The Nature of Good and Evil

I love comic books. They're all about right and wrong. It's simplified ethics. Old school comics were particularly simple.



The good guys were in brightly colored outfits, the bad guys were mostly in black. The good guys weren't racist, they did't have any vices, they were pure of heart.



The bad guys were fairly simple as well. Often mad scientists with dreams of world domination or monsters that came from nowhere only to destroy. Pretty clear cut there. Nobody should be allowed to own the world or destroy it as far as the majority of people would be concerned.



The good guys step in and might makes right. If the good guys with all their strength and powers could defeat the bad guys the day would be saved and evil would again return to the shadows.



But the real world ain't like that. Evil doesn't come in the form of monsters or mad scientists so often here. Try walkin' in your mall and spottin' all the good guys and all the bad guys. Odds are you ain't gonna get 'em all right.

Evil is subjective. So's good. It all depends on who's judgin'.

A man that cheats on his wife isn't evil but he's wrong for it. A woman that keeps the extra twenty bucks from an atm might not even be considered wrong in keepin' that extra money. All children are selfish and tend to lie or be sneaky to get what they want but are they evil?

If Bob killed a man he might be called evil. But what if the person killed was attackin' Bob's family. What if it only appeared that the person killed was attackin' Bob's family? What if Bob's family had attacked the man that was killed? Things start to get a lil murkier.

There is no razor thin line drawn in the sand for every occasion. People can only act with the best of intentions and hope the rest of the world will understand. There's always a reason for the actions of people. Convenience, weakness to tempation, amusement, whatever it is there's at least one reason for it. It doesn't always make a lick o' sense and far too often it's backed up by stupidity but people have their reasons.

Reason is what a person needs to determine good and evil. To label all people who kill evil is to ignore those shades of gray that make things messy. It would be nice to live in a world where things fit into their lil boxes and you could always tell what's right and whats wrong. They don't. It's not that simple so you always gotta keep your wits about you and do your best to judge for yourself. It's why we hold trials for criminals. It's why we have rehabilitation programs. They clearly ain't perfect but it's all we got right now.

Nuthin' and No one is truly evil. Most folks who do bad things are misguided. They need to be helped not condemned. They need to learn to make better decisions not to be locked away and mistreated.

True evil would have to be a relentless force of death and destruction. True evil would not have a purpose for a new order to replace the old or any benefit to anyone. It would only destroy and corrupt whatever it can.

True good would then have to be a relentless force of life and creation. Its purpose would have to be peace and happiness for all. This is an impossible task.

There are no such creatures I've ever run across in my time.

There is no absolute evil or absolute good. There are the things we do and the reasons we do them and what happens as a result. These three things determine what could be good or bad. But nothing we can do can make us evil nor can anything we do make us perfectly good. We can get better or worse easily but there always remains at least a sliver of one or the other.

I'd say that's a good thing though. As perfect as we may become, if that lil bit of us wants things it shouldn't stays with us, then we must constantly work to keep it in check. That bit of badness keeps us awake at the wheel. And as bad as we may become, as hateful, and wild, and malicious as we can be if that lil bit of good stays with us then there is still hope to save us from ourselves. There's alway time to change what we are as long as there is a breath in our lungs.