From: doug@testsys.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.newage
Subject: Re: inventing good and evil
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 92 07:19:36 EDT
Distribution: na
Organization: SKAN Communications Inc.

In article <sbuckley.714025658@sfu.ca> 
(Stephen Buckley) writes: 

> Doug Thompson writes:
> 
> >Good and Evil therefore are invented by human society as it becomes
> >more complex, more highly organized, and more subject to various
> >insturments of coercive control. 
> 
>   how would you go about proving this conclusion is true beyond its
> reasonability at the end of an argument?  i don't think human beings
> are in a position to know what you assert with as much certainty as there
> sounds in your words.

"Proof" is a tricky thing when dealing with history, pre-history, or
anthropology. We rather postulate what appears to be the most likely
explanation of the information available and hope that our explanation
will become more thorough and more reliable over time as more
information becomes available.

However, when we examine 'primitive' societies - and there are stone
age cultures around to look at, and when we examine the historical
record - we do have very early legal codes from Hamurabi, for instance
- we see that the relative sophistication of the understanding of good
and evil roughly approximates the 'sophistication' (or complexity, if
you will) of the society which carried the understanding.

In addition to complexity, there are at least two general types of
understanding of good and evil in a social context, one which contains
a lot of coercive authority, and another which does not have nearly so
much of that. The readiness of any society to accept and utilize
coercive means also appears to be associated with the size, complexity
and centralization, as well as a few other factors.

We could get into a highly detailed and technical archaeological and
anthropolical discussion here which is probably not appropriate to
this newsgroup. 

In any event, 'proof' doesn't really exist in this kind of thing.
Several centuries of academic and scholarly inquiry into the question
have not led to much in the way of 'proof' though it has led to a good
deal of scholarly consensus concerning just how any culture's ideas of
good and evil develop, evolve, and manifest themselves.

Generally, hunter-gatherer societies don't get too fussy about
clothing or nakedness until after association with other cultures
which do have such body fetishes. While all human societies that I
know of have pretty clear ideas of right and wrong, 'evil as a
problem' only appears to arise when higher levels of complexity or
inter cultural conflict are encountered. Evil, for instance, isn't
really noticed by people until there exists disagreement as to what is
good and what is evil. Disagreement is not always present, especially
in the more 'primitive' social forms. In such situations the
"knowledge of good and evil" is learned at mother's breast and is
simply taken for granted. It is not an issue and people don't argue or
worry about it. Only when conflicting ideas are introduced does it
become a matter of concern - and a problem.

=Doug

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