I was born into a Catholic family and raised Catholic. As far as I could understand from what my priest taught me, I needed to earn the salvation of my soul by performing good actions and by avoiding those actions that were deemed bad or immoral. In my adolescence, I started to take my standing before God rather seriously. Therefore, I tried as hard as I could to improve my behaviour. This was in itself a daunting enterprise. However, the real problem arose when I realized that Jesus taught us that improving our behaviour is not enough to secure our salvation. Jesus said things like: “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire”. He also said: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart”. So, what Jesus said is that God does not only care about what we do, but also about what we are deep inside. He said that complying with a set of laws such as “do not steal” or “feed the poor” is not enough to be in peace with God. To be in peace with God we must be perfect enough to make any set of laws unnecessary, since a law such as “do not steal” only makes sense if it is addressed to people who harbour the desire to steel. In other words, Jesus taught that only by completely eradicating all wrongful desires from our hearts can we attain the moral perfection that God demands from us. Jesus’ moral standards are, of course, extremely high. However, this made sense to me. God must be, by definition, the being with the highest moral standards in the Universe. So, God’s moral standards could not in any way be lower than Jesus’ moral standards. In addition, a just God would never accept anything other than what his moral standards demand, since if he accepted anything else than that, he would not be a just God.