One of the real life illustrations that Dr Peterson applied to the idea of the death and resurrection of Christ is how being a good person is an ideal and not achievable.

So, how do you become a good person even though being one is unachievable?

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He explains the death and resurrection of Christ as a model, death means old you getting cast off and burnt and a new you being rebirth or resurrected from the ashes of the old you. (I'm using my own words, so you might have listened to the lecture and understood it differently)

Being a good person is an ideal, it is unachievable but one can be a good person through the process of becoming a good person. Just like Christ is a central figure on which most Western civilizations are based, becoming Christ is the unachievable end, but the process by which

we constantly improve ourselves is the journey to that ideal and it is the people who have embarked on that journey that are defined as good people.

It is the process itself that makes you a good person, whenever you think you have addressed all your imperfections,

what you discover is that there is a legion of more inadequacies that still bares getting addressing, so in a sense, you can never become perfect, you can never be Christ, but you can be intentional about being on that constant journey of self improvement, and those

are the people who are called good.

Basically, being a good person is the intention to be better, to do better, to change from your old ways and to become a new person. This journey is tough and arduous, there's a lot of pain in there because it involves allowing your old self

die. Whenever there's death, there's pain and suffering and that's what Christ getting nailed on the cross signifies. On his journey to becoming Christ, he had to go through pain unimaginable to die.

Becoming a good person is not an easy

it is a journey filled with pain and self sacrifice and death (of the old you at least) and this journey never ends. It is continuous, because what you're aiming for is an ideal not a destination.

Deciding to be a good person and taking the tough steps to be one is what it

means to be a good person. And it is a continuous process. There's more imperfections imbued in you than you know, and it is only after you start taking the steps to do better that you discover them, and the more you work, the more you find. But in that constant process of

letting your old self die and letting a new version of you be reborn. That's what makes you a good person. And being a good person is in the journey. You can be one, but you can't become one.

What this means for us is that, immediately a person decides to

change from their old ways and be a better person and they take actions to be one and become a better version of themselves, they are already a good person.

You cannot become a good person totally, fully, without blemish until the entirety of humanity is the same way, and

since this is an impossible ideal (or at least from a human perspective), you'll never arrive at the destination but you take strength from the fact that being on the journey is what goodness is.

Nobody is perfect but we can all be better, or at least try.

That's what it means to be good.

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