[According to Kabbalist Freemasonry, both good and evil are
needful or necessary because God supposedly created evil so
that free
will can exist. Traditional Catholicism taught, to the
contrary, that not only did there once exist a pre-fallen or
perfect world devoid of evil, but in the end of days, Jesus
Christ will utterly destroy evil, in which case a pre-fallen
or perfect world will be restored, one where there's neither
evil nor any excuse or alibi for evil, including the excuse
provided by Freemasonry and Kabbalism; namely, the old dodge
that evil is necessary, and therefore, good. Here we apply
the skeptic's scalpel to soime of the underlying assumptions
behind Kabbalist dualism.]
WHAT EVIL IS AND WHY IT MATTERS
John Paul Jones, 1997
I. What Evil Is:
In one of her songs, Madonna says that she's a material
girl, who lives in a material world, who likes material
things, etc., so, despite the lack of material in her
costumes, Madonna appears to be a materialist. Given her
popularity as a pop culture icon and her less than
magnificent musical material, I'd also wager that her's is a
popular opinion. As such, false it may be, but immaterial it
ain't. So, consider:
Philosophically speaking, a materialist believes that
everything which is exists within the physical, material
world and can be explained by material causes operating in
the physical universe, so there is no need to postulate any
supernatural, non-physical existents or entities to explain
anything. Thus materialists are often called naturalists,
because they deny the existence of anything supernatural,
which is to say, non-material.
Naturally, as a Christian, I disagree. For not only does the
Bible postulate the existence of supernatural or
non-physical realities, but those spiritual forces and
causes are held to be of paramount significance, as when,
for example, the prophet Isaiah, speaking of the Egyptian
army, says, "their horses are puny flesh, not mighty
spirits," implying that spiritual forces are more powerful
than material forces. Or again, when the prophet Jeremiah
asks rhetorically, "Should the axe boast that it chops the
log?", he is suggesting, I think, that the spirits which vye
for the dominion of men's souls are the real forces which
move us to do mighty things, so why, in that case, should we
boast of our accomplishments, as though we were the power
that moved us?
Yet we can, without appealing to scriptures, establish the
need to postulate the reality of supernatural (i.e.,
non-physical) causes, or so I submit, so I believe, and so I
will argue here.
According to Occham's Rule, a rule used by scientists,
engineers, and philosophers alike, we are justified in
postulating the existence of something that's non-observable
if and only if postulating its existence is necessary to
explain the existence of something which is publicly
observable.
For instance, in science, black holes and certain sub-atomic
particles are infered to exist even though they cannot be
percieved direcltly via sense-perception, nor indirectly via
sophisticated scientific apparatus, because only by
postulating their existence can certain known and observable
phenomena be explained. Even so, those sub-atomic particles
and black holes are infered to be part and parcel of the
material, physical world, so their existence does nothing to
establish the existence of anything supernatural.
Even so, while many scientists resolutely reject the notion
of supernatural phenomena, their own discoveries seem to
reveal what they refuse to acknowledge. The discovery of the
cause of scurvy is a case in point.
For centuries, men died of scurvy before scientists
discovered that the disease is caused by a lack of vitamin C
in the blood stream. (In fact, there is a whole host of
ailments which are said to be caused by the chronic lack of
certain vitamins and minerals.) Before science made this
discovery, scurvy was presumably defined or identified by
its observable symptoms rather than by its' cause, and
consequently, not knowing the cause, people who could have
accessed fruits and vegatables, thereby obtaining sufficient
quantities of vitamin C, died needlessly, so whether their
deaths were caused by a lack of vitamin C or a lack of
knowledge or both I cannot say and do not know.
In any case, my question is this: where, exactly, is the
vitamin C lacking if not where and when it is needed in the
physical, material world? If this lack of vitamin C causes
the observable symptoms of scurvy, presumably the lack is
real, and if it is real, it exists in some sense, but in
what sense, exactly, does this lack exist? Not in the
physical, material sense, presumably, for we cannot taste,
touch, see, hear, or smell that which is lacking. It's only
by measuring and percieving, via scientific instruments,
what is in the blood stream that scientists can then infer,
though not percieve via sense percetion, what is not in the
blood stream. What is not there cannot be physically
percieved, I assume, because it does not exist physically.
In fact, what is it to say that the vitamin C is lacking in
the blood stream but to imply that it does not exist in the
material world? After all, to say vitamin C is lacking in a
person's blood stream is not to say that it does exist but
in the wrong place, e.g., on the train to New York, or at
the supermarket, or in Madonna's refrigerator, but rather to
simply assert that the vitamin C does not exist where and
when it is needed.
Therefore, are we not justified, according to Occam's Rule,
in postulating the existence of non-material, non-physical
causes: namely, the lack of things needed, and specifically,
in the case of scurvy, the lack of vitamin C in the blood
stream? If the symptoms of scurvy cannot be otherwise
explained except by this lack, then is it not needful to
postulate this lack of vitamin C as very real and
significant, even though it is not an observable, physical
thing?
