[lit-ideas] Re: War, no sort of about it

  • From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 15:13:31 -0400

There is a lot of merit in the theory--especially if one has embraced the idea that humans are inherently evil and that there is no way to change them other than outside force or constraints or internal change.

_____

It can also be a huge cop-out. For example, I know a Christian who betrayed a friendship and later claimed the experience taught him the meaning of man's sinful nature. "The devil made me do it."

Instead of all this evil stuff, couldn't it just be that people are born egocentric and make varying degrees of progress away from egocentricity and total self-concern?

It's the problem of the reality of evil: Is evil an actual force in the world or is evil the ignorance of reality?

In the first model you get the Devil (which notion the Jews took from the Babylonians during their captivity) as arch-enemy of life.
Notice that the Devil in Job is merely a court prosecutor for Yahweh, not the grand bugaboo he later became.

In the second model you get the notion of evil as a sort of dream from which people may or may not wake. It has no reality by itself. The metaphor in the Upanishads is of people walking along a path at night and seeing a snake on the trail, which in daylight turns out to be a bit of discarded rope. In their ignorance the night before, they saw a snake.

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