When I came to the Jedi Community, I was exposed to a wealth of philosophical concepts. I was challenged to seek out new information on the internet and learn about all sorts of beliefs. Last week, on the Church of Jediism Members Association, someone came in and asked “What do you get if you remove the concept of sin?”. The person was obviously speaking more to the Christian idea, and the post has since been taken down, but it got me thinking about something I read earlier on when I started looking around the internet for new spiritual ideas.
The Yin-Yang was never intended to express the idea of good and evil. It expressed things that are in nature. But over time, the symbol has taken on meaning for those that seek answers to the idea of “Good” and “Evil”. It’s not the only idea we have latched onto either. We make it seem as though good and evil are always fighting within our hearts. As a result, when the philosophical concept comes up we automatically assume that it is true- we all have some internal strife that makes us struggle with choosing a good action or an evil action.
In reality, a lot of the world lives without the thought of whether their actions are good or evil. I’m not advocating for moral relativism. I’m challenging the very thought that man lives their day-to-day life with the burden of feeling their actions are righteous or sinful. To give you an idea, let’s try an exercise:
1) Write down the names of 5 people that you believe you know fairly well, and can be objective in assessing them.
2) Make a list of everything that you would consider human created evil. It can be anything, adultery, eating meat, murder, etc.
3) Now compare your first list (include yourself for a total of 6 people) with your second list. Go through the list and ask yourself “How often does this person really have to struggle with making a decision about this evil/sin, since you’ve known them, on a scale of 0-5?” (5 being very often). Now don’t confuse this with passing thoughts, or thoughts that just surge with anger. For example, if you listed murder should be on your list- I would hope it is at least- I am asking you to consider how many times the person has actively started to act on their impulse to kill another person in anger, cold-blood, or some other justification that doesn’t qualify as legitimate self-defense, but decided not to. How often have they committed the sin without much thought or regard to it as a sin?
At least one person on your list should have come out low. If all of them came out high- and they are all your friends…you might want to consider getting friends with closer values to yourself. When I did this exercise- my calculations came up very low. Most of which were in the category of cheating and absolute 0 in murder. Two of the people I analyzed were with me in the Army working a detainee facility for 14 months. We had plenty of opportunity to see red with our detainees, but the anger to do something horrible to them was never present. Not even as a passing thought.
Then why all the stories that tell us we fight against good and evil? For one, struggle against good and evil makes for an interesting read. Secondly, we are still in a world that has yet to achieve universal peace and we need something that explains the world for us. Historically, stories of heroic men and women were meant to both inspire new heroes and console others with the knowledge that heroes do exist. The people in these stories struggle against the idea of good and evil actions not because it is inherent, but because they are forced into extraordinary situations a large chunk of human population do not experience. I won’t say most, a lot of the world faces the reality of war everyday and I simply do not have the number to compare.
I would love to write more, but I would much rather have you contemplate and challenge this idea that we have put into our world view simply because people around us have promoted it. So instead, I’ll leave you with a question to meditate on:
I often see people say that we cannot know good actions without evil to compare it to. Let me ask- are the evils you put in your list necessary in the real world to demonstrate what a good person looks like? Or, is it possible that a world without evil could still be kind to their fellow man.
I think you have a good idea of my answer to this question. But this answer has to come from you, with your own reasons for believing such. I cannot give it to you.