I can't answer to Osama Bin Laden's character. However, I disagree with your thesis in principle, for purely historical reasons.

I mentioned the Canadian residential schools, but you should look further into that. You will find that people were sure their motives were good, very good. That they did great harm was because they held beliefs that were not true. A google search on "Canada Residential Schools" will turn up a lot of links. Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance has an introductory section.

For good people to do evil requires only that they firmly believe they know something to be true, but to be wrong. Do you know whether this happens often or seldom? I personally think it happens far more often than anyone supposes.

I mentioned the Nazis. The Nazis (some of them undoubtedly thugs) came to power with the votes of mostly honest citizens who believed that their cause was just. One of the ugliest periods of recent human history came about because of the support of these "good" people - people raising families, people working for a living, but people who believed something terribly false.

Also in WWII, hard-working Japanese, people with a high sense of honour and family loyalty, really believed that, because their emperor was a god, they had the right to rule over their neighbours. Of course -- their neighbours rulers were merely men, not gods. They were wrong, and look at the harm that occured throughout the Pacific region (and to the U.S.) as a result.

In 1692, quite a few women (and some men) were tortured and/or executed for witchcraft by the honest, godly people of Salem. Well, they believed they were in the clutches of evil that was destructive to their community, and they were very anxious to get rid of it. What they did was tragic. It was wrong. And they really believed (until it all quietly stopped in what can only be seen as an embarrassed silence), that they were right.

It's not hard to conjure up examples of good people, believing incorrectly in the current dogma, doing great harm -- and always believing that they were doing exactly the opposite.

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

Can you prove these were good people in the first place? I'm not sure good people create or follow dogma.

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I agree very much with EH




Regarding any apparant murderer etc etc etc

Before condeming it may be worth putting yourself in there shoes in there life expereinces

Given you expereinced there life expereinces it may just be that you would end up exactly like them in your actions - we are taught many mnay things which we just accept as our "society accepts them"
It is the norm

It is very easy to look at the effects of others and judge

The problem is we do not know and should we you be open minded enough to admit that we may well be shown an explanation - which is what was shown to me

Many many things appear impossible to let go of or forgive because we hold our judgements so dear to us
The truth is without the whole picture we only judge on the effects and not on the causes

If a murderer was found to be insane through insane teaching through his life would we condemn him or treat him for his insanity ?
Would he be the guilty or the sick ?

I think I'm a good person, but I can't prove it. And I'm closer to me than anybody else in the world!!

I see where you are going, but I think if you reflect, you'll find that if you try to define "good" as you are, you are going to wind up with no room in the category for anybody.

We are all the product of our times, our cultures. Every one of us, at some time or other, has very likely done something of which we are (at least after the fact), thoroughly ashamed. That feeling of shame is the knowledge that what we had done was "wrong" in some way or other that ought to have been important to us.

The cruelty of kids in the schoolyard is a classic example. So often, kids get drawn into group-think and end up bullying the dweeb, the fatty, or the kid with no lunch money. On their own, they would be more likely to be sympathetic, even friendly. But the pressure of the crowd is often too strong, and they will taunt just as fiercely (sometimes more so) as the rest. There will be a "good kid" under there somewhere, but they will find it almost impossible, in context, to come out.

The development of this courage to stand against an obvious wrong is a long and difficult process. Because I don't have much of it myself (I don't consider myself a courageous person), I don't fault others for not having it either. But the point I'm trying to make is there must have been people watching the executions of women in the soccer stadium in Kabul, or the burning of heretics during the Inquisition, or Germans who knew in their hearts, as they saw the trains loaded with people they suspected might be in grave peril, who knew that what they were witnessing was very, very wrong. But even though they may not have participated themselves, they did not stand up and say, "Stop!"

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

I'm not defining good at all, I think you are attempting to.


That is the entire problem with this whole argument. Who is going to define what good is? Isn't that what causes dogma? That is exactly why we all need to question before we follow anything.

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What if there is no Good or Bad ?

What if our belief in them is the problem ?


The Tree of knowledge - of good and bad ..............................


Interesting isnt it ?

In the belief that they exist, does that make the dream so ?


Again go to the Golden Rule and it asks us to look past this - To see the truth in every brother

And do we follow that simple instruction ?

EH....Dogma in itself is not harmful...baptizing a child may or may not be neccesary but it causes no harm...beliefs or actions such as you stated with the burying up to the head and stoning are dogma or activities that do not in truth lie in the true basics of any religious path as it was intended by its founder...it is the drifting away and loss of respect for others and negative emotions that make people interpret things to fit their feelings or ad to the original teachings that cause these destructive behaviors...the core beliefs of all major religions if researched will all support a peaceful coexistence and the fundamental human ethics that are at the very core of civilization....the core desires and respects for kindness, loving, sharing etc. We may not need religion to realize these things...but..in the world as crazy as it appears at times it is nice to have a group of people or place to go and refresh yourself periodically and feel good about things and share that peaceful feeling and hope for humanity...

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www.divinelightinterfaithministry.com

I posted this before, but it is relevant to the present discussion :

Even in the corrupted gospels of the church, from which true gnosis has been largely expurgated, the text still stands: "I said: ye are gods (john 10:34)" and millions of the simple gape at the page and have not the wit not courage to understand. For the most diabolical of all the gods is the one who invented guilt. Human beings then learned to judge and despise themselves, an uncomfortable state, from which they chronically sought to escape by judging and despising one another.

