The premise that there is a Good Place is the problem. For someone like me, who fixes things, there can be no Good Place because there wouldn’t be anything to fix.

Nature provides us with all we need to know about morality. It is this: a species survives when it contributes more usefulness to its future than it consumes in resources. In other words, it doesn’t matter what you ‘owe’ because you simply give more than you take in relation to your whole environment, including your grandchildren’s biosphere. Humanity’s failure lies in its anthropocentrism. We built city walls to separate ourselves from the risks and responsibilities of the natural world and now we are facing the consequences of that mentality, both inside and outside the walls we’ve built. Civilizations fail because they are civilized (separated from reality by artificial barriers), not because they become uncivilized. Morality questions always get complicated because someone tries to quantify individuals and intentionality separately from our responsibility to the actual natural world instead of our contrived rules that only account for human interactions.

God is just the marketing department for the town meeting. Believing that only the people are the ‘town’ is the selfish extraction mentality that religion sells along with aristocracy. Everyone is supposed to behave according to the Great Aristocrat in the Sky, and of course, to accept His minions’ opinions and failings.

Collectively, humanity can be a great species: but its tendency to avoid reality is going to be its downfall.