UU Explanation of Evil (or lack thereof) (ritual, salvation, creation)

[Green Gaia]

Originally Posted by Davidium

As a UU, I begin my search for evil by looking at the converse of the seven principles.

Those who do not affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

Those who do not respect the interdependent web of all existance of which we are a part.

And all of them in between.

This is where I begin my search for evil. I think we do define evil as UU's we just do it in the converse.

That's interesting, David. I hadn't thought of it that way. That makes sense.

[lilithu]

Originally Posted by Maize

We know bad things happen, people do evil things and often UUs are there in the aftermath to help with those who are effected by it. But we offer no answer about WHY it happened in the first place. We like focus on the good in people, the human potential for goodness. Because of this I think we are positive movement. But in today's society when all you have to do is turn on the evening news to see horrible acts of evil and suffering in the world to be reminded that not everyone is living up to the goodness we UUs believe all people have inside of them. How do we explain this? Can we? Should we?

Namaste Maize,

Wow, you posed a lot of good hard questions while I've been gone.

I agree with you and Rev Church that we UUs do not take evil seriously enough, and in doing so we allow evil to continue. We do like to focus on the good in people, the divine spark, the inherent worth and dignity. We focus on nourishment and support, not control and punishment. And I love us for that. But in focusing so much on the good in people, we experience cognitive dissonance when we see evil in them and therefore we just ignore it. So we're there in the aftermath to deal with the consequences, but we are really bad at dealing with the source and nipping it in the bud. Nipping, afterall, would be a kind oppresive control, an impingement on someone else's freedom, not a nourishing and supportive act.

So how do we explain evil? And can we find an explanation that would help us to respond to evil more effectively without resorting to pre-emptive control? I think that David is right in the examples that he gives but I'd like to spell it out more explicitly. As UUs, we do not believe (or most of us anyway) in an active source of evil, like a Devil. There is no cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. Rather, there is light, and there is the darkness where the light has not yet reached. Evil is a negative, a negation. Evil is the absence of good. Where there is no love, there is evil. Where there is no compassion, there is evil. Where there is no understanding, there is evil. Where there is no empathy, there is evil.

The person who rapes/robs/murders/declares war does so because he or she does not feel compassion/empathy for the other person. Without love, there is only self-interest. The level of evil one commits depends on how much compassion the person is capable of. Most of us would not murder, because we're capable of feeling the horror of being murdered. But a lot of us might occasionally take something that doesn't belong to us or take an unfair advantage if it presents itself, especially if we're not doing it against someone we personally know, because we don't really stop to feel what the consequences will be for others. It's abstract enough that we can ignore it. As the Buddhists say, if one truly had compassion for everyone, if one truly understood the consequences, one could not possibly commit evil.

I prefer this view of good and evil because it also takes into account something that the 'god versus devil' model doesn't, the evil that is commited by inaction. By people not doing anything. By apathy. If I have food and the person next to me is starving and I don't give him any, that is evil. And while we pay a lot more attention to people actively hurting others, whether it's genocide or robbery/rape/murder, most of the evil in this world is done passively, by people not acting when someone else is in trouble. That is as true for the Katrina aftermath as it was for the holocaust.

I also prefer this view of good and evil because it shows that we are all capable of evil. It's not a matter of some people being good and some evil and we should somehow "eliminate" the evil people and then everything will be fine for all eternity. The "battle" between good and evil exists within each of us, on an ongoing basis. Rather than just focusing on the good and ignoring evil, we religious liberals must indeed take evil seriously... by cultivating love and understanding in ourselves and in others. Basically by doing what we've been doing but with greater purpose. If people do not live up to their innate goodness it's because, for whatever reason, that goodness has not been cultivated.

I've been struggling with the last couple of sentences above because they sound so goody-two-shoes naively idealistic to the cynical part of me. But I can't think of any other way to say it other than directly. I believe that there is innate goodness, that divine spark, in everyone. So I have to believe that even the greatest evil can be overcome by cultivating that spark.