light dark

[AB]

ive heard many people claim that we have both light and dark, good and evil inside of us. others claim that either some one is good or they are evil. many people suggest that we are are evil and good residing in the same form. what do you people beleive? (no offense intended)

[Tankdown]

Define good

....Also define evil

[AB]

im not asking for an answer, im asking for what yalls opinions are on these things

[Faijer]

Such things are normally Romanticised concepts of extreme morality, and if you look at the period in which the particular piece of fiction is written, you should be able to see that most of the values that are good and evil within it reflect the attitudes at the time, or attitudes that were being formed or being rejected (pending on the author).

Take a course of Moral Philosophy and you'll understand how there isn't really such a thing as good and evil, only our stereotyped categorisations of moral extremes.

[AB]

....do what now? what peice of fiction? i think we are having a slight misunderstanding

[Raitaro]

Any peice of fiction will reflect the moral extremes of the time...

[Zake]

Pfah, concepts of "good" and "evil" in any absolute sense shouldn't be applied any further than RPGs.  Even angels and demons can be understood in relativistic morality- harmony and disharmony, peace and conflict, life and death, are all more practical and meaningful terms.

I find that a person will only label another as "evil" when he has little or no understanding of the second person's actions, intentions, experience, etc.  When we understand an "evil" person, this "evil" is deconstructed into frustration, confusion, ignorance, or some other practical vice.  Same applies for "good," I'd imagine.

[Faijer]

harmony and disharmony

Though these terms reflect more accurate situations, the terminology is still loaded with connotations. The dis- has a tendency to suggest that it is not the way things should be, and consequently throws negative emotions into the term.

Two more interesting terms would be facism and anarchy, the juxtaposed extreme political situations. Which of those sounds better or worse?

[AB]

anarchy hands down

[Tankdown]

Who knows, maybe in the future there will be scientific evidence of something that only makes things worst. (Worst as in there are no advantages).

Untill then its a matter of opinion.

[CloakedxAdept]

Jungian psychology defines our "dark" side as "the shadow". Essentially what this is is our animalistic natures becoming aparrent in our personalities. According to Carl Jung the shadow can be the source for all the best and worst in man. This basically means that while experiencing "the shadow" a person is more spontaneus, creative, emotionally strong, etc. at worst the person succumbs easily to addictions, may seem insane at times, and is generally in less control of his actions.

 Personally, I believe as humans become more and more civilized this becomes less and less necissary. However for an artist it may be advantageous to be in tune to a certain degree with this side.

[Redefine]

i think good and evil are needless over-complications. the only morality i see is the aristotelian notion of fulfilling the function of the human being. the problem with this is its hard to define the function of a human.

[Oriens Lvx Lucis]

"Good" and "evil" are arbitrary descriptions of subjective perspectives on what is morally correct and incorrect, respectively.  An example...in the Mayan culture it was good to sacrifice a human, so long as said human was a prisoner of some sort, in order to please a deity.  Most people here would probably disagree with this and depending social background may even call this evil.  The one who has been raped or knows someone who has been raped closely may call it evil, yet theurgists will believe that rape could simply fulfill some sort of karmic debt and is neither good nor evil, etc.  The list goes on.

[Julianus]

I have always disagreed that Good and Evil are subjective terms. Let us take Good as an example.

To begin with, there is no definition of Good. Good just Is. The same, for instance, can be said about a point or a straight line in Euclidean Geometry: there are no definitions to describe them as they exactly are, though everyone knows what they are. If we are to examine this from another perspective: No one has ever seen a perfect point, nor a perfectly straight line; despite this, everyone knows what a point and a straight line are. Therefore, what we may presume at this point is that for every object there is one Idea, one Form, one Archetype, call it however you like, and this Idea may be manifested in the physical world through many different and imperfect things. For example, the Idea of Good is one and only one. Good, however, may be expressed as many different things; as Oriens has said, in the Mayan culture, it was considered Good to sacrifice a human for the shake of a god and in ancient Greece it was normal for for a man to form a cross-generational relationship with a minor. For the modern and "civilized" person, the above would be characterized as being rather Evil than Good.

Because of this, one might say that Good and Evil are subjective terms, perceived differently throughout the course of History. As I said previously though, Good and Evil are two definite things and Man always seeks to reach Good and distance himself from Evil. Then, you may ask, if this happens, wouldn't Good and Evil be the same for everybody? Not necessarily. See Good, for example, as the top of a high mountain and imagine that there are many roads which lead to this top, meaning that there are many ways to approach the Idea of Good which, no matter how many ways there are to approach it, it is one.

[Faijer]

"I'm good, because I give money to strangers, I've risked my life to save other people's lives, and, knowing that there are starving people in the world, I try not to be gluttonous."
"But you have three slaves who work on your farm. You don't pay them or anything, how is that good?"
"Well, my father kept slaves, I'm just carrying on the practice."
"But it's wrong."
"Says you."

This brief diorama was brought to you by Faijer Inc., with the intention of showing how good and evil do not exist because morality is not black and white, nor is it quantifiable.