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There are truly no such things as good and evil. If you land on a planet where all things good on earth are evil there, and all things evil on earth were considers good then, which planet is right and which is wrong?
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Evil is a concept that is not always useful. There are psychopaths who are mass murderers. Should we be sympathetic because they may have a brain disorder? I don't know. People come together after a natural or man-made disaster, but I still think it would be better if thousands or millions had not been killed in a tsunami, the world trade center, or by Hitler and murderous dictators in recent times.I can not not see that anything good that may have happened as a result balances the suffering. Is this a Zen saying?
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Balance is the key. I enjoy the concept that darkness is simply the absence of light and that hate is simply the absence of love as it makes finding balance easier..
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It is a balance.....without Evil there is no Good, and vice versa. Despite not believing in a higher power, I do believe in the concept of balance.
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I don't think anything can ever be so black and white like that. Everything has good and bad in it.
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Is there evil in acts of lovingkindness and good is acts of hatred? I don't think that any one person is either way, but I cannot help but think that the same can be said for one's actions. There was nothing but good when Miep Gies tried to give herself up for Anne Frank & Co. There was nothing but evil when 11-17 billion people were killed during the Holocaust, not to mention the lives given by the soldiers from the allies. There are often shades of gray, but there can be absolutes as well.
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good and evil simply are. just as up/down, in/out, black/white. neither exists without the other. a fact of our current reality. just like the yin/yang symbol there is always a speck of evil in all that is good and a speck of good in all that is evil.
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God is absolute good and Satan and his minions are absolute evil. Everyday we are walking towards one or the other. The good news is Satan's time is short because Christ is coming back to put an end to Satan's control of people's minds.
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Everything is mere appearance and how we impute appearances. Just as cold and hot are the same thing, where cold is merely different levels of diminished heat, our view of good and evil is the same, so good is merely a reduction of evil. There is however an absolute 0 that exists in nature that is completely devoid of any heat, so too there is absolute goodness devoid of any evil. This is beyond our normal view of good and evil, just as100 degrees below zero is beyond our normal view of heat.
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I believe in good and evil, but I can’t except that one could theoretically exist without the other. Almost everything in the Universe has a polar opposite, and I don’t think the spiritual plain, is any different. I try to picture our world, if all ill’s were vanquished, or if all turned to evil. I ask myself what would happen, and all I see is a scenario, in where we eat the world into oblivion, or we blast the world into oblivion, in where balanced would be forced back onto the world. There has to be balance, in order for their to be harmony. For this reason I cannot picture a heaven, or a hell scenario. Without misery, you would not know happiness, and without happiness, you wouldn’t know misery…Without darkness there is no light, and without light there is no darkness. Wallow in heaven for a few millennia, how is it that you wouldn’t get bored? Suffer in Hell, wouldn’t you eventually come to acclimate to the suffering, and view it as reality. I have known people in some of the worlds worst, third world sh*t holes, who didn’t see their situations as miserable but normal. This was crazy for me to think, when the air I was breathing was toxic, and trash and sewage were everywhere. Bullet holes and shrapnel ripped apart every structure, and everyone alive, had lost someone to war, famine, and or sickness.
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I think evil can be described as something that goes against most or all of our strongest beliefs. Therefore it can be different for everyone... though most of the world can generally agree on certain things being evil - genocide, infanticide, patri/matricide etc. For example the majority of the world believe(d) the acts of the n***s were evil... yet the n***s didn't believe what they were doing was evil (or at least not all of them did) (I don't think they would have done what they did if they truly all thought what they were doing was evil, but that's just my opinion).
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I think evil can be described as something that goes against most or all of our strongest beliefs. Therefore it can be different for everyone... though most of the world can generally agree on certain things being evil - genocide, infanticide, patri/matricide etc. For example the majority of the world believe(d) the acts of the n***s were evil... yet the n***s didn't believe what they were doing was evil (or at least not all of them did) (I don't think they would have done what they did if they truly all thought what they were doing was evil, but that's just my opinion).
At the same time good can be something that either doesn't go against the majority of our beliefs or follows the majority of our beliefs. Not murdering someone who is hurt is a good thing but actively helping them get better is also a good thing.
I'm not familiar with Miyazaki but this particular quote seems to follow an idea I learned from either the Tao of Pooh or the Te of Piglet which said that we cannot know, at the time something happens to us, if that something is good or bad. Only time and hindsight can determine if anything will affect us negatively or positively. The world ticks along as it always has and always will, it's not actively trying to hurt us or nurture us, it just is. How we perceive the things that happen around and to us determines good or evil.
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>Is there such thing as absolute good and evil?
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>Is there such thing as absolute good and evil?
Not here! I quote (as ever) the Baha'i scriptures:
"Such an existence is a contingent and not an absolute existence, inasmuch as the former is preceded by a cause, whilst the latter is independent thereof. Absolute existence is strictly confined to God, exalted be His glory. Well is it with them that apprehend this truth."
--"Gleanings," LXXXI, p. 187
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No there is good and evil in everything. There must be, because one cannot exist without the other and nothing is perfect.
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I'm going to roll with Shakespeare on this one and say that nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. I don't believe in good and evil as absolutes, but rather as subjective values.
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