Now if the lack is not real, how can it be said to cause
scurvy? If the lack is real, how can it be said to not
exist? If the lack does not consist of a material thing or
physical substance, how can it be said to be part and parcel
of the physical, material world? If, then, the lack is real,
non-physical, and known to be the cause of scurvy, how can
we avoid infering that it is a supernatural cause? For to
say that something is supernatural is simply to say that
it's real but not physical, not material, and hence, it
isn't part and parcel of the natural, physical, material
world.
In any case, St. Augustine, among others, did acknowledge
the reality and significance of this supernatural reality
which manifests itself in the material world as suffering
and pain, and he had a name for it: namely, evil, which he
defined as the lack of things needed. For he noted that the
things which we call 'evil', such as starvation, poverty,
blindness, or ignorance, consist not of anything which
exists but of good things which are lacking, e.g., blindness
is the lack of sight, ignorance is the lack of knowledge,
starvation is the lack of food, poverty is the lack of
wealth, etc.
This abscence, or the awareness of it, causes us physical
and emotional pain, but pain and suffering are merely the
symptoms of evil, not evil itself, according to Augustine,
because, although all evil causes pain and suffering, not
all suffering and pain is evil, for it is not evil, in
Augustine's view, if the wicked suffer pain or emotional
torment for their wickedness; to say otherwise would imply
that just punishment is evil. Therefore, it follows,
Augustine reasoned, that evil cannot be defined as pain or
suffering.
Even Christian theists have fallen into the error of
equating evil as pain. C.S. Lewis, in his book "The Problem
of Pain," seems to equate pain as evil without realizing, I
suspect, the logical implications of this false assumpiton.
If indeed evil is pain, then the eternal torment of the
wicked would be an evil, and thus, if we accept the doctrine
of eternal dammnation, of which there is ample scriptural
support, Christ would have failed to defeat evil on the
cross, since pain, i.e., "evil," would endure forever in
hell.
II. Why Augustine's Definition of Evil Matters:
If evil could be rightly defined as pain and suffering, evil
could be destroyed by simply destroying life. Indeed, I go
so far as to think that the culture of death stems from this
materialistic and erroneous view of evil as pain and
suffering, which leads people to think that death, suicide,
or the destruction of life can eliminate evil. This view
leads to what might be called the "search and destroy"
method of dealing with the problem of evil. According to
this methodology, all we need do is find the material cause
of evil and destroy it. After, all, since materialists
assume all causes are material, they are logically obliged
and conceptually predisposed to assume that evil is itself
caused by material, physically destructable things or
causes.
Consequently, those of a materialist mind-bent, whether
Christian or otherwise, are constantly engaged in campaigns
to destroy the evil things or people they think are at the
root of the problem. So we have, for example, the "war on
drugs," the "war on guns," the "class war", and various
genocides--all of which are known to cause more evil than
they allegedly uproot, and today, as we witness the spread
of eco-fascism in Europe, which holds that we can solve the
reputed environmental crisis by simply exterminating many
millions of people, we also witness the widespread approval
of Chinese population control techniques, such as
state-sponsored abortion, infanticide, and forced
sterilization. Strange fruits and bad apples, all.
Rightly discerning the evil which causes some particular
calamity, ailment, or dire predicament is not easy, because
the evil does not consist of the presence of anything so
much as the lack of something, and things abscent but
needful are harder to identify than things which are
physically perceptile. Add to this the fact that it's much
easier to destroy something which is than to imagine and
create that which is needed but lacking, and we see why
materialism is the favored philosophy of dolts.
But perhaps the worst consequence of the materialist notion
of evil is that it causes people to disbelieve the Biblical
account of evil, which identifies our individual and
collective sins as the cause of human suffering and pain. An
utterly unbelievable claim, that, insofar as one thinks that
physical existents, such as hurricanes, guns, earthquakes,
viruses, and other material things are the necessary and
sufficient causes of human suffering. After all, there is no
observable casual relationship between sin and, say, a
tornado that wipes out a church congregation.
But in truth, it was not the tornado which caused people in
the church to be harmed, but rather, the lack of knowledge,
foresight, or protection which could have prevented the
suffering. If we say instead that the tornado caused the
suffering, as though the tornado is evil, we evade the fact
that either people were ultimately responible in some way
for the pain, else there is no point in calling anything
evil, much less inatimate objects, since the word 'evil'
connotes moral blameworthiness, and its practical utility as
a concept is that it helps us to seriously ask the questions
that need to be asked: "What could we have done to prevent
this suffering? What could our ancestors have done, and how
can we avoid making the same mistakes as they did? In short,
how do we avoid hell on earth or hereafter?
[Note: Nietzsche, among others, pointed to the fact that in
his words, "neediness is needed," which can be construed to
mean one of two things: 1) that evil, i.e., the lack of
things needed, is needful, and therefore, good; or 2) that
imperfection, the lack of things desired, is needful, and
therefore, not evil. The first meaning is logically incon-
sistent and empirically groundless, so it provides no good
reason to reject Saint Augustine's definition of evil. The
second meaning is both logically consistent and supported by
the evidence; also, it's consistent with St. Augustine's
definition of evil, not to mention congruent with the basic
premise of economics: namely, that man's wants are infinate
and can never be fully satiated, in which case, the lack of
things wanted is inevitable & necessary for life as we know
it, so imperfection (the lack of things wanted) is "needed"
as Nietzche put it, but evil (the lack of things needed) is
not needed.]
