thought experiment--need help

Without evil action, incontrary of it wouldn't exist. i regret for evil things i did to my mum when i see her being good to me no matter what i do. i do 'evil' things, i do good things. i get them all in retun. sometimes it seems like i recieve too many 'evil' actions and then another day i realize i don't deserve to be treated this peacefully- that people should do me evil things in return. i can never know why it happens. if i consider that being poor/lack of money is a bad thing to happen- then i'd be curious why is that guy i see on my way to school has no home. i am sure there are many people in world that has done evil things and living in great houses. he is just good- never been caught stealing or anything. and why are babies dying? been really evil? i don't think so. if i consider that death is a bad thing when it comes early, then we don't get what we do in return.
most of the time an action can not be categorized as good or evil and the way that people react to our actions wont be always understood by us like the way they want us to. when i was back to my room the other day i couldn't find my coat and looked everywhere in my room- couldn't find it. thought maid stole it.(evil maid!) then it came back from dry cleaning and i understood that she actually did me a good thing.(good maid) she was supposed to clean the room- but she also took care of my clothes. how nice. but maybe she did it because she was feeling guilty because my lost wallet last week- maybe she stole it? (evil maid) i can continue. my point is nothing is good or bad- it is us to decide. so most of the actions we get-in-return can be good or bad, depending on our imagination.
(i loveD pollyanna)

Hi Caroline,

I think you missed my point ( or I made it badly ).

I do not believe an act IN ITSELF can be considered good or bad, but rather the intention defines the "goodness" or "badness" of something. I believe religions give us a guide as to how to judge this.

Thats what I was trying to say with the following poem:

" a snakes poison is life to itself, death to others".

When the snake bites , people may assume, what an evil snake, however the act of biting, is neither good nor bad. The intention of the snake may have simply been to stay alive, how can this be considered evil?

i think if you look at creation from a perspective of unity you will see that there is balance between opposites. it isnt a case of when you do good you will get a cookie for a reward. your reward is that you did something good-the karma is that more good is perpetuated by it, some evil is reduced somewhere. without balance everything would be destroyed. without opposing points, such as the poles in duality, nothing at all would occur, it would be a stalemate.

this is why i believe that evil can never be overcome with good-only balanced. there is the choice for each individual to be on the one side or the other. i dont like to use the terms good and evil, i think productive and counter-productive, or maybe nurturing and destructive would be better.

An evil person would only do evil expecting a reward, or something good. He does an evil action for his benefit. Honestly, nobody would want to do something they think will give them bad results in return (of course there are masochists, but that has to do with something entirely different). Evil is the result of accidents, in my mind. Some people are evil, but they think they are good. Some good people are mistaken with the thought that they are evil. I'll post again later if there are any updates.

A few years ago, a pharmacist was arrested for having diluted the drugs he sold to cancer patients so he could make more money from selling them. Several of his patients died because they did not get the correct dosage of the drug they needed. Do you think he thought he was doing good?

I'd probably stick with the terms good and evil, in most situations. Subjectivity aside, they just seem to provide a bit more clarity when discussing such matters.

After all, cancer cells could be considered productive, and antibiotics are counter-productive to the growth of microorganisms that could make us sick. People often nurture grudges, and destruction of forest land often leads to healthier new growth.

quite right. i didnt make that clear, actually. antibiotics in actuality are destructive and if there were a better way to remove the ill effects of bacteria from a higher organism that is what would be preferable. people are maintaining grudges i would say rather than nurturing, and there is also a process of pruning where some plants are sacrificed towards the end result of a higher yield.

when i think of destructive or nurturing i am not thinking of a single instance or organism, but the end result on all creation as a whole. so when a lion kills a zebra i dont say he is being evil or even destructive. it is a part of how creation and reality works, it is behaving within the framework of natural law.

human beings have the capacity to think outside the box and defy natural law, though they cant really break it. but this is where the responsibility for our actions becomes much more serious than that of the lion's.

I've been thinking of something jgweed said recently: that of many definitions of a word, I may do well to stop and reflect on what I really mean when I use the word.

In regard to good and evil, each person defines the words anew in the context of his/her own experiences. Yet, we have received the words in a context of tradition handed down to us. In the case of good/evil, the tradition can be seen to be complex by virtue of being a fusion of the perspectives of several distinct cultures:

The original Jewish perspective is earthy in character. As Isaac Asimov pointed out, a central theme in the Israelite culture was 'the deal.' We have a deal with God. We follow his law and he in turn protects us. So if you do good, you'll see God's blessing externally: are you healthy, wealthy, owning a good reputation, with a big family? If so, you must be doing something right because God is blessing you. Did the Assyrians recently lay your town to waste? Well you must have screwed up somehow because obviously God isn't protecting you. If I'm Joe Israelite on the street, I may say that the Torah is confusing. I'm just a poor milk man. If the most honored rabbis argue over what it means, how am I supposed to figure it out? But what I can do is look at my circumstances and determine from that if I need to change my ways or not.

