Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri May 26, 2023 9:50 pmNot really an important concession. It doesn't solve the problem. What one would need is something to make the concept "evil" plausible, rational and defensible in THIS universe, not in mere speculation. For if we cannot do that, then we cannot argue that we are owed any "evil-free" or "evil-reduced" kind of existence, or that it's in any sense "wrong" that what we call "evil" happens in this universe.
Like many moderns, I'd guess, I suppose I have become inured to what you are referring to as *evil*.
The New Testament concept is, unless I have somehow got it wrong, that this Earth, and I think they mean our social and cultural world primarily, is 'the Devil's domain'. Lucifer has been set loose here and in concert with all his lieutenants, influences people to get involved with projects that lead them into psychological and spiritual mire. Whether one is devoutly Christian and committed to specific Christian metaphysical categories, or whether (as I think is the case with me) one sees things in less specific ways and more generally, nevertheless I think most of us look at our world through a paradigm established by Christianity.
Myself, I have more or less come to accept that *this is the way things are here*. Harry and I have talked at some length on this theme and, in contrast to him, I accept what he would call *evil* almost as a matter of course. To refer again to Vedic thought, and to repeat what I have already mentioned on other occasions, the Vedic seers refer to "the rule of the fishes" which corresponds to "the law of the jungle". It is a perspective gained through clear-headed observation. The natural world is a "dog eat dog"
reality. It is that way now and it will always remain so.
Man is obviously a part of that world. But man establishes social and cultural systems to mitigate open and overt evil. In the Vedic concept, the Empire requires maintenance. The frontiers must be protected and, from time to time, expanded. Military power (the power to kill, to displace, etc.) requires obvious 'evils' (bad actions resulting in harm done to others). But those who create the cultural and civilizational structures allow for the creation of an *inner world* of cultivation, trade, social life, and religious life. You cannot have one without the other. Those who engage in evil actions (harm, conquest, expansion onto other people's lands, etc.) incur the guilt of 'sin'. But this sin is, shall we say, understandable. It is necessary for the greater good. So in that system a priesthood knows how to wash those incurred sins away. How to liberate those who engage in it from their guilt. They see themselves as doing this before the gods.
In my own case, and in respect to our present, I have the sense of an increase in the intensity of power-struggles. And the rise of technologies that, in the hands of 'bad actors', will be (are being) used for purposes I would say are *genuinely bad*. But would I go so far as to use the word 'evil'? I very well might. But these things would have to be talked through slowly and thoroughly.
And we still can't even show that "evil" is a coherent concept, since it only refers to an imagining, not to any feature of reality that we have been able to associate it with.
I did not say that I understand *evil* to be imagined. I said that other, different, ideal *worlds* can be and are imagined. The Christian 'heaven' is an example.
(And if there are 'many mansions' in the heaven Jesus Christ referred to, this could correspond to my 'any number of different worlds' (or lokas) each with differing rules, and each with a different density level.)