The problem of evil
Anton Vredegoor
http://www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/HERESY5.TXT
<quote>
" This problem is generally known as "The problem of evil."
How can we call man's destiny glorious and heaven his goal and his
Creator all good as well as all powerful when we find ourselves subject
to suffering and to death?
Nearly all young and innocent people are but slightly aware of this
problem. How much aware of it they may be depends upon what fortunes
they have, how early they may have been brought into the presence of
loss by death or how early they may have suffered great physical or
even mental pain. But sooner or later every human being who thinks at
all, everyone not an idiot, is faced by this <Problem of Evil>; and as
we watch the human race trying to think out for itself the meaning of
the universe, or accepting Revelation thereon, or following warped and
false partial religions and philosophies, we find it always at heart
concerned with that insistent question:
"<Why should we suffer? Why should we die>?"
Various ways out of the torturing enigma have been proposed.
The simplest and basest is not to face it at all; to turn one's eyes
away from suffering and death; to pretend they are not there, or, when
they are thrust upon us so insistently that we cannot keep up the
pretence, why then to hide our feelings. And it is part also of this
worst method of dealing with the problem to boycott mention of evil and
suffering and try to forget them as much as one can.
Another way less base, but equally contemptible intellectually, is to
say there is no problem because we are all part of a meaningless dead
thing with no creative God behind it: to say there is no reality in
right and wrong and in the conception of beatitude or of misery.
Another nobler way, which was the favourite way of the high pagan
civilization from which we sprang_the way of the great Romans and the
great Greeks_is the way of Stoicism. This might vulgarly be termed "The
philosophy of grin-and-bear-it." It has been called by some academic
person or other "The permanent religion of humanity," but it is indeed
nothing of the sort; for it is not a religion at all. It has at least
the nobility of facing facts, but it proposes no solution. It is
utterly negative.
Another way is the profound but despairing way of Asia_of which the
greatest example is Buddhism: the philosophy which calls the individual
an illusion, bids us get rid of the desire for immortality and
look forward to being merged in the impersonal life of the universe.
What the Catholic solution is we all know. Not that the Catholic Church
has proposed a complete solution of the mystery of evil, for it has
never been either the claim or the function of the Church to explain
the whole nature of all things, but rather to save souls. But the
Catholic Church has on this particular problem a very definite answer
within the field of her own action. She says <first> that man's nature
is immortal, and made for beatitude; <next> that mortality and pain are
the result of his Fall, that is, of his rebellion against the will of
God. She says that since the fall our mortal life is an ordeal or test,
according to our behavior, in which we regain (but through the merits
of our Saviour) that immortal beatitude which we had lost.
Now the Manichean was so overwhelmed by the experience or prospect of
suffering and by the appalling fact that his nature was subject to
mortality, that he took refuge in denying the omnipotent goodness of a
Creator. He said that evil was at work in the universe just as much as
good; the two principles were always fighting as equals one against the
other. Man was subject to the one just as much as to the other. If he
could struggle at all he should struggle to join the good principle and
avoid the power of the bad principle, but he must treat evil as an
all-powerful thing. The Manichean recognized an evil god as well as a
good god, and he attuned his mind to that appalling conception.
</quote>
I wonder where postmodernism stands in this classification. Is it a
category in itself? A cherrypicked construction from all of this that
changes with the day? Is it taking the role of an impartial observer
that doesn't concern itself with the content but tries to deconstruct
the motives of the persons believing in these theories? Is it just
looking for metanarratives? Does pomo itself have a metanarrative?
Anton
G*rd*n
> from:
>
> http://www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/HERESY5.TXT
>
> <quote>
>
> " This problem is generally known as "The problem of evil."
>
> How can we call man's destiny glorious and heaven his goal and his
> Creator all good as well as all powerful when we find ourselves subject
> to suffering and to death?
>
> Nearly all young and innocent people are but slightly aware of this
> problem.
"Come on, God, answer me. For years I'm asking why, why are the
innocent dead and the guilty alive? Where is justice? Where
is punishment? Or have you already answered, have you already
said to the world: Here is justice, here is punishment, here,
in me." -- Spoken word intro to Biohazard's popular song
"Punishment", derived from movie _The_Punisher_ (1989), and
quoted widely in gamer and punk/hardcore music forums, i.e.
among young people.
> ...
Anton Vredegoor
G*rd*n wrote:
> "Come on, God, answer me. For years I'm asking why, why are the
> innocent dead and the guilty alive? Where is justice? Where
> is punishment? Or have you already answered, have you already
> said to the world: Here is justice, here is punishment, here,
> in me." -- Spoken word intro to Biohazard's popular song
> "Punishment", derived from movie _The_Punisher_ (1989), and
> quoted widely in gamer and punk/hardcore music forums, i.e.
> among young people.
Maybe it's because sufficiently advanced ethics is indistinguishable
from evil?
