Is there such thing as good and evil

  • Thread starter Thread starter justamoose89
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
J

justamoose89

Guest
I am a student at the university of the incarnate word (and a devout catholic) who was just told by the leaders of campus ministry that there is no such thing as good and evil. How can my friends and i respond?
 
justamoose89 said:
I am a student at the university of the incarnate word (and a devout catholic) who was just told by the leaders of campus ministry that there is no such thing as good and evil. How can my friends and i respond?
Click to expand...
Sometimes people say that and mean that they don’t want to judge other people’s actions (therefore they don’t want to speak in terms of good and evil). I always give people the benefit of the doubt but if this is one of those relativism theories (there is no Truth, each person has their own truth…), I would respond something like: if there was no Truth and no moral good and no immoral evil, it would be like driving cars without traffic lights and traffic rules. What would happen? people would decide to drive in the line they want, in the direction they want, stop and go and speed up as they please and they would kill each other.
 
Ask them if there are no positive and negative elements in reality, e.g. creative and destructive, healthy and diseased, orderly and disorderly, proportionate and disproportionate, honest and dishonest, moderate and immoderate, reasonable and unreasonable…

There is a remarkable description of evil in “The Divine Names” - a work attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite:

“Thus evil is contrary to progress, purpose, nature, cause, source, goal, definition, will, and substance. It is a defect, a deficiency, a weakness, a disproportion, an error, purposeless, unlovely, lifeless,** unwise, unreasonable, imperfect, unreal, causeless**,** indeterminate, sterile, inert, powerless**, disordered, incongruous, indefinite, dark, unsubstantial and never in itself possessed of any existence whatsoever.”

Individual attributes can be questioned but the main thrust of his argument is sound. It is absurd to deny the bipolarity of existence.
 
By the way, has anyone seen a possessed person? If you ever come in presence of one, you can’t doubt that the the devil is real.
 
If they don’t exist, why are there words in our language to describe them?
 
I guess I shouldnt be surprised. During our peer minister campus ministry training, the director brought in a speaker (a priest actually) who told us that the Old Testament God and the New Testament God were two different beings, that one religion is not more true than another, and that there is no hell. I can’t wait to graduate.
 
davidv said:
If they don’t exist, why are there words in our language to describe them?
Click to expand...
You are on the right track. The sort of argument here is a conceptual argument. What would a language without any value judgements of anykind look like, ethics is one form of value judgement? If we cannot even conceive of a language without words like better or worse, right or wrong, than that severly cripples any attempt to be a moral reletavist. You see we all must make sense out of our linguistic habits, by that I mean that if we cannot help talking about things in a certian way than we must figure out why? We cannot help but talk in moral terms so we must figure out why? So the question is does saying that good and evil don’t exist explain why we cannot help but talk in moral categories? No it doesn’t.
 
The reply that I’ve gotten from them is that there is no such thing as good and evil, only action and consequence. At that moment, my friend brought out his Bible and showed them about 6 verses in scripture that prove there is good and evil. And then he was told that he wasn’t allowed to use a Bible, because this was for “dialogue” only. At a Catholic school! It just disgusts me. I feel like there is no winning with these people.
 
justamoose89 said:
The reply that I’ve gotten from them is that there is no such thing as good and evil, only action and consequence. At that moment, my friend brought out his Bible and showed them about 6 verses in scripture that prove there is good and evil. And then he was told that he wasn’t allowed to use a Bible, because this was for “dialogue” only. At a Catholic school! It just disgusts me. I feel like there is no winning with these people.
Click to expand...
Point out to these people that they obviously think it “evil” to use a Bible in a discussion which is “dialogue only.”
 
Ask them whether they approve of rape, torture and murder? If not why not? 🙂
 
justamoose89 said:
I am a student at the university of the incarnate word (and a devout catholic) who was just told by the leaders of campus ministry that there is no such thing as good and evil. How can my friends and i respond?
Click to expand...
Good is that which accords with the God’s nature which is the Supreme Good and the source of the being in all that exists. Evil is a negation and a lessening of being. E.g. a lie is evil because it expresses something which is not, and thus is contrary to being/reality.
Examples can be multiplied, but you’ll get the idea.
 
tonyrey said:
With regard to the consequences! An evil intention is positive enough. 🙂
Click to expand...
What I believe Constantine is trying to convey is Augustine’s solution to the “problem of evil”. That is, if God is all-powerful and purely good, why does evil exist?

By Augustine’s reckoning, evil does not exist as a present substance. Rather, according to Augustine, that which is commonly perceived as evil is nothing more than an observed absence or “privation” of goodness. In short, evil does not itself exist.

However, in this OP’s case, the professor is more likely trying to reject the existence of good and evil in the sense of right and wrong actions, not metaphysical forces. This is moral relativism, a dangerous and depressingly prevalent teaching among liberal religious scholars.
 
We are beings of the horizon, and are created in the image of God, who is the beginning AND the end. We understand good AND evil; we are both. We stand in the center line, and shall walk the straight and narrow. Balance! You hate the bad, and you love the good, right? You love and you hate. If you walk the straight and narrow, then you’re balanced. Because you love the good, you will receive it; because you hate the bad, you will not receive it (as long as you have faith in Jesus Christ).

On another note, I highly suggest you read The Surrender to Secularism, by Bishop O’Gara.
 
God, who sent His Son to suffer for our sins, has now experienced the same evils that we experience here on earth, but with greater suffering because of who He is, thus we are now saved as we are made in His image!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top