governs our lives:

·       Individual humans are not concerned so much about the survival of the species as they are about their personal survival or significance. In order to push ourselves beyond our confining space-time limits, we as individuals try to set ourselves apart from the rest of humanity. It is unsettling to admit that one is average or ordinary – a routine person. (7)

Jesus’ Apostles were no different. Each wanted to be greatest in His kingdom. However, Jesus was able to perceive their toxic motives:

·       And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:3-4)

The human quest for significance seems to be unrelenting and self-exalting. Weaver documents this quest in many ways:

·       Salvador Dali once said, “The thought of not being recognized [is] unbearable”…Lady Gaga sings, “I live for the applause, applause, applause…the way that you cheer and scream for me.” She adds in another song, “yes we live for the Fame, Doin’ it for the Fame, Cuz we wanna live the life of the rich and famous.” (7)

However, others pursue significance in ways that appear to be opposite to niceness. Weaver writes:

·       In 2005 Joseph Stone torched a Pittsfield, Massachusetts apartment building… After setting the blaze, Stone rescued several tenants from the fire and was hailed as a hero. Under police questioning, Stone admitted, however, that he set the fire and rescued the tenants because, as summarized at trial by an assistant district attorney, he “wanted to be noticed, he wanted to be heard, he wanted to be known.” (44)

If we cannot be nice, we can achieve feelings of goodness in more perverse ways.  On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman, a zealous fan of the Beatle, John Lennon, first obtained his idol’s autograph before gunning him down. He explained:

·       “I was an acute nobody. I had to usurp someone else’s importance, someone else’s success. I was  ‘Mr. Nobody’ until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth.” At his 2006 parole hearing, he stated: “The result would be that I would be famous, the result would be that my life would change and I would receive a tremendous amount of attention, which I did receive… I was looking for reasons to vent all that anger and confusion and low self-esteem.” (47)

By attaching himself to someone greater, Chapman was able to elevate himself. Was it “low self-esteem” or merely Chapman’s own way to achieve what everyone else is trying to achieve – importance? Weaver reports that:

·       More than two hundred people confessed in 1932 to the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. (50)

The need for importance – and this is often expressed in the form of toxic love - is so powerful that it seems that people are willing to pay almost any price for it. However, seeing the hopelessness of this pursuit, some have opted for a quest for ultimate meaning. In this case, toxic love might take the form of a moral-crusader. The UN claims: “The precious dignity of the individual person is a central humanist value” (82-83). Even if true, is this mission just another expression of toxic love, disguised as a nobler quest? Toxic love’s prime concern might be looking good in the cite of others.

We can even deceive ourselves into believing that the most horrid crimes are a spiritual duty, as Jesus explained:

·       They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God. (John 16:2)

We are captive to our psychical needs and will satisfy them any way we can, even if it takes deluding ourselves. We need to believe that we are nice people, even superior people, and will, therefore, be nice and tolerate behaviors that we should not tolerate to convince ourselves of our niceness.

However, the root of niceness is self-righteousness and an unwillingness to seriously look at ourselves, as the Bible repeatedly claims:

·       All a man's ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the LORD. (Proverbs 16:2)

When we attempt to establish our worth and identity through our performance, it is almost inevitable that we will succumb to toxicity. Why? If we are honest with ourselves, our performance is blighted and will fail to give us the lift from our feelings of guilt, shame, and dissatisfaction with life. Instead, we are compelled to reach out for greater and greater toxic infusions.

What then is the answer? It begins by receiving a gift of significance that can only be received as a gift of righteousness from God, as the Prophet Isaiah claimed:

·       I delight greatly in the LORD; my soul rejoices in my God. For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. For as the soil makes the sprout come up and a garden causes seeds to grow, so the Sovereign LORD will make righteousness and praise spring up before all nations. (Isaiah 61:10-11)