Is the road to HeII really paved with good intentions?

Question

Think along the lines of "no good deed goes unpunished".

Answer 1

All the little quips that I have put in about my past is sure to make many wonder. Those that betrayed me and stabbed me in the back thought they were doing the right thing. They have convinced themselves that what they did was right.

What they did was to lose me as a friend as well as protector. I don't wish or pray for harm to come to them but I d**n sure don't have to help or save them.

Answer 2

yes it is. because you can try your best to be a good person and live a life without sin. you can can good intentions for your life and good intentions for helping and influencing others.

BUT if you do not put your trust in jesus christ and ask him to come into your life and have a relationship with him...you are not saved from the fires of h**l. no matter how good and sin free you live your life.  

Answer 3

No I don't think so. Sure, people who try to do good are as flawed as others. So they make mistakes. However, I also think they also do a lot of good. The road to h**l is more often paved with indifference or meanness

Answer 4

Your admonishment to think along a particular direction misses the point. They're not connected.

A significant deed has consequences, and it is said that "no good deed goes unpunished" because it sometimes leads to undesired or undesirable consequences for the person who performed it.

Nevertheless, that's not the proverbial road to h**l. The good intentions paving that road have to do with desiring to force some good, imagined result on everyone else, and being willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve that result. It's a matter of thinking the ends justify the means, and ignoring the evil inherent in the means; the consequences are most likely borne by others, whereas for a truly good deed the performer gets punished.

The reason the results don't justify the means, of course, is that we only imagine that we control all the results, but we are often free to choose our means of trying to reach them (at least, free until someone or something stops us).

The thing is that people who are really trying to do evil things are quite rare. Most of us are quite capable of convincing ourselves that what we are doing (no matter how underhanded, crooked, deceptive, or exploitive it may be) is for a good cause. At the very least, all we need to have is the intention to use our ill-gotten gains to do some wonderful thing (cure cancer, invent cheap energy, feed the starving, give scholarships, fix the political system, stop wars, etc.) once we get past the immediate difficulties. Our intentions are so good that the bad things we do are justified by what we plan to do later.

Answer 5

I believe that intention is everything and as long as your intention was good to begin with, you meant good results to occur  for everyone involved.  That being said, often your good intentions turn out with the wrong or different results than you originally intended and there is really nothing you can do about that other than evaluate why that happened.  

Answer 6

Well, those good intentions can often lead to unforseen negative consequences. For example, the era of Prohibition was begun by people with the good intention of reducing the negative aspects of accohol consumption. It unfortunately had the unintended consequence of creating a very powerful criminal class that wreaked havoc on America for decades, and is still causing trouble even after the end of Prohibition.

I think that's what the aphorism means.