(This entry is only here for reference purposes. I plan to refer to it in several future entries on both religions and technology.)
Philosophy is like an onion.
Most people, on reading that, might think that I’m referring to layers… how you can peel away layers of both, seemingly forever, always finding more layers below. Some might mockingly take that analogy even further, pointing out that if you keep going long enough, both of them turn out have nothing at all at their core.
I mean it in a more gustatory fashion: onions are great in small doses when mixed with other foods, but when I go to the kitchen looking for a midnight snack, I’m not licking my lips for the raw and unaccompanied bulb of an Allium cepa plant. I prefer my philosophy in small doses, mixed with a generous portion of crisp leaves of humor, juicy diced examples, and crunchy croutons of straightforward thought, and you can keep those nasty little purple cabbagey bits of pretentiousness for yourself, thanks.
So please forgive this digression into raw philosophy. I promise to keep it short and to the point, and that there will be far more humor, examples, and other tasty treats in the later articles that refer to this one.
So, to dive right in: what is the definition of evil? A lot of computer geeks would immediately say “Microsoft,” but however true that might be, it’s not a definition. Wikipedia, among other web resources, has huge pages that attempt to define and explain the term in an all-inclusive fashion. Entire philosophic tomes have been written on the subject. But when you trim all of the religious fat off, it comes down to one thing: evil describes an act that is against life. Good is it’s opposite, describing an act that promotes life.
Murder is almost universally considered evil — almost, because sometimes killing a person is the only available way to prevent that person from killing other people. Cooperation is almost universally considered good — again only almost, because people who cooperate to do murder are generally considered evil by everyone else. It’s impossible to categorically say that any act is good or evil, you have to have context to judge it.
By the same token, whether something is good or evil may well depend on where you stand. A country that attacks another without provocation is generally doing something evil from the point of view of the people of the attacked country, but the leaders of the attacking country might well look at it as doing good by increasing the welfare of their own people in the long run. So when you get right down to it, you can’t even really say that an act is good or evil in context, unless you include the point of view as well.
To a modern Christian, the thought of ritually killing people several times a year is tremendously evil. To the Maya, such blood sacrifice was considered both good and necessary for the survival of their people.
To the Christian Crusaders, attacking the Muslim-held city of Jerusalem in the year 1099, killing 70,000 to 100,000 civilians was a good, right, and proper thing to do, ordered explicitly by God through Pope Urban the Second. To nearly everyone else, then and now, it is a purely evil act.
The moral? Don’t unthinkingly assume that your opinion of good and evil, right and wrong, is accurate or universal.
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. Susan B. Anthony
A good post, “life” is a reasonable enough definition, the Torah, after all, does say “choose life”. I’d not argue as much with theistic definitions of course, simply because I think mine is the source of right in that area, but I’d fight for someone to have the right to disagree with my point of view, to paraphrase Voltaire. The first Crusade (and to a somewhat lesser extent others) also killed people within Europe too. The Crusaders killed anywhere from 50,000 to several hundred thousand in the Rhineland.
Stating your own beliefs is fine, and welcome. Asserting that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong, which the above-quoted bit is perilously close to doing, is dangerous… that kind of thing is a prime source of religious intolerance. And if there’s one thing I won’t tolerate, it’s intolerance. 😉
[…] I’d not argue as much with theistic definitions of course, simply because I think mine is the source of right in that area […]
You forgot the rest of what I wrote:
[…] but I’d fight for someone to have the right to disagree with my point of view, to paraphrase Voltaire.[…]
I’m not intolerant, I’m just arrogant. 😉 Seriously, I don’t see what’s wrong with thinking something is right. Obviously some things are correct, and some things aren’t. As Goedel proved, there’s always unprovable axioms in any non-trivial system of logic, and I agree that I can’t prove everything about my religion – but I think I have a right to think it’s true. I think the idea that we can’t tolerate people who believe something is true is in itself intolerence, as long as it’s not a threat to others, I seriously don’t think the ideas are “dangerous”. Ideas don’t kill people, people kill people. (Well, after VA Tech that line’s a bit tasteless, but nobody who knows me ever accused me of letting that be a consideration. 😉 )
Study other religions, both around the world and throughout recorded history. See how many of them there are, and how they disagree in millions of ways, large and small. Saying that one of them is right for you is perfectly valid; saying that one of them is right, and all the others wrong, is patent nonsense, because if it’s true then God must be a sadist: “here are three hundred different religions, all of which claim that I give them my complete and exclusive support. You only get to pick one. I’m not giving you any help. Oh, and if you pick the wrong one, I’ll punish you for eternity.”
If God is not a sadist, then all religions are wrong because they disagree in so many different ways, or all of them are right for the people who follow them. If He is a sadist… well, then it doesn’t much matter.
| Saying that one of them is right for you is perfectly valid;
A more accurate characterisation of my belief is that one of them is right for Jews.
| saying that one of them is | right, and all the others wrong, is patent nonsense, because if it’s true then God | must be a sadist: “here are three hundred different religions, all of which claim | that I give them my complete and exclusive support. You only get to pick one. I’m | not giving you any help. Oh, and if you pick the wrong one, I’ll punish you for | eternity.â€
Um, Judaism believes that the righteous of the gentiles have a share in the World to Come. You’re confusing it with fundamentalist xtianity.
| If God is not a sadist, then all religions are wrong because they disagree in so | many different ways, or all of them are right for the people who follow them. If He | is a sadist… well, then it doesn’t much matter.
Or
c) your critique of Paschal’s wager only holds true if the religion has afterlife beliefs like the ones you mention, either that or if you don’t like pointers or gotos. 😉
Not quite how I’d understood your assertion, but I’m glad to hear it.
Okay, I’ll revise that to “Oh, and if you pick the wrong one, I may punish you for eternity.†😉
Well, punishing for eternity is another thing – Judaism doesn’t teach that except for a miniscule portion who deserve it. Punishment is meted out in a temporal purgatory for what you did wrong, and eternal reward for what you did right. As for the “may”, it’s more rigorously definied than that – non-Jews have to obey the 7 mitzvos (actually, catagories of mitzvos) of Bnai Noach. I’m getting kind of tired of talking about this, especially considering how I seem to have to rehash it (on other fora) every time the subject has come up. (i.e. being accused of harboring the beliefs of various fundamentalist varieties of non-Jewish religions.)