GOOD V EVIL: WE SAY GOOD IS DOMINANT BUT THERE IS A CASE FOR DOUBTING THAT

The basic drive behind religion is the wish to believe that evil is not dominant and God is good and has the final say in all things. It's thinking along the lines that if evil is dominant now, it won't be dominant in time. In fact the good will prevail. Without this religion just becomes a tradition and is no longer religion. It's just opinion or a social practice. It's not really useful.

Good is relative in this sense. If incurable disorders afflict the human race then it might be good to be arthritic and able to walk only for a mile in a day compared to the alternative. When people think of good they exaggerate it in their heads and fill them with unrealistic visions of a perfect paradise. It is unrealistic for you need to be able to visit a paradise to know what it is.

If good is good then what matters is that it happens not that it will rise to the top of the mess. It is putting what it might do above what it is. You want to be on the winning side instead of valuing good for itself. The other side of this is that it is saying evil as evil does not matter as long as it will change into something that is neutral or good later. This whatever it is, is not a moral stance.

If good is good then attaching much importance to its triumph is evil. This is hard to understand so we need to be careful. We are saying that there is a difference between the wood and the trees. There is a difference between the wire making up the bird cage and the cage. We end up like those who think it is okay to steal from your family today for you will be honest next year.

What if evil will hold its own so that it and good will have to just accept it is like half and half? Do they have to co-exist? If yes then that eliminates the value of religious faith and religion. If God is the creator of all and is totally good, that is hardly comforting if he gives us free will meaning that most of the creation might hate him forever and revel in evil and violence.

We have learned so far that belief in God does not necessarily imply faith that good is in any relevant way going to be permanently pleasing or worthwhile. When people say we should look forward to ultimate good they mean permanent good but the two are not the same thing. Good is measured by being good not by being final.

Religion glosses over this. By God they broadly mean that which causes evil to combust or lose. The implication is that those who do not affirm God as true strongly are in fact harmful defeatists. Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga says that evil is terrible and vile but reminds us that it is a not just a foe but a defeated foe. This denies that evil defeats itself. God had to do something to it from outside to defeat it. This blames those who are not choosing to work with God of being emissaries of evil. Those who refuse to work are virtually demonically evil.

If evil is as religion says only a parasite that needs to attach itself to good to do harm then needing God denies this. It should not last anyway. Religion does not really know what it means by evil and keeps contradicting itself.

Anyway religion/religious faith is at its core, about evil not being dominant. God is only an expression of that idea and a prop for it. They could think that good will get the better of evil perhaps in a long time but that is not enough. They come up with a God who is about being good and has the power to dismantle evil. They fear that good being good is not enough. You need something with the intelligence to combat evil. They don't want good to conquer evil the way the sea conquers land. They want it to know what it is doing.

Religion needs this idea of evil being something that will, thanks to God, fix itself, whether it likes it or not, to give it hope. It also needs it to ground morality for what is the point of trying if evil is going to get stronger or if challenging it only drives it underground?

Religion says that evil is not a power or a being but the lack of a good that should be there but is not, so there is no need to ponder how an anti-evil God can create evil. Its answer is that he doesn't. But this says evil cannot last anyway. So why does it need a God to make it dismantle? If evil has to fade away then faith in God hardly matters much.

Religion has no sensible or persuasive definition of what it means by evil. Evil rouses hate, pain and fear. But so does cough medicine. It does not tell us what evil is. Religion cannot really help with evil when it does not know what the foe is. And it does not really want to know. Thus it is part of the problem. If evil can be understood and defined then religion is evil.

The urge to feel that the holocaust or some event akin to something happening in a slasher horror is objectively wrong and extremely objectively wrong means that your morality is forced and therefore vague. How? You want evil to be like cheese not holes in the cheese. This bias is dangerous because again you need to be the therapist and keep your biases out of it otherwise you will do more harm than good. But the bias is there. That is why even if objective evil makes sense, it does not follow that anybody endorses it because it makes sense. They are compelled. Get that? Pride is a sin and an evil we are told but it is undeniable that those who speak for objective evil being a concern and a foe are pretending to see instead of being puppets of bias. They are claiming to be wise and superior to human nature. So religion has you fighting the evil of pride with pride! It is absurd.

If God creates from nothing and evil is a real thing then it is like him, something that was always there, and has the power to create. If evil is real then it has the power to create further evils out of nothing. It could incapacitate God totally. If God makes evil himself then he might make it rule the day forever and wipe out all good. If a human person embraces evil and becomes evil it follows you can destroy them. We know too well how easy it is to say evil is not a power and show by your outlook and actions that you in fact seem to think it is. How you treat something and how you think of it may not match. Talk of evil does smooth the path to violence and we should not be surprised when religious people start slaughtering so- called sinners.

The believers though they say evil that seems unnecessary and futile and gratuitous happens God does not agree with it so it is our fault for forcing it to happen and forcing him to tolerate it. The Christian message is that we are apples and God put us in a good barrel but we have turned the barrel bad. Don’t lose sight of the magnitude of what you are being accused of here. You force the creator to leave us to our own devices for his purposes and feed evil. This is not acceptable at all as where is innocent until proven guilty? Plus nobody is telling you the exact charges against you and that is not fair in itself. God is not telling you.  Clearly to say there is an all-powerful and all-good God far from making evil seem vulnerable calls it invincible.

We have shown that so-called good and hope depend on the evil of lying so it does not matter what evil is. It is dominant. Religion does not really want evil to be inferior. It wants its preferred evil to be superior and even eternal.

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