Why Right Men are wrong - or, Learning from experience is more important than making the right decisions

I have often thought about the Christian reason for continuing living - what it is that we live for - given that Heaven is on the other side of death. 

I conclude that there is no compelling reason for living in many religious or for mainstream materialistic atheism (which is why so many people are so keen to die by "assisted suicide"). 

For Christians it is two assumptions that make the experiences of this mortal life valuable: 

Firstly, faith in a loving creator God - who would not sustain us alive without good reason;

Secondly, the prospect of resurrected eternal life - which means that we shall personally carry through to the after-life, whatever valuable things we have learned in mortal life. 

In sum: salvation is the aim of this mortal life; and spiritual learning is its meaning. 

One consequence is that:

It is more important for us to learn the spiritual lessons of our life-experiences than it is to make the right decisions in life. 

This is fortunate (!) because we all make wrong decisions - and very frequently; and this is not going to stop.

In an ultimate sense, there is not much virtue in making the right choices in life! There are many possible reasons for making right choices (e.g. heredity, family, external pressures etc) that do not reflect personal virtue.

And, on the flip side, we can see that people who boast about their own right-choices, and who thereby claim special merit (and there are many such online), are among the most odious of pseudo-Christian hypocrites and Pharisees! 

Such people are primarily concerned to assert that they are always right about everything; and this prevents them learning the spiritual lessons of mortal life. 

They are "Right Men" (even if a woman). 

People who take pride in having made the right choices are therefore sometimes people who are more concerned about being right (and bragging about it) than learning from experience - indeed, their attitude of not-making-mistakes means that they cannot ever learn*. 

So why are Right Men sustained alive by God? 

I think because God hopes that, before they die, they will set aside their compulsion to asserted themselves as right; and will discover that repentance is ultimately and spiritually more important than "good behaviour"...

Because, after all, even the best of good human behaviour is no more than relative; and the rightest of Right Men is inevitably wrong about many things, for much of the time. 

*This also applies to the Litmus Tests. What is vital about the Birdemic, for example, is Not that we got it right first time, and immediately understood it to be a fake rationale for totalitarian evil - but rather that we learned from the experience. That we came to recognize from our personal experiences (e.g.) the mass manipulations, gross and systemic lying, incoherence of policy that served an agenda of surveillance and control, strategic misrepresentation and felt encouragements to sin... It is the failure to learn-from, and repent, personal actual experience that has been so damaging; and much more so that any initial failure to discern rightly.