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There's theology behind it as well. Puritans believe in Calvinist predestination. In a nutshell, God has known you for eternity. God knows what's going to ha
by jtbigwoo 13y ago
There's theology behind it as well.
Puritans believe in Calvinist predestination. In a nutshell, God has known you for eternity. God knows what's going to happen and what you're going to do. God decided whether you will be saved or not before you were born. Your salvation/damnation happens through God's grace, not through your good works.
This presents a dilemma: Why be a good, hard-working citizen if you can't affect the final outcome? The answer is they came up with is clever and I'm going to greatly oversimplify it.
Basically, the Puritans believed that there are clues as to whether you are going to be saved. If you look at a guy and he's a hardworking, serious fellow, he's probably going to be saved. If the guy is lazy and frivolous he's probably damned.
Thus your immortal soul depends on working as hard as possible even though it's God's grace that saves you and not your works.
- oz 13y agoTo add a bit to this, the Puritans believed that earthly success was a sign of one being predestined to eternal salvation. So they worked hard for success.
- enraged_camel 13y agoYeah, I left the theology part out since it can potentially devolve into a religious debate. :)
- gruseom 13y agoThat is a rough approximation of Max Weber's theory from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which is an amazing and surprisingly readable little book.
- lurkinggrue 13y agoYes, If you are rich then you are blessed by god.
- gohrt 13y agoLittle known fact: The Puritans invented the concept of "p-value", and like every one else doing statistics since, they misinterpreted its meaning, assuming that "P implies Q with probability 95%" means that "Q implies P with probability 95%"