Good and Evil

Hello,

I decided that I would expand upon the whole "is the world good or evil?" bit that I voiced my opinion on rather poorly in class. Again, I'm horrible at articulating my thoughts clearly outside of paper. But, anyways, as I had mentioned before, good and evil are nothing more than concepts that we as humans developed ourselves. Before we were brought to this world, good and evil didn't exist, and in a way, it still doesn't, at least outside of human society. The world itself is neither good nor evil, rather I would say it's neutral. For example, a Cheetah killing a very young Gazelle. Is it considered evil? No, it's nature. To use, it may seem evil, but in reality it is not. It is simply how the world works. Not a very good example, I'll admit, but it's late and the rain is affecting my thought process.

Also, good and evil is subjective. And many people have their own ideas over what is good or what is evil. Take me for instance. I believe murderers, rapists, gangbangers, drug lords, etc. should be purged from this world, because quite frankly, there are just some people who don't deserve to live and are just a waste of oxygen. Now, I REALLY hope I didn't soap box there, but I simply wanted to express MY views as an example. Feel free to disagree.

Now, that isn't to say that there aren't acts that are by all means evil. Though evil is indeed subjective, there DO exist actions and deeds that are evil to the core and are concrete.

---I commented on Rachel's post. "The Emotional Man"

He Was So Close!

Largely this blog is used for us, the students, to talk about things that “jumped out at us” in the texts we are reading each week. Thus I am going to show you something that jumped out this week. One thing that continually caught my attention was the concept of The Good and a person’s journey to The Good. I never thought of reality in the way Socrates thinks of what is real. I think something is real when I can touch or feel it. Socrates says quite the opposite. All the things we can see or feel are just shadows. He says that what is really real is found in the realms of The Good. Life, to Socrates is a journey to find The Good. Oh my goodness, to me this is so close to the believer’s journey towards God. No, we don’t have to get better and better on a journey to get to God. We are saved as soon as we ask the Lord into our hearts. Immediately we have a personal relationship with God, on the spot. However, many call our life following Jesus, a journey. It is a journey… not a tea party. God grows us with every hard, sometimes unstable, footstep of the way.

It seems to me that Socrates really had taken the time to think about life. He concluded that there must be more than the commoner’s living. Doesn’t that sound familiar? So many times people find themselves asking the same question. Working, eating, sleeping, working, eating, sleeping—“there must be more” they say. Yes! There is more! We were created with a longing for more. As humans we try to fill in the blanks ourselves, “___ will make me feel happy.” Yes, even Christians incorporate this in their relationship with God. “If God would do ___, I would be happy.” But the thing is, all we need is God. We need God himself…..no one else. We don’t need God to be the way we want Him to be towards us ….we need God. I’m going to go as far as saying we don’t even need to strive for high intellect, to have all knowledge. We don’t need things, money, pleasure… we need God. The, I AM WHO I AM, God. Socrates was so close to finding something so much higher than he could imagine.

this can is more eternal than me?

So, the things that last in this world are the eternal things. Now, I know that a can won't last for forever, BUT it will last longer than my physical body. So, a coke can is more eternal than me? ugh! How discouraging! I also had a bit of trouble understanding that everything in this world is just a series of shadows and that they aren't real, because they aren't eternal. So, yes, I know the can isn't technically real, but it's still technically closer to real than me. This, of course, does not include my soul, since that is eternal. So, one could say that that is the real me, and my body is just the casing for my soul. But, we naturally view our bodies as who we are, and this is how we identify each other. So, I couldn't help but feel a little offended at the fact that the can I was drinking from and planned to throw away, was considered more eternal than me. Not fair, Socrates. Not fair at all.

P.S. I commented on Hunter's post.

Truth

While reading about the cave, I had a few questions. I really had a lot of questions with the whole reading of the text. But here is my main one: While the prisoners are in the cave that is their reality. That is all that they know. However, when they leave the cave they see a whole new world. The outside world becomes their truth. Could this be saying that there is no truth? That everything is relative? That there are no absolutes? I do not agree with this belief. There is one truth and only one truth: Christ.

