Carrot on a Stick

Tuesday, September 17, 2013:

Yesterday a demented human being walked into a building and blew away 12 other human beings. I have heard religious folks trying to explain the age old problem: If God is all powerful and all knowing; then, why does God allow such evil to prevail? The answers I hear from the clergy are not comforting to me at all. The chief one is that we are all given free-will and evil is nothing more than the misuse of free-will; that evil and good are the reasons there is a heaven and a hell. Reward and punishment, in this case, is a carrot held out on a stick, compelling us to do well in our lives or to intimidate us with the fear of some future ambiguous torment in the next life. This only works if all of us fear death and busy our minds with ways to comfort ourselves with the notion that we will be rewarded for our suffering we endure in the here and now.

            So, if I don’t accept the premise of life continuing after death in some way, then I am left with the explanation that evil and good don’t exist. If I can accept these terms then I must also accept the proposition that what we think of as evil is nothing more than an aberration of natural selection. The lepers Mother Teresa helps stand on equal grounds before the evolution of the species as do the crimes against humanity of Adolf Hitler. I.e., the lepers the dear woman does help enables a mutation that becomes a useful adaptation but this can’t be determined in the here and now and the ovens of Auschwitz... oh hell, I can't go there!

            Other than deliberate acts I have mentioned, there are those cases where something goes wrong in the neuro-biological make-up of an individual that throws aside the issue of good and evil altogether. He simply gets his rocks off murdering people or is driven to it by the demons of his own mental illness. This explanation has nothing to do with free-will and is not a cushy one at all. Evil then becomes arbitrary and has no useful purpose in evolution nor does it yield to any concept of reward and punishment. It just is. Deal with it.

It disturbs us to think that an individual gets pleasure out of anti-social acts such as murder. It disturbs us to think that the man can walk into a school snuffing out the lives of the innocent and there is no punishment in this life or the next at all for him. Therefore, I go to a place where good and evil become irrelevant. I go to a place where there are no explanations available or necessary. I go to a place where the Heart of Compassion compels me to act with kindness because I understand that we all live in this ambiguous duality and it isn’t then necessary to act on behalf of good or evil. The fact is that a few good people tend to hold societies at large in check so that evil doesn’t prevail. There is no reason for it beyond the love a mother feels towards her infant at her breast or the pride of a father at the growth of his child. I believe that we are genetically engineered towards compassion and compassion extends beyond the reach of the lack thereof. I believe this for no reason whatsoever. It is an article of faith based of personal experience when I surrendered a life of confusion to the Heart of Compassion.

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