An altruist's lament...

It's been said that there are no atheists in foxholes.  I suppose that it's also true that there are no altruists in churches.

Most spiritual and religious teachings and traditions place a high value upon doing good for your fellow man, woman, and child.  The believer is given something between a hint and an assurance that the good one does eventually benefits the giver is some way, shape, or form.

This paradigm raises an interesting question.  Once someone believes that the good they do will improve their own lot in this life, the afterlife, or their next life (or some combination of the above), can any act truly be considered selfless, if the actor benefits from the act?

Are we being intrinsically good if we do good for others, or are we only consciously or subconsciously looking to put brownie points up on some karmic scoreboard?

I suppose that the only true test of one's intrinsic goodness could be determined if God/Goddess/All That Is/Fill In The Blank paid someone a visit one day and told that person that nothing they did for the rest of their life, for better or for worse, would have any effect whatsoever upon the course of their current life or any future existence.  Good deeds would be unrewarded by man or angel, and bad deeds would go unpunished.  Your possibilities from this moment onward could not be shaped by your action or inaction.  Only under these circumstances could one's true nature be revealed.  Would you murder your most hated enemy, knowing that you would never face arrest, trial, and incarceration in this life or die at the hand of another in a future incarnation?  Or, knowing that there was nothing you could do to change your own fate in any particular direction, would you help others in a sort of nihilistic altruism?

We need to embrace the fact that our best, most noble actions and intentions may be chiefly motivated by the selfish desire to have a pleasant life, afterlife, or future incarnation, whether we admit it to ourselves or not.

Of course, the motivation behind good deeds is more or less irrelevant so long as the good deed is performed.  Imagine a world in which every person, consciously motivated by the idea that doing as much good as possible for others would being some kind of karmic payoff, began to do as much good as possible.  Despite less than noble intentions, this world would soon be rid of violence, corruption, intolerance, injustice, and hatred, as each one of us, individually and collectively, sought to better our own lot in life and afterlife by doing as much good as possible.  The result would be much the same as if we all really were that selfless and full of unconditional love for everyone and everything.

Embrace your inner selfish bastard.  It's the right thing to do.