Dat ol debil Augustine

First of all let's get this out  of the way.

Does doing a good act for the wrong reason make it bad, YES and should intent be a factor when the final result is good? YES This gets into the whole mess of whether the ends justify the means.YES.

Luther got that thing about only getting to heaven by loving Jesus from Augustine.  The idea being that man is too puny to save himself and he can only get into Heaven through Jesus.  The good works that Luther was referring to were not like helping little old ladies across the street or giving to the poor, they were giving to the church, particularly in the form of indulgences

It is kind of a loophole.  Well what did Old Dog learn after all the money spent to give him a Lutheran education?  Was he daydreaming about ice cream or Ragnarok?  I guess the answer the Lutheran elders would have given, if Old Dog had ever thought to ask, back when he was a Pup, was if you are going around sinning you probably don't really love Jesus.  

Back in Gage Park, huddled in the basement of Elsdon Methodist, while the Catholics ruled the streets, selling indulgences, drinking wine under the excuse that it was the blood of the lamb, and playing Bingo right  in front of God, we used to whisper to each other about that thing where Catholics could confess on their deathbeds and cast aside a life of sin and stride proudly through the pearly gates.  

There was born again, where you could chuck all your sins into the old kit bag, on the prot side, but we Methodists, it was just a little bit beneath us, all that caterwauling and tears, just not dignified Methodist style.


And that is Augustine again inventing original sin.  You had that odd tale of the tree and the snake that didn't seem to be going anywhere, and then you had the question of why exactly did Jesus drop in, and Aigustine put the the two and two together, to make little kids in their Sunday best squirm and say hey, that doesn't sound fair/

I don't know anything about  a point system or "The Good Place."  

Back in the early days of LSD, when a trip was supposed to be opening the doors of perception, and not some kick tossed into the rag bag of beer and dope, we once got a hold of an Alan Watts record thinking oh how cool will this be.  We dropped our acid and put the record on the turn table and the stylus on the wax and sat down to grok, and the guy just kept droning on with  some kind of tinkling music in the background/  What's big is small, What's bright is dark.  What''s a candy mint is also a breath mint.  What the fuck?  We took it off the turn table and put on the Jefferson Airplane.