--------------------- End of Essay -----------------------
In the
book "Truth and Tolerance", Cardinal Ratzinger gives an
explanation of the contrary Christian view,
worth quoting at length here, where a few comments of my own,
in brackets, are added:
"In a philosophy of the unity of
everything, the disinction between good and evil is necessarily
relativised." [Here he's talking about all forms of
mysticism, not Jewish myticism, i.e., Qabalah, exclusively,
yet the hexagram is nevertheless a universal symbol of the
ideology which tries to "unify all things", as he puts it,
and as Freemason Churchward points out in "The Arcana of
Freemasonry", this ideograph, the Seal of Solomon as Masonry
names it, enjoyed wide usage long before "Judeo-Christianity",
thus attesting to its cross-cultural significance as a symbol
of the god of this world, the god of the dual horizon.
While
it's certainly true that the cross was likwise used prior to
"Judeo-Christianity", it's equally true, as Rosicrucian symbolism
of the Rosy Cross makes manifest, that the cross does not signify
duality in that, even according to occultists, it symbolizes only
the male principle, not the female principle, as signified by the
rose. What's more, the Catholic crucifix, as a symbol, is the
symbolical antithesis of the hexagram because Jesus Christ Himself
is there, signifying His great work and mission on the cross,
which was to show the world that "God is light and in Him there
is no darkness at all."]
We can find some important clarifications of this question
in the thinking of Guardini. Guardini thought out the basic
distinction between 'opposition' and 'contradiction', which
is what it finally comes down to here. Oppositions are
complementary; they constitute the richness of reality, in
which he saw in the many tensions of life the wealth of
existence. Oppositions refer us to one another; each needs
the other, and only between them do they produce the harmony
of the whole. But contradictions break out of this harmony
and destroys it. Evil is not even--as Hegel thought and
Goethe tries to show in Faust's Mephistopheles, I am 'a part
of that power which always seeks evil and always works
good.' Good would then have need of evil, and evil would
not really be evil at all but would just be a part of the
world's dialectical process. The sacrifice of counteless
of thousands of victims by Communism [and other ideologies and
religions based on occult dualism, incl. Satanism and the
"synagogue of Satan", Freemasonry] was
justified with
this philosophy, building upon the dialectic of Hegel, which
Marx [the son of a Jewish Rabbi, who evidently adopted the
Kabbalist dualism of Judeo-Masonry as symbolized by the hexagram]
then turned into a political system. No, evil is not a part
of the 'dialectic' of being; rather, it attacks at its very
roots. God, who as a threefold unity represents, in multipicity,
the very highest unity, is pure light and pure goodness
(see Jas 1:17), whereas in the mysticism of identity
there is in the end no distinction between good and evil.
'Good and evil, according to Buddhism, stand from the begin-
ning in mutual interdependence. Neither has priority over
the other. 'Enlightenment' is the realization of my being
as it was before good and evil', is what Sudbrack says about
this. The choice between a personal God or the mysticism of
identity is most certainly not a merely theoretical one--
from the innermost depth of the question of being, it
reaches out into practical living." -- Ratzinger, "Truth
and Tolerance", pp. 48-49 [Brackets mine.]
SOURCES:
Aquinus, Thomas, The Summa Theologica
".....evil is the abscence of the good which is natural and
due to a thing." -- Thomas Aquinus
Hick, John H. (1983) Philosophy of Religion, Prentice Hall
edition, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., where Augusine's view of
evil is discussed on page 43. It's the same as that quoted
directly above.
Lewis, CS (1962) The Problem of Pain: How Human Suffering
Raises Almost Intolerable Intellectual Problems, Macmillan
Paperbacks Edition, 1962
Maimonides, Moses (1956) The Guide for the Perplexed, Dover
edition, 1956 (Maimonodes held a view of evil very similar
to Augustine's)
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968) The Will To Power, translated by
Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, the Vintage Books
Edition, September 1968 (completed by Neitzsche in 1888)
Santayana, George (1905) Reason In Religion, Dover edition,
1982
END NOTES:
[This article was published in Paranoia magazine,Fall 2003.]
[Augustine's view of evil is similar to the Kabalists' view
of the Supreme Diety: Dionysius the Areopagites' "mystical
works are meditations on the theme of God, whom he defines,
after the manner of Plotonius and he Kabbalists, as a kind
of divine darkness or emptiness," i.e., as a sort of nothingness
or lack. ("The Occult: A History," Colin Wilson, pg.
130)
"My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge".
Hosea 4:6
"All the great evils which men cause to each other because
of certain intentions, desires, opinions, or religious prin-
ciples, are likewise due to nonexistence, because they orig-
inate in ignorance, which is abscence of wisdom."
--Moses Maimonedes, "Guide for the Perplexed," Chapter XI
