Does Evil Exist?
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| FOX NEWS: a vehicle for evil (or good!) to flourish (other media corps bother me too) |
I'LL START BY STATING that I don't believe things have inherent goodness or inherent evilness. From the point of view of a physicist, all things are just different organizations of the same basic stuff. The description of that stuff is a human invention and it resides in the human mind.
That isn't to say that everything is all the same. Quite the opposite, we get different arrangements of stuff and those different arrangements lend themselves to differentiation and description. Those individual arrangements (things) then interact with other things. They can ether interact harmoniously or competitively. To operate harmoniously means that no part exploits the other and each part is allowed to operate smoothly, according to its needs. To better understand it, think of the body. For the body to be health, it has to be in harmony. If one part breaks down and start using too much of some resource, another part breaks down and can't perform its function.
Good and evil aren't properties of people or even decisions or events. They're properties of intentions. (So a storm, for example, can't be evil.) The intention to to make things operate harmoniously is noble or good. When you care about society and your effect on others around you and wish for other people to live with dignity and peace, you are harboring good intentions. When you want to take what others have, when you scheme to make others suffer, and when you use beyond your needs to the detriment of others, you are harboring and acting upon evil intentions. You can measure intentions by the degree to which a person's heart is open, in other words, the degree to which they feel whole and able to wish others well.
The great warlords of yesterday and today who sought to dominate their neighbors were dominated themselves by evil intentions, though they were not themselves evil. They tried to steal the power, property and dignity from others and use it themselves. They lied, manipulated, used hateful rhetoric, violence, fomented paranoia, and so on. But still, they were fundamentally pure.
What do you think, dear readers? How do you get rid of evil?