Good and Evil

never mind that i need dave randalls icq number...

( he is the evil to my good)

typos dear? shouldn't it read he is the devil to my god (remember goddess reference from long ago thread) icq number btw is 24402922

Well I gues the way the theory goes is: there is no such thing as good without evil. Because you can't define what is good without something else to measure it by. And that something else is it's opposite - evil. Same with hot and cold. To define hot you need to measure it against something else, which is the opposite - cold. Otherwise hot doesn't really exist with out something else to compare it with. I think that's the way it goes. But you don't have to be haunted by the concept.. as that's all it is: a concept. Christianity kind of draws a dividing line between good and evil. Some other religions and other Eastern mystical schools of thought. Talk about finding the middle way and walking the fine line inbetween. Becoming neither too good nor too evil, but balanced. T But why you shouldn't be haunted is because good and evil is different to hot and cold in the sense that it is a notion which comes from our minds, not necassarily a concrete fact. It's an idea which keeps changing. Good and evil is always fluctuating, and what was once considered to be good, might now be considered evil, and what was once considered evil might now be considered good. Just to confuse you even more. Ah well enough of my mindfunk.. I've just done my own box in..hehe

Unfortunately the argument about good and evil collapses as oon as you remove it from our own sphere of understanding. In fact it is entirely possible that evil is considered good and vice versa somewhere. Probably down in Pandemonium on Market Day.

The light and shadow metaphor would seem to imply that evil was a lack of good in the same way that a shadow is lacking light. It leads to interesting though - if goodness can be absorbed does evil remain?

To quote Satan in the South Park film: - 'What is evil anyhow? Is there reason to the rhyme? Without evil there could be no good So it must be good to be evil sometimes.'

I suppose one very evil person can do more harm than one very good person can do to counterbalance it - i.e Stalin and Hitler aren't offset in the slightest by Ghandi and Mother Theresa, but rather by the hundreds of thousands of people who probably don't consider themselves to be 'good' but carry out tiny moments of kindness without thinking anything of it.

Very true, Andrew. I'm reminded of my first job upon leaving school. I worked in a hardware shop for a bloke called Geoff. About two in the afternoon we used to load up the van with cement, peat, coal and paraffin, and go off on our deliveries. This was the winter of 72/73 when we had all the power cuts. Do you remember that? Edward Heath had fucked things up with the miners and the rest of the power workers, and everyone was on strike. So while the shop sold plenty of hurricane lamps, Geoff made even more money by delivering the paraffin fuel for them and coal for the fires on those cold, winter evenings when whole neighbourhoods would have the lecky cut off for a few hours. He was a good bloke, Geoff. We used to deliver to his decayed old lady who lived in a dun-coloured terraced house. I'd sling a sack of coal on my shoulders and would have to walk through the house to the bunker outside. As soon as I entered her home I could feel a cold, damp mist rising from her decomposing carpets, and I would want to gag at the putrid, musty stench. It was as if some kind of mouldy, organic substance was rotting and festering away under the floorboards. At one stage the wallpaper may well have had a pattern to it, but that was many, many years ago. Now the whole interior of the house was the colour of polluted ochre. This old lady would never have made it through a winter of power cuts without coal and paraffin. But then I doubt if she could pay her electricity bills in any case. I'd be tipping my sack of coal into the bunker when Geoff would come up behind me with another sack. "Looks like we put on one too many," he'd say, "Might as well bung this extra one in here, eh? Save taking it back to the shop." This tired, honest old lady, skin disintergrating from her brittle, anaemic hands, would search in her little, black purse for the coins necessary to pay us, for she knew we worked on a C.O.D. basis. But Geoff would always say, "That's alright, love, leave it for the moment. I've got no change with me right now. I'll bill you next week, okay." And then, after two or three weeks of this, Laura, his mother who also worked for him, would mention that Mrs. So 'n' So at such 'n' such address was behind on her payments. Geoff would wink at me, tear the bill up and say, "Oh well, you can't win 'em all, can you?" It's tempting to write something like, "Why aren't there more people like Geoff in the world?" but, of course, there are. I think this is a wondeful planet and I think it's full of Geoffs. They don't get much publicity, and they certainly don't ask for any, but in the winter of 72/73 Geoffs all over the United Kingdom were saving the lives of otherwise neglected pensioners.

Mykle's point about shadows is a good one, to my mind the norm is the shadow. The world is always in the dark until some light enters it. You can't create darkness, it's always there until you create some light to put in it. It's the same as hot and cold. Everything is cold until it's heated. You can't transfer cold from one point to another you can just take the heat out of it so cold and darkness are the norms. Does this mean that evil is the norm until you put some good into it? it would explain how much easier it seems to be to do evil rather than good (Andrew's point about hitler etc) if it's always there.

I think Funky defined it best. You can't call one thing "good" unless you have something to measure it against. On the other hand, I believe that these sorts of things are merely matters of perspective. A lot of people whom we would call evil, believed that what they were doing was right, worthwhile, and good.

the thing is dark is just the absence of light There is either light or no light. Same as there is no such thing as hot and cold, merely varying amounts of heat or none (absolute zero - 0 Kelvin) so the question is is good merely the absence of evil or evil the absence of good? (one of the central doctrines of Christian Science is that evil is an illusion) Going back to temperature, even though we scientists know that hot and cold are the same thing qualitatively but different quantitively (and that of course is still relative) . The terms hot and cold and the fact that they are seen as opposites must have some meaning, that meaning is derived from human experience. Humans experience hot and cold as opposites. Perhaps the same goes for good and evil. Objectively something that seems good to one person seems evil to another but because of the common shared qualities of human experience generally we all experience war as "evil" and say music as "good" so we have to look inwards to understand good and evil

The whole thing is explained to my satisfaction by Herman Hesse in 'Steppenwolf'. There is no such thing as ultimate good or evil - just shades of grey. And after you've got the hang of that read 'The Glass Bead Game' - and discover the utter futility of our lives! A-um. pip pip

Just what I was going to say about shades of grey. The only thing I can think of on the spot that a lot of people define as evil was Hitler (and I suspect even he had grey areas). Other than that, I really can't think of anything that is considered pure good or pure evil. It's a grey thing.

Not sure I agree with that - every day it is possible to see an opportunity to do good and not take it, but this is not the same as doing evil. Example - passing a pond and seeing some kittens in a sack and rescuing them is good, ignoring them for fear you might drown yourself is neutral(ish) but throwing the kittens in the sack and then the pond is not just not good, it is an actively evil thing to do, surely. Yes, things are shades of grey, and one person's evil may be not much worse than another persons well-intentioned but misdirected action, but I don't think you can classify evil as just a failure to do good.