[Keeper of Dol Guldur]

"First of all, a correction.
By the end, I said that only
definitions 3, 6, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, and 14 were valid
judges of the kind of "good
vs. evil""

A confession, Iarwain, I saw your conclusion... and I ignored it. Cast it aside like an old shoe. I know I shouldn't have, but I really really wanted to take some of the original definitons of 'good' and to play with them to fit my needs. And it amused me to no end that I was able too, although technically I was wrong, since it had already been discerned that not all definitions are 'good' ones.

"I was hoping someone would
take advantage of this
potential arguement, now here
is my chance. Never mind,
I'll spare Legolas and leave it."

Come, come now, Iarwain... I'd love nothing more than to hear how Legolas and moral excellence fit logically into the same sentence. Your views are quite welcome to me.

"But that *is* the definition
of "bad," "

Yes, 'Vana, and bad is a definition of evil. But how can 'corrupt' be 'bad' be 'evil' if it is simply a bit of straying? It is like saying that an outside influence or a simple mistake can turn someone evil, but 'evil' in and of itself is purely wrongness, and although a mistake is doing something wrong, it does not make the person who made it 'evil'. At least not in my viewpoint, but then... never mind. Let us not get into my own opinion on the word 'evil'.

Actually, let's. Let us say, for instance, that corruption is bad is evil. Which means that straying is bad is evil. Which, in turn, means that a mistake is bad is evil. Let's say that a man makes a mistake and strays from "The Path"... he repents and is forgiven, living out his life back on "path". He is no longer corrupt/bad/evil. Correct? Yes. However the next man, let us call him Bob. Bob makes a mistake. Bob is a stubborn egotist and does not repent. He simply will not admit that he is 'wrong', so rather than repention, forgiveness, and living the 'right' way, Bob's life continues from his mistake.

Say Bob's mistake was that he heard a rumor and although he could have stopped it from ever continuing, Bob passed it on. This rumor upset many people and caused a lot of fighting. People died because of this rumor. People suffered because of this rumor. Bob however, doesn't know all of the trouble that his rumor caused, and even if he did, he wouldn't admit that he made a mistake. Because Bob was the cause of a very large amount of 'pain and calamity', does that make Bob 'evil'? Or does that make Bob stupid? Does it mean that 'evil' is the response of the stimulus 'stubborness'? Or does it mean that evil is simply a fleeting characteristic that can never be pinned down to any one thing because at any time, that one thing could repent and would no longer be evil... It seems to me that whether you know if you're 'evil' or not, your conscious decisions determine your nature...

Oh crap. My argument just stopped being opposition... I seem to have agreed that your choices reflect who you are. Yeesh. Well, at least let me throw in this: it seems that although corruption can be evil, there is a cure to evil: true repention. Which means if you aren't stubborn and know when you are wrong, you can't be evil. Wait a minute! A new arguement!!!!!!!!!! Is evil caused by stubborness or ignorance? And if ignorance, than nobody could truly be evil, because they don't know that their actions are wrong! Yippee...

Excellent. I made myself happy and *eep* thought very hard about this thread, even throughout school. I am really beginning to like it!

Fea