Of all creations, this is the hardest to uncreate as it leaves the deepest wounds; it left, in fact, that festering suppuration that is normal consciousness in our species today. For once evil and bad conscience were invented, "the one became two" - the mind was split against itself, the cosmos was split into fictitious and antagonistic oppositions; everything was turned upside-down and backward and the world became populated with the hallucinations of mania. This raving lunacy, this hatred of self and others, is the "sleep" and "dream" and "illusion" against which the sages warn us; it is the "drunkenness" against which jesus rails in the Gnostic gospels; it is coded into the parable of the fall in Genesis. And all this suited the first priest-swindler very well as it has suited all other priest-swindlers ever since; it made them rich; it gave them that which, for small souls, is sweeter than than wealth- the power to control others; and they have been most industrious, ever since, in inventing new "sins" so that more gloom and horror and despair will be spread over life.

For the sake of clarity: the god-power, the creative faculty, is not used with anything less than total literalness. When beauty was created by a godly mind, beauty existed. When mercy was created, mercy existed. When guilt was created, guilt existed. Out of a meaningless and pointless existence, we have made meaning and purpose; but since this creative act happens only when we relax after great strain, we feel it as "pouring into us" from elsewhere. Thus we do not know our own godhood and we are then perpetually swindled by those who assure us that it is indeed elsewhere, but "they" can give us access to it, for a reasonable fee (and our loyalty). And when weas a species were ignorant enough to be duped in that way, the swindlers went one step further, inventing "original sin" and other horrors of that sort (like the MYTH of an eternal hell), making us even more "dependent" upon them.

The results have been an armed madhouse; one might go further and call it an abattoir in which the cattle have been persuaded to slaughter one another.
"I have come to put an end to revenge," said Jesus, but revenge is the obsession, the compulsion, of all those who, having been told they are guilty, have become guilty. The criminal is not the exceptional type, but the normal type in a world in which evil has been invented; as cynics like Shakespeare and Swift and Cervantes have all remarked, the criminals on the bench sentence the criminals who come before the bench. The criminal mind is precisely the average mind in this world, after the priests invented sin.
"He who cries, 'fool, fool!' is already a murderer."
"Judge not."
The illusion of Sin and Guilt, the madness of our species, is the act of cursing the world under the misapprehension that one is cursing only one part of it.
To curse the fig tree, as in the most misunderstood parable of Jesus, is to curse the soil in which it grew, the seed, the rains, the sun; the whole world, eventually - because no part is truly separate from the whole.
The fallacy that one can judge the part in isolation from the whole is "the Lie that all men believe."
Of all lies, this is the hardest to undo: of all creations, the hardest to uncreate. But, it can be done.
We can do it. You can do it. I can do it.
Because we are all gods, we can create our own good and evil, our own beauty and meaning, etc.
All may say, "This is my way, my good, my evil" ;
None may say, "This is the way, this is the good and the evil."
The judge speaks the truth without knowing it, and acknowledges his own divinity without realizing it, when he says, "I find you guilty"; he lies the oldest and most terrible of all lies when he says, "You are guilty."

The god creates meaning and value; the devil is a god asleep who imagines meaning and value exist in themselves elsewhere.
Men and women are the gods they imagine to be elsewhere, the creators of meaning and value.

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I also have issues with blindly obeying unverifiable dogma which would result in harm to another.
To me, the most important thing about a person is that they exist, which they have every right to.
Do as you will, but do no harm.
Do not do to another that which you would not have them do unto you.

As it happens, I am currently writing a piece on this very topic. The basis of my essay is that we fling these terms around too loosely to make any sense of them. Good and evil, right and wrong, what do they really mean, and how are they related to one another?

My thesis essentially begins by defining "good" and "evil" as outcomes, and in particular, outcomes affecting sentient beings. You will appreciate that there are really very few unalloyed good or evil outcomes. That can give rise to such expressions as "every cloud has a silver lining," or make us ask questions like, "okay, so what's the catch?"

I define right and wrong as actions driven by intention. You will also appreciate that our best intentions don't always achieve good ends, and sometimes wrong intentions, acted upon, yield surprisingly good results. As Robbie Burns said,

"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promised joy."

It gets worse, of course. (Philosophy always seems to do that, doesn't it?) I won't give away my whole essay, but essentially, my concern is to show how some wrong actions may indeed be justified if the outcome is significantly more good than bad (intentionally).

But a very large part of the thesis is that unverifiable beliefs cannot ever justify a wrong action leading to an evil outcome. This seems to fly in the face of the convictions of many religious people, and not just fundamentalists in distant lands. There is much unnecessary pain caused to good people in the United States today by the religious right.

And how does that square with an unverifiable belief leading to actions with good outcomes? (For example, charitable and volunteer work more often comes from people with religious convictions than from secularists. This is a point often made by religious people in arguments with seculars, and I can't deny the truth of it, since it is a matter of pretty public record. Of course, some of the biggest philanthropists are atheists, but their fortunes make it easy for them to be generous.)

Well, you'll just have to wait until the essay is finished. Even I don't know the answer to that yet.

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

After you got your e-mail that you've been raptured I wonder if the IRS would devise a penalty?

- Art

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- Johannes Kepler