[This is a recording, please stay on the line; do not hang up.] Thank you TheStumps, alyoshka, Xunzian, Bob, and Uccisore for participating in this chapter of the book discussion. All are invited to continue discussion of the chapter, but this reply concludes my participation in this chapter, as I must now turn my attention to the remaining chapters of the discussion. Thanks again.
– Bob
He was very sure of it, and the reason He said that was to make the person seriously consider who he was talking to.
If you believe that you know what goodness is, you immediately know what evil is. What do you do, if you notice that your goodness isn’t quite what you had hoped it was? Do you assume that the degree of evil in you has risen? What if these two forces are always there in varying intensity?
No. You can know good without ever knowing evil. If you don’t feel close to God, trust what He has revealed of Himself, just like if your wife was visiting her family without you, you would trust that your marriage still holds. Evil never comes into the question if you stay focused on God.
If what we call “evil” is inappropriate behaviour, brought on by the ego assuming that it has to assert itself because it feels it is threatened, it may be that the degree of “evil” in our lives has an equivalent in the degree of danger felt. The question then would be, “What is causing this insecurity, fear, phobic mayhem and such psychiatric disorders as we see in our society?”
Without a self, we cannot love. God created selves so that we can love. Often evil is committed in a state of comfort, of thinking we need nothing. The cure is to accept the hand He is holding out to you.
The love of others is closely connected with loving ourselves because we don’t love others because they are special, but because they resemble us. It isn’t that we like others, but we love them, because we can identify with them more than anything else in creation. It is good in the sense of being appropriate, but not good in being something that is praiseworthy.
Self and others are all made in the same image. Identifying with someone does not always motivate love—sometimes it motivates resentment… especially if they remind us of parts of ourselves that we hate. We don’t love because we want praise, love is its own reward.
Your questions are asking whether this or that is condemnable or praiseworthy, but it is a question instead of whether it is appropriate or not. In many cases it was not appropriate, but the same behaviour is in other circumstances strangely regarded appropriate.
Strange, indeed. Were the Jews loved, or was genocide evil (when would it ever be appropriate?)? Was the 17-year-old boy loved, or was his torture evil (when would it ever be appropriate?)? Are those sold as sex-slaves loved, or is that evil (when would it ever be appropriate?)? Why not, instead of inappropriate, just say “evil”?
Since the aim must be to promote appropriate behaviour, we would have to ask whether we are clear about what that is – and never accept the opposite. Can we do that?
Can you love God as He Is and let Him love through you? [Edit for clarification: Again, good and evil are not a duality, if your use of the word ‘opposite’ was a reference to that. There is much common ground between various civilizations as far as what is considered acceptable behavior, but do you share that common ground, and do you see that the ‘aim’ is God’s love–not mere ‘moral improvement’?]
[This is a recording, please stay on the line; do not hang up.] Thank you TheStumps, alyoshka, Xunzian, Bob, and Uccisore for participating in this chapter of the book discussion. All are invited to continue discussion of the chapter, but this reply concludes my participation in this chapter, as I must now turn my attention to the remaining chapters of the discussion. Thanks again.
Bob, I am interested in your answers to my questions, but it would be easier for me if you paste them into an active, relevant thread, and provide a link to that thread in a reply to this one.