I will use the last week of Lent to ask the questions that I am still struggling to make sense of, where I haven't yet found an answer that satisfies my intuition. Let me start then with the question of what is evil and why does a good God permit evil.
Comparing evil to chaos, disorder, things running down – entropy – the second law of thermodynamics, I ask whether evil can be seen as a natural rather than a supernatural phenomenon. We can equate good with ethical behaviour, health, growth, development. Building not destroying. Polar opposites. We know what good looks like. We know what evil looks like too. But do we?
In anger, for example, a manifestation of evil? Did Jesus show a flash of anger as he drove the moneychangers out of the temple? How many of our own human failings can be reasonably described as evil, or attributed to metaphysical evil forces?
And then there's the problem of how to deal with evil. In the physical, material world, evil needs to be stopped, for our common good. The prisoner's dilemma empirically proves that. Giving way to evil only emboldens it. Psychopathic killers, who intend to turn human life into non-life to further their material goals, need to be terminated with extreme prejudice.
That is the role of the state, to protect us from material manifestations of evil, internal and external threats. But in the metaphysical world? Can one pray for evil to stop? Or is our suffering necessary? The existence of evil as the price we pay for being alive and conscious?
Or maybe evil will, slowly but surely, be squeezed out of the cosmos by spiritual evolution. We no longer torture people or animals to death as a spectator sport; ethically, humans are steadily becoming less barbaric.
This is easier to understand if we reject the notion of God as being perfect with that of God as being a work in progress, unfolding along with the Cosmos. As I wrote in December, we can take the spiritual journey from Zero to One as encompassing everything in the Universe, including its Cosmic Purpose, including Big-C Consciousness, and accept a Divinity that's neither omniscient nor omnipotent nor omnipresent, but tending that way, with an Omega Point as the final destination; all in God, God in all.
But before we get there, is evil something we just have to put up with?
Or can you ward off evil (at least at the personal level) with the power of will? Not wishing evil upon yourself can keep it at bay?
Perhaps the individual can train their will to do that magic, to bring good fortune upon themselves – but can collectives, groups of people – nations even – bring down a metaphysical dome around themselves to ward off evil?
[An interesting notion regarding evolution is that our animal kingdom only evolved the way that it did was because we did so in parallel with viruses. What didn't kill us made us stronger. This theory suggests that life forms which don't coexist with viruses evolve far more slowly. Perhaps an answer to the Fermi Paradox is that complex life never got to evolve on planets where viruses didn't appear.]
Lent 2024, Day 40
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Lent 2021: Day 40
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Lent 2020: Day 40
Coercion, Persuasion, Conversion and Faith
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