Enchanting! We stand again at the precipice or is it a pinnacle? Three points came to me. The only Source of evil is good. Judgement is all ego and God isn't one. There are no innocents unless all are.
But is this thought process actually a vaccine against becoming evil? Or is it just a means of rationalizing evil deeds and *feeling* ourselves to be good people, even as we know that innocent children are dying by the thousands-- unintentionally, we console ourselves-- but unmistakably, to any outside observer, at our hands?
I know you tried to keep this free of explicit references to the Current Thing, but it reads like nothing so much as an apologia for what Israelis call "yorim u vochim".
Could it be both? There is always a risk of self congratulation and rationalization and we need to be careful on that point. In any case yorim ubochim > yorim u’smeichim.
A lesser evil is still an evil. And it is telling that the reason that God "wins the argument" is that God cannot find even ten righteous men in Sodom. Telling, that is, about the mentality of the authors of Genesis, who thought there could be such a thing as a city without even ten of the righteous in it, because it was convenient for them to think so as a justification for a horrible act of destruction. In the real world, "they're all like that" is a common rationalization for evildoing of all sorts, and civilized people should know it is never true: in any city of any size, even if the wicked are a large majority, the righteous number far more than ten, and their lives are individually as precious as anyone else's. It is *that* recognition, among others, that may restrain our worst tendencies.
Enchanting! We stand again at the precipice or is it a pinnacle? Three points came to me. The only Source of evil is good. Judgement is all ego and God isn't one. There are no innocents unless all are.
But is this thought process actually a vaccine against becoming evil? Or is it just a means of rationalizing evil deeds and *feeling* ourselves to be good people, even as we know that innocent children are dying by the thousands-- unintentionally, we console ourselves-- but unmistakably, to any outside observer, at our hands?
I know you tried to keep this free of explicit references to the Current Thing, but it reads like nothing so much as an apologia for what Israelis call "yorim u vochim".
Could it be both? There is always a risk of self congratulation and rationalization and we need to be careful on that point. In any case yorim ubochim > yorim u’smeichim.
A lesser evil is still an evil. And it is telling that the reason that God "wins the argument" is that God cannot find even ten righteous men in Sodom. Telling, that is, about the mentality of the authors of Genesis, who thought there could be such a thing as a city without even ten of the righteous in it, because it was convenient for them to think so as a justification for a horrible act of destruction. In the real world, "they're all like that" is a common rationalization for evildoing of all sorts, and civilized people should know it is never true: in any city of any size, even if the wicked are a large majority, the righteous number far more than ten, and their lives are individually as precious as anyone else's. It is *that* recognition, among others, that may restrain our worst tendencies.