Saturday, April 23, 2005

Good and Evil: On The eyes Of The Beholder

It is quite rare for someone who is evil that he will tell I am an evil guy. In fact a lot of evil people feel self-righteousness. Any of us can do an evil act at one time or another. It is a battle inside all of us to do evil and good. Good itself has to be reasonable. If I give all my money to charity and live in a shelter I will be considered a fool. Religions had lined out for us the acts of good and evil. In Moses'law an eye for an eye is a just law. It means that the second eye was not an evil act but a response to the first evil. Forgiveness for mild and unintentional acts are good. Most of times the justice in Islam agrees with the common reasoning that humans use. Thus to appreciate good and evil we have to know all the story. There is pure evil like Hitler and Saddam that can be difficult to rationalize their acts. There is evil of 9/11 that happened out of severe desperation. You do not encourage it or promote it but you remove the conditions that created it. Restructure means you say guys the current political and economic systems are injust and not working we need new systems that will remove all of these injustices and make everyone happy. It is like the health care and long term care in America the systems are just beyond repair that we need to restructure them. I put forward a project to the American government (Moral Utopia Project) that the current administration had blocked it to me. Thus if you are searching for evil in this world forget about religions, end of time scenarios or even secularism. Look at the world as you are watching a movie and you will find where evil is lying:
1- The very large disparity between the rich and poor. 2- the political systems with religious systems that work hand on hand for the benefits of the rich.3- The oppression of the Arab and Muslim world by tyrants that are well protected by America.4- The Saudi dynasty that have all the money and invest very little in Arab world and buy the loyalty of the American politicians. 5- The United Nations that were stealing the money of the Iraqi children. 6- The wars for oil that led to a lot of destructions. 7- The religious, monetary and sexual hypocrisies of the establishments. 8- the secrecy and lack of transparency to most political leaders. 9- Disease, hunger and poverty that the rich are not caring for. 10- The interest-based economy that gives you 3-4 % a for your invested money in a bank, while lending you for 15% or more particularly if you are poor. Thus to define evil and good you have to use the same reasoning we applied to our justice system: be unbiased, listen to all sides and look at the evidence. If the judge is your relative he is likely to be biased to you. I have a relative of mine when she calls me she complain that the Israeli killed Palestinians. But she forgot Palestinians started first to kill Israeli. The land historically and religiously belong to both of them. Violence is not helping either one case. What we ought to do is find the way to get both sides to reconcile their differences and look for permanent peace to both of them. The world is just too complicated that we need to dissect events and review the long history of international affairs. The simple them against us or plain evil and good leads us to the same path of confrontation. It is easy to make wars but it is quite an art to make peace.