Good and Evil

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Good and Evil

This was written in responce to the following questions:

In the story of Eden, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge brings awareness of the distinction between good and evil. This knowledge seems to make Adam and Eve both more like God and more fully human than they were before. To what extent is facing the chanllenge of distinguishing between good and evil-and choosing action accordingly-basic to human existence? ...How do we know that to value and what to do?

I do not fully agree with the notion of distinguishing good and evil as originally being a quality or ability that humankind was supposed to have (this is in opposition to the statement "more fully human" in the second sentence). The fact is that we now (as far as we know) live in a society. This society contains people, animals, plants, and living /nonliving creatures whom we must learn to get along with. This is an obvious and basic need for human existence because without the distinction and ability to choose our actions, we could have killed one another about two days after stepping out of the Garden of Eden.

There is no clear-cut way of understanding ho...

... middle of paper ...

... in God / a god /gods / a higher power becuase we would then expect the decision to come from the higher power and not from a ourselves or technically any religion.

The fact is that what is actually good or bad/evil is impossible to define on a global scale unless we are all told the "truth" directly by the higher power. Of course that would assume that everyone would be willing to accept the "truth", that the being knew the "truth" (I guess it is possible to believe that a higher power exists but not believe that they know the whole story), and that a higher power exist.

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