Generally, most people think good should be rewarded while evil should be punished, or in fact there should be no evil at all. And the first part is true, it's just that "there should be no evil at all" is not true. I do believe that the good should be rewarded, but not all the time. An example is that during the spring, my mother likes to garden. Sometimes what she plants does not come out well and that is when her "good should not be rewarded". Evil comes into play here and Job relates to it. Job was doing good with his wealth, children, and wife but he only got punished because Satan told God to. This relates to my mother because what this does is provoke her to try her gardening again, with either the same or different seeds or soils, and she may either forget her last attempt and concentrate on this new one, or keep thinking about it. Job, despite that he was "tortured" by god, once god let go of him/ stopped torturing him, he moved on and had new children--even with a possibility of forgetting his children who were all killed before-- and gained more oxen and wealth. It may be weird to think about it but, with good comes evil, with love comes hate, with potato comes tomato...etc.. They all relate to each other because we cannot have one without the other.
Humans should act ethically, even though they may be punished for doing so. In some extreme cases people are judged wrongly for something they didn't do (ex: murder, robbery, etc...) and are put into jail, despite all they were doing was watering their plants in their garden. No matter what happens or what people do to prevent it, there are some unlucky people out there that get punished even though they did nothing wrong or they did something good. Though, the human (and other races) should act ethically because it is supposedly the right thing to do. When doing something right, there is sometimes the feeling of uneasiness or other "un" emotions but there is a greater chance of us being thankful and/or grateful for what we have done. Emotion is what makes us do something ethically (besides religion) and right. Getting something physical in return is not the right way to do something ethical. In religious terms, we have to do something ethical because god wants us to. A lot of this has to do with the Ten Commandments because it sets up laws for us to not do anything bad and only doing good. And even when doing nothing wrong, just as Jesus had, he still got punished. But, in the end something good may happen to them such as getting out of prison early because you were proven innocent or coming back from death. Overall this is a tricky topic because it can differ depending on what view you are looking at, religiously, more modernly, or something that I have not even heard of yet.
God seems to punish "Job", despite him doing something bad. This personally brings a big break into religion. This is because most religious people think that if they do something good, they will be rewarded, but that is being greedy is it not? An example is the holiday Christmas; its better to give then get. Basically you should give without any hope of getting something "physical" in return. People would say that you would get the feeling of "doing something right" or "happiness", but that may not come sometimes. In fact, people do sometimes get the feeling of wasting something (money perhaps). This could be then the sense of punishment, the fact that you did give something away and the person did like it, but in return you get annoyed or an unfulfilled feeling. Some more modern examples are the fact that despite how much we help developing countries, they may either get little help, stay the same, or become even worse. And today, rather than giving one person punishment, he gives large groups of people punishment (I cannot think of any one person with sever punishment), like Ethiopia (the poorest country in the world), Darfur, and even the people spending the money on them. The last part, "people spending money on them" is true because they could be loosing a lot of money over helping them and it be effecting themselves in the process. I think that the only reason that God would do this is not only to teach us that we are below him (like he has done to Job) but too tell us that there will not always be prosperity no matter how much we want it. It can come to an abrupt end or make a slow decline to it. Scientifically this is true too because all nations start out with and equal amount of births and deaths (in an preindustrial stage), but as they move to a transitional stage, the birth rate stays the same, but the death rates drop dramatically, causing the population to raise dramatically (like India or China), and lastly, by the time the postindustrial stage comes by, they equal to each other again. But what we do not know is what happens after that, and that is where it is up to us. God shows us that we will never be sure about what will happen and that prosperity will not always happen despite what we want to believe. God wants to the people of this world to realize that not everybody is the same and no matter how much you help those in need, it may not ever succeed.
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