A Question to the Religious

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It depends what you mean by evil. The world itself is not actively, consciously bad - which is what I'd call evil - just uncaring, and is so arranged that bad people and unpleasant things often go unhindered.

Though as a great philosopher once wrote:

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always."

i define evil as anything which is part and parcel of being human [re: imperfect and falling short of the divine] being wallowed-in rather than engaged in struggle to transcend human ethical consciousness]- IOW it is mocking the golden rule by saying "he with all the gold gets to make all the rules." evil elevates the temporal imperfect values of the status quo, over more loving but difficult values. yes, evil can be simply uncaring, IOW evil is both active and passive. evil by default is still evil. saying to the bullied child, "you shall just have to get tough!" is evil by default, by enabling bullies/bullying and reinforcing the existing oppressive social order.



but the replacement bad guys always come along. the big evils are merely recurring exclamation points upon the run-on sentences which are the mundane evils one sees all around if one is willing to look. people who say, "oh that's just the way it is, no use giving a damn about it" are folk who have given in to the dark side and have allowed evil to win by default. love is still not in the driver's seat. what good is a human unless s/he learns to rise above the atavistic animal nature? "enquiring minds want to know."
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just my 2-cents' worth, adjusted for inflation

I think we are mostly in agreement but talking at a slight cross purpose; what I mean is that the world itself - the fabric of the universe around us and the way it behaves - is not evil (or good) or anything other than itself. Just a bunch of dumb matter following simple(ish!) rules. We're sitting at the back end of billions of years which have produced a big chunk of molten rock with a slimy crust to live on, a big hot thing in the sky keeping us warm, and an ecosystem which produces creatures whose lives fundamentally revolve around killing things and/or sexual dominance. A better arrangement must be possible - not a world where "the lion lies down with the lamb", that's silly, but one in which no lions can ever arise and rational, caring, cooperative people do. People with no trace of the evil which is, as you say, part and parcel of being human; literally, our heritage. I don't like to think it's the major part, even in the world as is, just that it could be better, and perhaps better in a different world - better in a paradise - than it can ever be in this.

Hehe. Getting quite heavy.

you write poetically. reminds me of sagan. i hope to write pretty some day.



but you're good at the heavy-duty stuff. maybe somewhere there is another universe where the better arrangement you described above has been established. let us hope. i like sylvia browne's vision of an "earth II" where there is no human wars and injustice because there are no humans.