Good

Are you a good person? There’s an easy way to tell, according to the Internet at least. It’s based on what you do with a shopping cart when you are done with it. If you put it in the designated shopping cart collection area in the parking lot, you’re good. If you leave it to drift off into parking spots, you’re bad.

The test has been discussed on Reddit and Twitter. On Reddit, a user laid out a very detailed description of the theory that essentially claims:

The shopping cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society. Objectively, the correct action to take is to put the shopping cart where it’s supposed to go. It’s not illegal to abandon the cart, so you can do that without consequence. … Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you … or fine you … you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do.

Another said:

For a date you need to take them to a restaurant and do the waiter test & then later go to the store with them & do the shopping cart test.

Finally,

The only way to truly know a person’s character, is to secretly follow them to the grocery store and watch what they do with the cart when they’re done.

You can view the Reddit thread here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God also tests our character, but instead of the shopping cart test, God uses other measures to examine us: The test of love (1 Cor. 13), the test of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23), the test of Christlikeness (Rom. 8:29), the stress test (1 Pet. 1:7), and others.

Psychologist Delroy Paulhus studies the nature of evil. Through careful experimentation designed to separate the psychopaths and others among us who have objectively quantifiable evil personality traits, he studies the actions and reactions of normal and abnormal folks. Tests include apparently dumping innocent bugs into a coffee grinder (the bugs remain unharmed, but participants don't know that), and computer "games" designed to inflict unpleasant suffering on other participants.

After years of intensive study, Paulhus has uncovered an understanding of evil remarkably close to the biblical picture of humans. His work demonstrates that we are complex moral beings, rather than the common assumptions that we make—good or evil, bad or nice. "We have a tendency to use the halo or devil framing of individuals we meet - we want to simplify our world into good or bad people," he says, but he notes that reality is different.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We all have the capacity for evil, the capacity for good. The image of God in us may sometimes be blurred beyond recognition, but it remains, no matter how evil we may become

In May of 2010, Indiana congressman Mark Souder resigned his position after confessing to an affair with a part-time staffer. In more than a dozen emails to WORLD magazine, Souder reflected on his downfall. In one email, he shares how difficult it is to keep people in power in check. "Politicians and any top professionals are skilled manipulators and smooth with words," he wrote. "Holding us accountable is hard." Another email reveals the agony he feels over his failure. He writes: "My sin, while forgiven, is greater in that God put me in a position of public trust, so I deserve whatever criticism I receive." He goes on to write about what he did and how he felt in the midst of his affair: "I prayed multiple times a day, sang hymns with emotions and tears, felt each time that it wouldn't happen again, read the Bible every morning …. So how in the world did I have a torrid—which is an accurate word—many-year affair? How could I compartmentalize it so much?" In yet another email, Souder adds: "Bottom line, however, is that the problem is sin …. The problem is getting the will subordinate to the Holy Spirit early enough that the Spirit is not quenched."

The omnipotent God, primal power of the world, being himself supremely good, could not permit anything evil in his works, were he not so all-powerful and good as to be able to bring good even out of evil.

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of The Science of Good and Evil, writes:

I once had the opportunity to ask Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List, what he thought was the difference between Oskar Schindler, rescuer of Jews and hero of his story, and Amon Goeth, the Nazi commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp. His answer was revealing. Not much, he said. Had there been no war, Mr. Schindler and Mr. Goeth might have been drinking buddies and business partners, morally obtuse, perhaps, but relatively harmless. What a difference a war makes, especially to the moral choices that lead to good and evil.

Shermer goes on to quote Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, made clear in his private writings he intended to proclaim a Christian message through his fictional writings.

Tolkien lived through the two world wars, yet he never lost his faith that those catastrophes the devil intends for evil, God turns to good. He embedded that faith in the very creation of his famous imaginative world.

In the posthumously published book The Silmarillion, Tolkien has the spirits sing Middle-earth into existence. The melody of Illuvatar (God) was "deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came."

Melkor (Satan) interfered with a loud, brash tune, trying to "drown the other music by the violence of its voice." But the "most triumphant notes" of Melkor's discordant song were "taken up by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern."

As a man who himself had faced the monstrous evil that lay behind war, Tolkien didn't sugarcoat his message. He knew the horrific events God uses for good are no less horrific for those who experience them. In The Silmarillion, he put it this way: "Evil may yet be good to have been, and yet remain evil."

It is hard to speak of the positive results of catastrophic events when people we have loved are dead and landmarks we have known are destroyed. For example, we can never see 9/11 as anything but evil. Yet, as our minds reawaken to the horror of war, the same horror that helped impart realism and strength to the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, we may rediscover the bedrock source of that strength—the knowledge of the God who, through and only through an awful death at the hands of sinful men, rose and redeemed humankind.

Author J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote in a letter:

"No man can estimate what is really happening at the present. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success —in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in."

Jesus didn't teach us to love our enemies for their good. It is for our own good--to keep from becoming the enemy.

When I was a boy growing up in New York City, one of the nicest ways for me to spend a Saturday afternoon was at the matinee of the neighborhood theater. A group of us would arrive early and warm up on a series of cartoons. But we really went to see the cowboy movies.

We liked those movies because they were so predictable. The bad guys always wore gray and rode dark horses. Whenever they spoke, they spoke with a snarl. The good guys always wore white hats and rode white horses. And from time to time, they would stop and sing to us with their guitars.

On Sunday, if we managed to make it to Sunday school, it sometimes seemed that the same people who had written the screenplay for the movie had also written some of our Sunday school lessons, for the characters we studied there were also very gray and very white. We knew, for example, that had we been there for the showdown in Egypt between Pharaoh and Moses, Pharaoh would have been dressed in gray and Moses in white. And it was no surprise to us that David sang with a harp, because in our minds that was a kind of old-fashioned guitar.

As I grew older, though, I grew tired of those cowboy movies, just because they were so predictable. They didn't deal with real people living in a real world. Instead, they usually dealt with cardboard characters in a tissue paper play.

There is a widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in life is due to our very own natures--the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly, out of anger, and anxiety. Instead, we want our children to believe that, inherently, all men are good. The children know that they are not always good; and often, even when they are, they would prefer not to be. This contradicts what they are told by their parents, and therefore makes the child a monster in his own eyes.