Good and Evil

Good and evil are obvisouly opposites. Things can be oposits in at least two ways. One way is for the opisites to be two distinct thins with opisite charectistics. Examples are the north and south magnitic poles. Male and female and positive and negative charge. In each of these the examples the opsites are distint things that can be described apart from their opisite. Another type of oposites is whwn one of the opisites is simply the absence of the other. Examples of this type include light and dark and hot and cold. In these examples one is the absance of the other. Darkness is the absence of light. Cold is the abance of heat. It can some time be difficult to determine whar type of opsites a pair are and in the case of one being the absence of the other. which one is which. Is light the absence of darkness or is darkness the absence of light?. At one level both statements make sence, but as people learned more and more about light it became clear that light was a form of electromafnetic rediaction with a certian wave length and freciency. There have been books written about light but all you can realy say about darkness is that it is the absence of light. Darkness is not made up of some partical in the way light is made up of photons. As we study a pair of opisites more and more, we may find that we can say much about of one of the pairs but only that the other is the absance the opsite. When this happen it shows that the oposites are not two distinct things but one is a distinct thing and the other is the absence of it.

As we study good and evil more and more we learn that we can say much a bout the various forms of goodness such as love, truth, joy. There have been books written about each. It may seem at first that we can also say much about evil, but a close examination reveals that the much of what is said about evil is not about evil itself but about evil itself but the causes and effects of evil. We may speake about darkness as causing poor viaion or we can tell how to mane a room dark, but this in not about darkness itself but the cuse and effects of darkness. Some people equate pain and suffering with evil. There is much that can be said about pain and suffreing bur I donot beleive that pain and suffering are the same as evil.

If evil is the absence of something than how can it cause anything? Eveil can not create anything but it does cause things atleast in relation to goodness. It is analogious to cold causing the formation of ice. Cold is the absence of kinetic enerhy of molicules (ie heat) but it causes ice to forn

Many diseases are caused by the absence of a nutrient or other factor even cancer eichis the poliveration of cell is caused by the absence of one or more regulators of cell growth. In the same way an evil man does not have someyhing a good man dees not., but an evil man lacks somethong a good man has.

First lets look at pain. The capacity to feel pain is not only not evil but the capacity to feel pain is a good thing. If we had no ability to freel pain than we would not know to remove out hand from a very hot object untill after we were burned. In this since pain is like a smoke detector or warning light on our cars dash board.

There is a difference between pain and suffering. It has been said that pain is inevitable but suffering is optionai. This points to the distinction between the toe suffering is our reaction to pain. I beleive this is because the only thing anyone cans say about evil is that it is the absence of light.

It has been said that: "All that is necessary for evil to persist, is for enough good men to do nothing." I disagree. I believe good is to evil as light is to darkness. It would make no scene to say that all that is necessary for darkness to exist is for the light to do nothing. All that is necessary to end darkness is for the light to exist. All that is necessary to end evil is for the good to exist.

3/10/11: There are two related aspects of evil, not seeing the good and not being the good. Not seeing the good is more like the darkness due blindness than darkness due to the absence of light. It is subjective darkness in an objective world of infinite light, but it is not like the blindness of a person who loses their sight. It is like the blindness of a person who loses their life. Dead people don't see and you can not transplant a living eyeball in a dead body and make it see. Evil is spiritual darkness that results from the spiritual blindness that results from spiritual death that results from the separation of our spirit from the Holy Spirit which is the source of all spiritual life.

Not being the good in a similar way is the result of being cut off from the Holy Spirit which is the source of all good, of all love, joy and peace.