Anton
G*rd*n
> > "Come on, God, answer me. For years I'm asking why, why are the
> > innocent dead and the guilty alive? Where is justice? Where
> > is punishment? Or have you already answered, have you already
> > said to the world: Here is justice, here is punishment, here,
> > in me." -- Spoken word intro to Biohazard's popular song
> > "Punishment", derived from movie _The_Punisher_ (1989), and
> > quoted widely in gamer and punk/hardcore music forums, i.e.
> > among young people.
"Anton Vredegoor" <anton.v...@gmail.com>:
> Maybe it's because sufficiently advanced ethics is indistinguishable
> from evil?
I think that would depend on in which direction they had
been advanced.
tada...@yahoo.com
The is a slander against Stoicism.
Classical Stoicism had a theology, a belief that the universe was
directed by
God's plan which we must accept as good.
Epictetus argued the position based on reason and view of human
psychology. The
goal of life is eudamonia (contentment/enduring happiness). We cannot
be happy
till we distinguish between what we have control of and what we do not
have
control of. Then we focus on what we can control. The rest we accept
as
if we willed it ourselves.
Anton Vredegoor
> The is a slander against Stoicism.
>
> Classical Stoicism had a theology, a belief that the universe was
> directed by
> God's plan which we must accept as good.
>
> Epictetus argued the position based on reason and view of human
> psychology. The
> goal of life is eudamonia (contentment/enduring happiness). We cannot
> be happy
> till we distinguish between what we have control of and what we do not
> have
> control of. Then we focus on what we can control. The rest we accept
> as
> if we willed it ourselves.
Yes, thanks for clearing that up. There was much more to Stoicism than
"grin and bear". I think the whole text (of which I quoted only a part)
is extremely biased and when I read it I already felt something
twitching in the back of my mind when I read the Stoicism description.
However, I was using the text as a part of an old machine that was
tuned to some description of evil in order to get the discussion going.
(Imagine a VCR which is defect because it 'eats' it tapes, but can
still be used as a tuner, and which maybe has some channels still
programmed in or has a functioning scanner. Combine it with an even
older 16 channnel Grundig TV set, and by using a scart cable one can
still watch television with it, maybe with some warped channels.)
Later on -in the part of the text I didn't quote- there is a
justification for killing off a whole group of people with an only
slightly different belief system: the manicheans. I wonder if the
stories about manicheans pining for global suicide were real or
imagined, like it's always the truth of the victorious side that gets
passed down to us through history. These manicheans fascinate me a bit
because they were very succesful, but not so well organized. Something
like the taliban? Or like microsoft versus open source code?
What's more important is that I often read criticisms of postmodernism
which concentrate on it being immoral or on it's adhering to moral
relativism. Somehow science *prides* itself with being 'objective' and
it seems to get away with that quite easily, ar least until recently.
So why not postmodernism?
I've seen it being described as something like 'the fundamentalism of
the left' (well I'm making that up, really, but something like this
seems to be what's implied) and being thrown in the same category as
the despised super string theory of science, being a partner in crime
with the "War Against Rationality":
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2005/11/ideas-for-rescuing-modernity-part-1.html
(scroll waaay down)
So it gets attacked by religious entities for not being moral and by
scientific entities for not being scientific. What then, is it? Is it
at all possible to place it in this spectrum? And what is it's
connection with art?
Anton
JusUK
"Anton Vredegoor" <anton.v...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1134063620....@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Postmodernists do seem to be good at coming up with plausible sounding but
incomprehensible gobbledeegook which is very post-modern if you ask me. It
seems that some people only need to read a few hundred pages of this to be
able to generate it themselves. Anything worth reading can be written
clearly (with a few exceptions admittedly).
tada...@yahoo.com
tada...@yahoo.com
That's a pretty sweeping statement.
It is true that various system seem to condone evil. One solution to
the problem of evil is to maintain that evil is, for some mysterious
reason, actually good in the sense that it is part of God's plan.
Similarly, the Stoics maintain that we must happily accept all that we
cannot control if we are to be happy. One might say that, for the
Stoic, it is only one's own freely chosen actions and attitudes that
are good or evil, all else is indifferent.
The similiarity between these two approaches is probably not a
coincidence.
Paul was most likely trained in Stoicism before he converted to
Christianity.
Stoic ideas were probably injected into Christianity as it moved into
the Greek/
Roman world.
tada...@yahoo.com
Here is a couple of possible answers to your questions:
http://www.pragmatism.org/streams/v4n2/evil.pdf
http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/hypatia/v018/18.2schott01.html
James Whitehead
"JusUK" <ju...@travel-diarySPAMOFF.de> wrote in message
news:dn9sc9$jm2$1...@gemini.csx.cam.ac.uk...
clear -
tada...@yahoo.com
James Whitehead wrote:
> but it doesn't follow that the
Think before you type "the", or swear off this practice.
>aim of writing should be to make things
> clear -
"The aim of writing"? Is that something like "the meaning of life".
And I away thought that writing was like crapping. A solitary act,
where each
has his own aims.
I would agree that one's aim in writing is not always to make things
clear. Like
when diplomats feel they cannot remain silent on their government's
torture
policies. Writing to fill a void. Writing to prevent clarity.