The original Iranian perspective is abstract. You were born into a divided universe, so to speak... with good on one side and bad on the other. It's assumed that you were born knowing the difference. It's incumbent upon you to continuously reach out for the good side and turn away from the evil... thus appearing to be in motion. But this is not the old cyclical motion. This is motion in one direction only. This is progress (I'm borrowing from an eminent economist here, but his name escapes me.) So we see, that as in the case of Job, I can be down and out, but still be good.. as long as I'm reaching out for good. In fact, a poor suffering person has more reason to reach out for good. The rich man is satisfied with the status quo. So a rich man is actually more apt to be static.. not progressing. You can't tell from a person's outward appearance if they're good or evil.

These two opposing perspectives flowed into the GrecoRoman world where another pair of opposites resided.

The essential Greek perspective is that life is drama. You discover who you really are through trial and tragedy. As in the Lord of the Rings: Frodo would have just been another dreamy-eyed hobbit if it weren't for the rise of evil in the world. Frodo shows us the grandeur of the hobbit spirit only when the crap hits the fan. The Greeks loved the question: the journey... the adventure. The answer is the end. The archtypical Greek (as they appear in our imagination) would have scorned a peace activist. If we had peace on earth, where would the adventure be? You never feel more alive than when the whole world is at war: with bloodshed and grand purposes everywhere.

And that plops us into the comforting cradle of our own culture: the Romans. They started out as farmers in a world of competing cultures. You never knew what lunatic was on the horizon, coming with the intention of wreaking havoc. Farming requires long-term stability. The Romans demanded order in the world (for Christ's sake.) Their primary cultural agenda was to stabilize the borders.. through war if necessary, but negotiation is cheaper. A fanciful take on Rome is that they kept stabilizing borders until they'd taken over the world. Part of their tradition is that Mars bestowed upon them the mission to bring order to the world. In the Aeneid, Virgil expresses the horror in the Roman soul at the Greek notion that life is supposed to be fun. Life is about duty. Your ultimate duty is to adhere to the dictates of nature. The Roman definition of 'good' is similar to the Russian 'pravda': which combines 'correct or true' with 'morally good.' (would somebody who speaks russian correct me if I'm wrong?) It's correct that the tree grows toward the light. This is it's nature. If it fails to follow it's nature, it becomes diseased. Stoicism's origin may be Greek, but it expresses clearly the Roman perspective. All evil and disease arise from failure to adhere to nature (which one assumes is orderly.) All success and health arise from doing what you were born to do: which is encoded in your nature. Replace 'Nature' with 'God' and you have Roman Christianity... which is what westerners inherited. Since the language of philosophy was Greek, and Christianity was originally a fusion of Jewish and Iranian perspectives, our own Christian tradition is a forum for all of these perspectives. The inherent oppositions producing the ideological dynamism of Christianity, which we generally take for granted. That we now imagine that we're in a position to relegate it to the museum because it was nothing but fairy tales, indicates only our blindness to the way it pervasively shaped who we are.

Just to complicate the discussion of good and evil, Nietzsche was of the opinion that if one understood the origin (or to use his own term, geneology) of the distinction, you would find that it arose from an entirely different ground that one imagines. He contrasts from a philological, philosophical, and psychological perspective the two dualisms of good/bad and good/evil in terms of will to power and ressentiment.

Yes!

Part of the Jewish identity is the victimized outsider. Their folklore describes their suffering at the hands of powerful, evil, Gentile kings. At the same time, their root perspective assigns external well-being as the sign of goodness. If the gentiles are alienated from God, then why are they always so wealthy and powerful? A religion scholar might point to this conflict as the origin of Christianity.

During their exile in Babylon, the Israelites absorbed Iranian abstraction, and used the new ideas to explain why God's justice may not be seen immediately.

The Jewish idea of the Hereafter could be seen as a translation of the Indoeuropean field of the dead: Hades. But for the gentiles, this concept was not about God's justice. Hades may be gloomy, but it's just where you go when you die. For the Jews, though, Hades became the place where the gentiles are punished... although not eternally. The rabbis pondered over how long the gentiles should be tortured for their crimes... a year might be enough. Meanwhile, the dead Jews sit at the right hand of God looking down on the agony of the gentiles. The rabbis pondered whether an evil Jew might also go to Hades. The general consensus being: probably.

