[center][center][size=6]Understanding Good and Evil[/size]
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[center][center][size=4]by Joseph Mattioli[/size]
[size=5]What is good and what is evil? This is a question asked throughout the ages. No finite definition has ever come to unanimous agreement and if it had it lasted only for some fleeting moments and then passed away with the society that created it for expediency purposes.
Even with our modern nation, what was once considered good to many such as slavery was later thought of as evil. The taking of land from the Indians was once justified by many as good for America but was not deemed as such if you were in the moccasins of an Indian. Time changes circumstances and circumstances changes our definitions. Why is this?
It is because the terms good and evil are deemed opposites. The demarcation line of one versus the other is a line subjectively defined as whatever the controlling caste of a society at that time defines. Opinions and positions on such matters change. Killing in the United States now is considered evil but even that has exceptions. When we are involved in War, we make heroes of those who have killed many and dare not call them evildoers.
Good and evil, they are abstract terms that only have reality to the individual or society whose mind makes the distinction. Granted, every action or thought has a consequence regardless of where one draws the line between good and evil but nevertheless they are abstract terms of ever changing perceptions. They are terms that have even reversed meanings in history depending upon who perspective we are looking from.
Is good created by God and evil by some other sub-god such as Satan as some religions would have us believe? It would seem that that would not be the case. If God is God and creating good then he must also be the creator of that which is its opposite or evil. One can not hold the title of creator of all things and create an abstract term as good and then blame the creation of the opposite on that which is created. Yet, there is another way to look at it with a deeper understanding. Maybe God is neither creating good nor evil? Perhaps God only created creatures with a mind that had that potential of choice and the ability to make such distinctions if desired.
Opposites then are a product of duality of the mind. Perhaps God is the potential yet partakes of neither? Other creatures of creation do not seem to have such distinctions. In the animal kingdom we witness life and death and killing endlessly and yet we neither call it good nor bad. It is accepted as a natural part of life and evolution. Man having evolved as part of creation with a thinking mind is able to create thoughts that are not necessary for survival alone yet are chosen to take command of earth and become a god himself. To do this he needed to make his own rules of operation that could change with his whims and desires. He needed to make himself as independent as possible from the creator himself. He needed to control food supplies and resources so as to no longer seem to be accountable to the rest of creation but only to himself.
Evil was thus born in the mind of men. Evil born of opposite scales of right and wrong, good and evil, desirable and undesirable, ugly and beautiful, love and hate and a myriad of other judgments. All perceptions, opening up a Pandora’s Box of demarcation lines changing with his every whim, custom and transient thought. So then, perhaps man did through choice choose good and evil as a subjective reality in which to live and have pleasure of his own seeming creation. If God created neither, those terms are merely illusions created in the melodrama of man’s mind making a reality out of nothing.
What need has God for such folly? What need does he have for such absurdities of mind? What need does he whose source of power is unlimited and enemies are none have for a mind that is subject to doubt, hate, anger, jealousy, fear and guilt? What need would he have for revenge and war? What need does he who is complete and knows all things have for thinking or even language of such terms? What need does God, whose completeness is peace and existence is love, have for desires and the affairs of men who through choice choose folly for transient and fleeting moments of happiness and pleasure rather than his eternal essence present within them? What is good and what is evil? A conundrum, a riddle I say. They are but illusions of man’s mind that have no basis in the presence of reality in God.[/size][/center][/center]
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