Good Deeds

One of my favorite musicals is "The Fiddler On The Roof".  There are many scenes and songs in this movie that I like.  One of them revolves around the song "Do You Love Me".  The man asks the question to his wife "Do you love me" and she answers with all the good deeds that she has done and so he repeats the question.  The end of the song tells us and the man that she does.  I do agree that love does produce good deeds, but there are cases when good deeds are produced from something else.

Obligation will produce good deeds.  Anytime that you use a system of "do this or get punished", you will get good deeds.  Most people will pay their taxes, but I imagine that very few if any do this out of love.   From what I have seen, relationships that are revolving around this concept are not really strong and many have hearts that want to be somewhere else.  I do believe however that a person can have obligations, and do them  with love, but in that instance it is love and not obligation that is producing the actions.

Sometimes a person will do good deeds in order to put themselves on a pedestal.  The good deeds get them noticed.  In this case, love has nothing to do with it.  It is all about getting people to look up at them.

I believe there is another reason that someone will do good deeds.  This one is not talked about although I first noticed it on an episode of the original "Star Trek" series when I was growing up.  In the episode titled  "I Mudd" there were androids who sought to take over the human race by serving them.  As I have gotten older, I have noticed the same thing happening among people. Someone will want to do a lot things for someone, not out of love, but in order to control them.  A person like this will not want help in what they are doing because that would mean that they would lose some of their control.  They will end up looking like Rebecca in the Hitchcock film  "Rebecca".  Rebecca looked to be the perfect wife while being "Hell on Earth" for her husband to live with.

There are probably other things that will produce good deeds, but I do not think that any of them will come close to love.