When praising a person makes you a hypocrite!!

Religion is famed for its silence when it sees people living out an inconsistent morality. It can give glowing hypocritical eulogies at Church funerals when the deceased was a mini-Stalin.

As long as the morality is reasonably acceptable to most people or people are willing to pretend that the dead smell of roses, the Church will take advantage of that to win members and gain influence. For example, people call themselves Catholics and they believe that they are good Catholics despite living in sin with people they are not married to. The silence of the leaders of the Church is deafening but they will pay lip-service to things such as good manners and justice to keep a hold on the people. They are silent on the Church standard teaching that it's a grave sin to live in a sexual union outside of marriage. That indicates approval. It might be a reluctant approval but it is still approval.
 
They will answer, "But it is only natural to speak about the good side of a person." But if there is a big bad side you cannot just ignore it. There is more to a person than just the good side.
 
We know that the more evil you have that you do not regret, the less good your deeds are and the more sycophantic your good works are. Why? Because you are declaring that you want good not because it is good but because it suits you and you only care about it when it suits you.
 
Priests and clergymen continually go over cringing whitewash during the eulogies they make at funerals especially. They may really like the person but they do not love the person when they praise their evil side. That is what they are doing. By praising others they are trying to make you praise themselves for saying such sweet things.

 
Saying that somebody is a wonderful and loving person translates into, “I don’t care what she or he does or has done to anybody else”. But X is not a wonderful person if he or she hurts anybody and neither are you for praising her or him. To harm one person is to say you would hurt anybody else if they were that person.

 
Free will is the doctrine that we are to blame for the evil we do and cannot blame God or deep or secret forces in our minds for doing it and programming us. If you don’t believe in free will you can be grateful to people for it is not they who are bad but nature. You only think of one thing at a time. The very second when the person does good to you they are not aware of the evil will that they have. They don’t mean to be evil then. If they have free will then because the doctrine of free will presupposes the power to form a wilful union with evil they are to be condemned with the evil they do. Evil reveals you, it is not just something that you do. So sin cannot be separated from the sinner and to hate one is to hate the other. Sin cannot be hurt but sinners can. And hate is about hurting.

Everything we do we think is right. Even when we do evil it is because we have come to temporarily believe that we ought to do it. If doing good just because it is good is the moral law then it is immoral to seek to reward a person. You cannot reward them even by praising them for doing good for they do not want it and should not want it. Their attitude is that virtue is its own reward. They are satisfied just by doing good and consider that to be the only real reward. So the reward then is insulting the person. It is not a reward at all. It invites people to do or take what they see as wrong.
 
Christianity wants God to have all the credit for human goodness but still it praises people because it has an eye on their wallets and just cannot be sincere. Jesus started that in his parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. In that parable he had it that the Pharisee was a bad person just for praising God for making him a good person. The Publican who had no praise for himself but just asked for mercy all the time was praised by Jesus. Society has to believe that we are all naturally selfish creatures to gain anything from the giving or receiving of rewards. Rewards are meant to encourage people to do good and be selfish. In that case, they are not really rewards but bribes. You need free will to justify rewards but the truth is we don’t give a damn.  We would still give them whether we believed in free will or not. It's what people do.
 
Egoism is the view that we get pleasure for ourselves in doing even seemingly altruistic things – so the good we do is done for us not the other person though the other person benefits. It’s a theory about motives.
 
How can you praise a person for handing you back your wallet that they found on the street to you if they are egoists as in people who only do good because they like to? What if they are egotists who only do it because they think God will give them a wallet in the afterlife as a reward? It would be easier to praise the egoist. The egotist cannot expect any praise.
 
If egoism is true then it seems that praise still means nothing for you only do it to please yourself. It is not the other person you are concerned about but what they have done to please you. But it is the good feeling towards the other person that they like in you and are pleased by. It does have value. Even if we have free will the feeling cannot be helped and it is what appreciation is all about. Even if we have no free will we still have the feeling. So the denial of free will is not to the detriment of gratitude.
 
Some women say, "John is a great guy. But he is not the guy for me."
 
TRANSLATION: I am still saying that as far as I am concerned John isn't that great. He doesn't attract me. I am putting him down. If I think John is great but he is not the guy for me in the sense that he is too good for me then I am putting myself down. In another way, I am still putting John down because if I believe I should put myself down and demean myself for others then I cannot object if others follow my example. If there was a choice between John and somebody I like better dying who would I choose? How can I expect John to be comforted if I say to him, "John you are a great guy. We are not right for each other."
 
"Joan hit you last month. You hit her back today. She deserved it but it was wrong and I deplore your action. Revenge is wrong".
 
TRANSLATION: Is it just the breaking of the rule not to take revenge that angers you or the hitting? A teacher does not reprimand children for breaking the rule that they must do their homework but for harming themselves and damaging themselves by not doing their homework.
 
You wouldn't be so mad at the mere breaking of a rule! If Joan deserved it and she undoubtedly did if she hit a person of her own free will then you can't be angry because she was hit back. Your outrage is just a sanctimonious picking on the person who hit her back. You feel and act as if she didn't deserve to be hit back and that that is what is making you angry. You are implying that she was right to hit the victim and the victim was wrong to hit her back. You are implying that if the victim didn't deserve it then she does now!!