I commented on Olivia Yetter's blog.

Attempting to Make Sense of Things?

Honestly, I have struggled more with The Republic than I did with the Iliad, and I thought that was a struggle. Since I am struggling with reading it, I cannot really make sense of everything I am reading. I think I can pick out some themes each book is discussing, but I cannot put any order to my thoughts. This post is merely to put some things out there that ran through my mind whilst reading Book X.

Socrates returns to the seeming versus being argument when he discusses imitation. The imitator (sophist, or poet?) is the one who sees objects as seeming; he takes the truth and interprets it a particular way--the way he sees fit. The philosopher sees objects for what they are in their state of being (nature), so he is seeing their truth, but does not claim to know how or why? Ugh, I'm gonna stop there on this part.

So, for each thing there are three different applications of the thing: use, make, and imitation/painter, carpenter, and god. Okay, got that, but I still fail how to see how we went from imitation to discussing souls, Socrates.

The only part that I registered with any level of understand is the portion of the dialogue located on page 287, 603c: "Then in all this ... arising at the same time." Socrates is talking about battling with oneself when one approaches a decision with the soul to act one way or "ten thousand" other ways. The questions make sense to me and I can relate, but I still don't see how we got here.

I was amazed when Socrates actually makes a valid statement rather than questioning good and bad: "What destroys and corrupts everything is the bad, and what saves and benefits is the good." Then I got lost again when he started discussing the body and soul, the destruction of the body in relation to the soul.

Perhaps class will clear things up tomorrow, but to be frank (though my name is not), I've been a little foggy on most of this with the exception of that which I had already studied in PY-101.

Council, I apologize for this lackluster blog.

Commented Regis's

The Emotional Man

I was reading along and I discovered this quote:

"But when personal sorrow comes to one of us, you are aware that, on the contrary, we pride ourselves if we are able to keep quiet and bear up, taking this to be the part of a man and what we then praised to be that of a woman."

I was thinking about this quote and realized that it is still so true today. When we see men crying we think that they are clearly weak and cannot handle a situation. Often I don't want to see a man crying. A woman or child crying encourages sympathy but a man crying encourages mockery. It really makes me wonder why? He says all this in conjunction with his want to rid the city of poets and it seems to me any excess emotion. What would a society look like without emotion? Because without the "bad" emotion of sorrow where can the true joy and love come from. If we all walked around always smiling, smiling would be normal and boring not something that brightens our day. We would be living in a boring world with nothing to hope for or laugh about.

I Am Shadow

The good is eternal, and shadows are temporal. So I am just a shadow. Im visible to all, and I try to achieve the good. Socrates said that we must aim for the good, and we will spend our entire lives trying to get there. But will we ever truly reach it? No, we wont, and yes we will. We wont reach it while we are alive, but we can reach it after we die. We can go to heaven, and spend the rest of eternity with the ultimate Good: God.

I am just a shadow, but I will live my entire life trying to be the best man that I can possibly be. I hope to get as close as I can to the good, but I know that I'll never reach it until i die. That won't stop me from trying though. I want to be a good Christian man, an example for others to follow. I want to bring glory to God in everything that I do. Life is the ultimate journey from elusion to perception. We mortals are certainly a deluded bunch. We always think that the universe revovles around us, but we are very wrong. We are only a tiny, insignificant mark on the line of eternity. God is the only thing that matters in this life. That's why I try to honor Him with every single one of my actions, and I try to always give Him the glory for anything that I do. It's all God, not me. I am a shadow, I want to be a loyal servant to God until the day I day. And I want to be a servant to others just like Jesus was. So sure, I'm just a shadow, but I plan on using my existence for the glory of God's eternal kingdom.

I commented on Lucas' last post. It was a good one.