Posted by ANON (65.93.90.88) on August 24, 2002 at 21:37:28:

In Reply to: Re: Non-existence of Evil posted by Brett Zamir on August 24, 2002 at 20:47:46:

DEAREST DRETT

How can you possibly tell BK what he now accepts, that his post was parochial? Shame, shame. We are not here to form alliances - we are here to stare the monsters of contradiction or Highest Wisdom with courage and intelligence.

Let us take your own unassisting quotes and comments:

Quote: - "We know absence of light is darkness, but no one would assert darkness was not a fact. It exists even though it is only the absence of something else. So evil exists too, and we cannot close our eyes to it, even though it is a negative existence. We must seek to supplant it by good, and if we see an evil person is not influenceable by us, then we should shun his company for it is unhealthy."

So here you agree in the existence of Evil, so I cannot see how you are defnding the Non-existence of evil.
mblies)

Quote: - "Baha'is recognize that evil is negative and has no existence in its own right, but that does not mean that there is no power in evil. Do not Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha warn us repeatedly of the spiritual infection of Covenant-breaking?"

How can something that does not have any reality (does not exist) have power? This defies all the accepted laws of thermodynamics which are laws accepted by Baha'i according to Bahaullah.

Quote: "There is no power exercised over the people by those evil souls that have passed away. Good is stronger than evil and even when alive they had very little power. How much less have they after they are dead, and besides they are nowhere near this planet."

This is much more interesting - implying a connection between passed souls and living souls. I like the concept. However, I see more evidence that evil souls govern living souls far far far more than the other way round. I am speaking empirically, factually, scientifically.

Excellent quote: "We should also remember that most people have no clear concept of the sort of world they wish to build, nor how to go about building it. Even those who are concerned to improve conditions are therefore reduced to combatting every apparent evil that takes their attention. Willingness to fight against evils, whether in the form of conditions or embodied in evil men, has thus become for most people the touchstone by which they judge a person's moral worth. Baha'is, on the other hand, know the goal they are working towards and know what they must do, step by step, to attain it. Their whole energy is directed towards the building of the good, a good which has such a positive strength that in the face of it the multitude of evils--which are in essence negative--will fade away and be no more. To enter into the quixotic tournament of demolishing one by one the evils in the world is, to a Baha'i, a vain waste of time and effort. His whole life is directed towards proclaiming the Message of Baha'u'llah, reviving the spiritual life of his fellow-men, uniting them in a divinely-created World Order, and then, as that Order grows in strength and influence, he will see the power of that Message transforming the whole of human society and progressively solving the problems and removing the injustices which have so long bedevilled the world."

The line with "demolishing one by one the evils in the world" shoujld end the argument in its tracks. Here again Baha'u'llah and Baha reify evil and use it as a reality to explain or justify the necessity for all Baha'is to struggle toward good, also a reification. By making the attainment of "good" real, the existence of "evil" is made real. Once again, "The Non-Existence of Evil is rubbish, even by your own quotes. The push to eliminate evil is the effort to eliminate something most real, not something non-existent. I banish darkness (real) by opening a light (real); both the dark and the light are real. Dark is the absence of light just as light is the absence of dark. Each exists, in "reality" as all other elements of the universe, from the microscopic to the macrocosmic, by duality. Nothing exists without its opposite.

Finally, since I used the concept of abstractions, like pure numbers, I should also add that a positive abstraction always exists in conjunction with a negative abstraction. Sometimes it is argued that diametrics or antitheticals are a reflection of our inabiity to see things on an infinite and continuous spectrum. This lets us refer to one end as minus and the other as plus when in reality it is ONE THING or ONE ABSTRACTION. But this falls apart also because the fact remains the ends of the spectrum are in fact, in abstraction, in reality, opposites. And, surely, as human creatures, whether intelligent or stupid, we see all reality in those opposing qualities.

BEST WISHES,

ANON

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