Whig: Jesus said “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”. Nurturing one’s excellence or achieving great things is only useful if it helps us to enjoy the good life.

This is a frankly weird, bizarro-world inversion of Jesus’s clear meaning in Mark 8:36. The whole point of the passage is that a life spent in the pursuit of worldly fortunes such as pleasure, power, and money could not rightly be counted as “gain” or “profit” or “advantage” if it means “losing your soul.” The idea being that there are things more valuable than all of those things, having to do with the sort of a person you are. Nowhere does Jesus suggest that you should value being the right kind of person because it pays off in yet more sex, food, money, power, etc. down the road; nor could he reasonably do so, since he’s claimed that not even the whole world (which by definition would preclude getting any more) could compensate for the loss or corruption of your soul.

Of course, you could agree or disagree with Jesus on the matter. That’s up to you. But the decision to quote him to bolster a view that is precisely the opposite of the view expressed by the quoted passage, seems a bit strained.