The Problem of Good

This is the style most of these blogs will take. They are rants, not formulaic arguments. I hope my ideas are helpful to you.

It is an odd turn of the argument that people would use unexplainable evil as a proof against unexplainable good. A vision of true evil, of something wrong, can never disprove God, because if ‘wrong’ is a real thing, then so is ‘right,’ and so, the good exists. And only by admitting an objective morality can the atheist use the problem of Evil against God. But objective morality is, no more and no less, the stuff of God. You might as well disprove the sun by saying that it is too bright to look upon.

Evil, therefore, exists because of good. To remove evil, so must good be removed. But goodness is the point. Goodness is why we are here. So we cannot strike at the good, even if it seems it might remove the evil. Because no matter how terrible evil might get, if we let it destroy the good that created it, then it will win. This happens, you see, in religion. The aim of religion is the good, which is why, of course, it causes, or helps to cause, so much evil. Religion is the art of loving God; but once you have taught someone the highest love, they can then learn the lowest hatred.

To a man dying of cancer, having a needle pierce his skin is very little trouble. To a healthy man, it is a pain he would fight if he believed he did not need it. A very evil man does little good, but a very good man gone a little wrong will do very evil things. Just as a healthy body feels a little pain more acutely than a sickly one, so a good soul is more corrupted by a little evil than a wretched one. If you turn the strength of a strong man to evil things, he will kill many more than a weak man. But strength is a goodness, not an evil. It is only with the increased goodness of strength that it might become so deadly.

So it is the very goodness of religion which makes it so powerful a tool of evil. The key then is not to take away goodness to prevent evil, but to teach it. A strong man, a smart woman, these are good things. We do not kill them to stop the evil they might produce, but teach them better ways so that they can use their powers for marvelous things. Tolerance, humility and free discourse must be taught in every religion, even the secular ones which claim not to be religions (but they are, for they are interested in promoting their vision of good, which is another way of saying “religion), knowing that those will rise who will preach intolerance, arrogance and tyranny.

Let the tyrants speak, but do not let them fool you into thinking that their evil would have any strength without the goodness they attack. They will blame goodness for evil and strength for weakness, and their attack on religious freedom will be a crusade, their invective against spirituality will be a homily. Persecution is an evil whose strength will only be lost when the religious and the secular realize that God does not want us to be right at the expense of love. Any truth which promotes hatred is a lie, and mistakes the evil for the good which gives it power.