The second idea that entered their culture was the World to Come. It's similar to the Persian idea of the end of the world, preceeded by a great war between good and evil. But for the Jews, it again becomes a method by which the gentiles finally get what's coming to them. They're finally brought low and forced to recognize the superiority of the Jews at the end of a war in which the Jewish forces are led by the Messiah.

Around 170 BC a gentile ruler named Antiochus IV invaded Jerusalem with the intention of Hellenizing the Jews. To this end he installed a statue of Zeus in the temple and outlawed Jewish religious practices in Jerusalem. In the midst of this, the longstanding conflict heads toward psychic crisis. How could a Jewish father continue to teach his son that the Jews had special knowledge about securing God's blessings? This central column of Judaism was becoming ridiculous. Some Jews retired to the desert to draw close to God and ponder the problem. Occasionally a prophet would appear from the desert with an answer. Jesus could be viewed as a collective image of what the desert revealed.

Ressentiment was the source of the dilemma. (if I'm understanding the idea.)

The Jews had always looked down on the gentiles, and for good reason. The Jews were cleaner and better educated than the average gentiles. But they hadn't always longed for the day they'd be at God's side looking down on the gentiles being tortured. The Jewish psyche was becoming twisted. This is bitterness. The wisdom of the desert was that if you let the bitterness of victimization take you over and make you into something monstrous, then in this way, you've damaged yourself beyond what anyone else could ever do to you. The anger may seem to hold you against your will. Even if you know it's happening, it seems there's no alternative but to manifest the final victory of the villian: the destruction of the victim's soul. The message of Jesus is this: there is a way out. Let it go. Turn the other cheek.

Jesus was saying: stop hating the gentiles... and stop being a victim. Follow your bitterness to it's eventual end: see yourself now standing over the broken gentile down on his knees. What you want to say is: good! now you know how I felt. But instead, look down at him and do the opposite: hold out your hand with compassion: the compassion you wish someone would have shown you when you were on your knees. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Throw off the chains of social cause and effect. Be born again... free now to create the world from visions in your heart.

The solution he offered could have been seen as a revolution within Judaism: finally freeing them from a conflict that had plagued them for centuries. But for obvious reasons, it couldn't be that: the solution Jesus offered was the end of the Jewish identity. Jesus is one in a long line of folks who have miscalculated the odds that the Jewish identity can be undone.

Christianity drew off part of the Jewish population and began to evolve in a world that's similar to our own: a religious smorgasbord.

At first glance it makes no sense that the Romans would convert to Christianity. They already had a recipe for dealing with victimization: proceed to the city that's threatened you, burn it to the ground, plow over the ashes and sow salt. How could they make sense of the message of Jesus? The secret appears in the Aeneid. Though the Romans never objectively knew victimization, they saw themselves as the offspring of the victims. They identified with the Trojans, not the Greeks. The Greeks had no right to destroy Troy, Virgil says. From this point of view, Euripides only shows the Greeks at their worst: placing the victim on a pedestal and reveling in her beautiful pain. She's not beautiful, say the Romans. Being a victim doesn't make you virtuous. It only means that you were powerless.

But who destroyed Carthage? Who destroyed the second temple in Jerusalem? The Romans were the evil gentiles kings running rough shod over the world.

Somehow this leads to the reason the Romans needed Christianity. I think...

He clearly thought what he was doing was good for him. He wanted more money and he got it. He probably regrets that he didn't find a safer(for him) way to get more money.

What about compulsive murderers and pedophiles? They often realize that their behavior is abhorrent(and dangerous for them) but they cannot restrain themselves. If they could stifle the urges they would be happier, but I don't know if I would call people in this predicament 'Evil'. I think evil is (if you'll excuse an anthropomorphic metaphor) much more insidious than an uncontrollable urge, no, evil is self righteous. Evil thinks it is justified.

It's a matter of perspective.Let's say a person(take you for instance)just 5 years ago could do(fill in the blank)and never fully understand what you were doing was wrong,sure we may think we know the difference,but that doesn't mean we understand why.Now flash foward 5 years to the present,and you should realise there are certain things you can no longer do not because you fear some omnipresent being,but because you have a better understanding of an unspoken truth about reality that you never knew existed.And chances are in 5 more years,you will not be able to get away with the (questionable)deeds you get away with now for the exact same reason.So i think it would be out of character for"god"to punish a person because of their ignorance.Evil and kindness are nothing more than a person's inability to comprehend the curiosity of their own nature.

YUP,that's the last time i put that much thought into an answer.

I agree he may have thought what he was doing would help him. But I don't see that means he thought he was doing good. I think it is probable that he did not care whether or not he was doing good. I suppose that some people who do evil think that they are doing good. Socrates held that no person does evil knowingly. That is why he famously held that virtue is knowledge. So that if you know what is good, you will do it.