been a week.
heres an idea...
evil is necessary.
while people are always looking for ways to abolish evil and set up a world full of right, it really cant be done.
i dont say this because im an anarchist, or because im taking a shot at religion.
but because we legitamitly need evil.
say for instance, in an amazing coincidence and against all laws of probability, you wake up and have the ability to abolish evil next tuesday. so you snap your fingers, sing a sea shanty and "poof" evil is abolished across the land.
well, now what?
now you have no measure as to what is good. because evil and good are only existent if they have each other. its a matter of comparison. if you eliminate evil, then youve eliminated all levels of evil, and there are several ranging from genocide/torture type 7th level of hell evil, to the more mild white lie/wasnt me, slap on the wrist type evil. then all youve really done is made barely good the new evil. so suddenly we all need to lead pope-esque type lives in order to be good because anything less is considered evil.
see it is really hard to envision the absence of evil because all we have is the ability to compare and choose. so we compare lying to telling the truth, and sometimes lying isn't evil, ans sometimes it is.... ie. do i look fat? no - lie (but a good lie, so it isnt evil), yes - evil (because of the entire personal social relationships that we have to work so hard to keep ramifications of that statement, unless she has put on 100 pounds in the last week, in which case you have every right to say yes, and say it loudly and boldly).
so even though im rambling and going on quite a bit... what i mean to say is that there is no way to eliminate evil completely because we need that evil to be able to determine what is good.
or maybe its a matter of justification?
this is rather flimsy (i havent put too much thought into this aspect of it....) but it goes something like this...
assuming you were raised in a cave until the age of 15 (because then you have some sense of reason and whatnot, besides its the number of the channel on the tv.) and then you step outside for the first time and see the following... an eagle (or other large bird) snatching (and in the process effectively killing) a small furry bunny type animal. to you this is evil (assuming your recently-emerged-from-cave-person) because the bird thing killed the small furry bunny type thing. however, when you justify it by saying that the bird needed to eat that bunny thing in order to stay alive, then its not evil (some people even call it the beauty of nature... odd how killing animals is beautiful if done by other animals but wrong if it involves humans anywhere (that bear is mad it attacked a human..... ah, the beauty of nature, that bear just caught a salmon [untrue, it attacked the salmon just as it did the human])) so maybe if we can justify our actions correctly enough we can turn it from un-good to good.
just a thought.