Redefining Good & Evil

[Nogrod]

You Form surely know that christianity became a world-power with a few Roman caesars who just forced it to the people (closing all scientific academies and philosophical schools as heretical and thus turning the time backwards for a thousand years) and with it's two millenias of tradition all these different views have been considered. And that was not to the credit of the "going-to-be" mainstream christianity, as fex. the question of theodikea remains, thanks to the decision of one synod in the first centuries of our common era, into which fex. manicheanism has much more believable answers...

Looking back at Babylonian or Scandinavian myths one sees a host of open possibilities. Or looking at the Asian religions / philosophies, one gets a totally different answer where there is no winning or losing at all.

So we're dealing with western philosophy here; the philosophy of the winners of history who can write their own truths as universal ones? Even if there's tension between the orthodox-catholicism and say Lutheran doctrine on the matters... (not to talk of the African churches or the fundamentalist "new-borns" in America).

But how should we settle this kind of argument? People X say "There is evil in itself!" and others say "No, it's just the lack of good", and the third party says "It's just the balance between the forces" while the side Y says "It's just perspectives"...


But what strikes me in this comparison is the role of democracy as a backbone of European (North-American) thinking. And that bygone argument of Adam Smith about the invisible hand which will just settle all things for the common good. (He might have been right in a small industry perspective, in a small marketing area with knowledgeable consumers and no "branding", but... )

Now why should there be a logic of the universe which guides the goodies? Why the evil would be disarrayed and the good ones united? Wasn't it Martin Luther King's famous speech which approached us normal people saying that the evil is not what some evil people do but the fault of us good ones not doing anything about it? So making just the contrary point: we good are disarrayed and that's the problem.

And this sure raises the question of understanding the bad vs. punishing them...

And should we actually do something about bad things ourselves to make the world better? And how to do it?