“ God looks down from heaven on all mankind
to see if there are any who understand,
any who seek God.
Everyone has turned away, all have become corrupt;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.”
-psalm 53
Goodness must ultimately be self-less, the truely good therefore suffer and lay down their lives for others, they die bravely in battle, by confronting tyrants, catching diseases helping the sick, of hunger so others can eat and cold so that others can be warm, persecuted but refusing to become a persecutor.
“ Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away.”
Isaiah - 53
So the righteous leave this world, their memory is trampled upon, they often leave no descendants, when they die their essence is erased from the earth, they go to a higher plane of existence because this murky world cannot support them.
Their distant memory is all that stands between us and total corruption, one day they will return and take revenge on our oppressors, or us.
”Cut off from the land that bore us,
Betrayed by the land we find,
When the brightest have gone before us,
And the dullest are most behind-
Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!
'Tis all we have left to prize:
One cup to the dead already-
Hurrah for the next that dies!”
– Revel
If it was not for martyrs the world would have less hope, but although the dead can silently push and guide the living, they cannot take the place of the living. What good really is it to die? Surely there is more good to be done for the living amongst the living, There are enough or nearly enough ghosts, they cannot save this world from disaster only those of this world can do that.
So maybe to be truely selfless you should not be so quick to desert humanity and go to eternal rest, maybe we should not let our attempts to be good prevent our survival.
At some point we will die, at some point it is better to die, but until then maybe we should exist in a state of compromised goodness, a shadow of better people who lived before us, but good enough to be considered righteous in our generation, and that is possibly even more demanding, a disappointment to God and Man but needed by both.
Can you laugh in the face of death and be content with misery?