Writing when refraining
from writing would make things clear.
Anton Vredegoor
JusUK wrote:
> Postmodernists do seem to be good at coming up with plausible sounding but
> incomprehensible gobbledeegook which is very post-modern if you ask me. It
> seems that some people only need to read a few hundred pages of this to be
> able to generate it themselves. Anything worth reading can be written
> clearly (with a few exceptions admittedly).
At first I read this as 'can be written concise' but still I think I'm
detecting something like the old academic adagium of 'not publishing
something until one can prove it' in it, which is often coupled with
leaving out the mistakes one made along the way as well as the failed
approaches.
Maybe I'm attacking a strawman here, but just in case this was behind
your post, I think it's one of the great mistakes in for example
Gauss's or Riemann's way of publishing results.
It surely makes an academic career more impressive to only show the
polished diamonds and not the difficult acquisition and production
process that was involved. However, it makes it also harder for someone
else to follow in the footsteps. The possibility that a lot of other
eyeballs focussing on your progress could find an error in your
attempts and correct it, or provide fresh input before you give up and
try a completely different approach should also motivate one to publish
early.
I am not saying there is no advantage in clarity, and I think it should
be used when available, but I'm trying to express something like
'premature optimization is the root of evil' (Knuth, IIRC). Out of
Riemans 'nachlass' (a lot of unorganized scribbled notes which he never
published and which noone had access to for a long time) new methods
for computing the zeta function were distilled some decades later when
they became available. It's highly likely that Gauss knew more than he
published. It was just this stupid academic culture that kept us from
having scientific breaktroughs decades earlier.
Anton
'not to mention open source code'
G*rd*n
> ... It was just this stupid academic culture that kept us from
> having scientific breaktroughs decades earlier.
It is the political economy of personal repute. But if you
get rid of it you have to figure out what to replace it with.
W.N.(Bill) McCaw
> Anton Vredegoor wrote:
>
>
snip, snip the good quotes
>>
>>I wonder where postmodernism stands in this classification. Is it a
>>category in itself? A cherrypicked construction from all of this that
>>changes with the day? Is it taking the role of an impartial observer
>>that doesn't concern itself with the content but tries to deconstruct
>>the motives of the persons believing in these theories? Is it just
>>looking for metanarratives? Does pomo itself have a metanarrative?
>>
>>Anton
>
>
Orthodox Christianity posits a God who is all powerful, all knowing, and
eternal, and who can and does enter the unfolding of the day to day
happenings of Earth.
To me, the problem of evil can best be answered by positing that the
Creator does not tamper with the unfolding of events on Earth, but first
gave the law to the Jews as the elect to be a blessing to all.
They failed in the task so plan "B" was the Christ event offering
mankind grace through the man Jesus, with mankind's job to follow his
way and create the Kingdom by being the agents of reconciliation to the
world.
God's job was not to protect us from bad things, but to create leaders
that could teach us to be a channel for God's purpose.
Just my take on the subject. Brian McLaren's book "A Generous
Orthodoxy", and Neale Donald Walsch's series "Conversations with God"
and others are thought provoking.
Cheers! W.N.(Bill) McCaw
Anton Vredegoor
> Anton Vredegoor wrote:
> > Maybe it's because sufficiently advanced ethics is indistinguishable
> > from evil?
>
> That's a pretty sweeping statement.
It was an adaptation of this Arthur C Clarke quote:
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/776.html
> It is true that various system seem to condone evil. One solution to
> the problem of evil is to maintain that evil is, for some mysterious
> reason, actually good in the sense that it is part of God's plan.
Maybe so, but the quote was about it not being distinguishable from
evil. For example we can have a highly efficient compression performed
on a data file and the result can look like random data, because we
don't know the algorithm.
> Similarly, the Stoics maintain that we must happily accept all that we
> cannot control if we are to be happy. One might say that, for the
> Stoic, it is only one's own freely chosen actions and attitudes that
> are good or evil, all else is indifferent.
Suppose we have a world dominated by dinosaurs or a grass field with an
established ecosystem. If a new species wants to settle itself into a
system, at first it has to stay undetected in order for it to grow. So
we need perhaps darkness and stealth to create a breeding ground for
new things to develop. We don't know anything about these new things
because if we did, they would be to weak to compete with the establihed
order and would disappear. The new things can be good or bad, only by
their results when they come to power we will know them. This could
possibly be the dillemma for a good that has to evolve because it lives
in a changing environment.
> The similiarity between these two approaches is probably not a
> coincidence.
> Paul was most likely trained in Stoicism before he converted to
> Christianity.
> Stoic ideas were probably injected into Christianity as it moved into
> the Greek/
> Roman world.
There is a difference between condoning evil and accepting its
necessity, with respect to having knowledge about what's going on, or
not having knowledge about it, (if my linguistic powers are sufficient
to distinguish this)
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/english/data/d0081803.html
Anton
"I'm not condoning anything, just speculating"