RELI 216 Lecture Notes - Good And Evil
18 Feb 2013
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Document Summary
Moral evil conceived of as the product of free act involving human responsibility alone. Social blame, centralized as guilt, is in face a response to an existential quality that was initially represented as a stain infecting the human heart as if from outside. When a superior power is replaced by the feeling of sin, we can feel that we have been seduced by overwhelming powers. Each of us finds evil already present in the world and no on initiates evil but everyone has the feeling of belonging to a history of evil. Strange experience of passivity, which is at the very heart of evildoing, makes us feel ourselves to be the victims in the very act that makes us guilty. Sickness and disease are forms of physical evil. Fate that seems to lead the sick and the aging to the threshold of death tends to make morality the very emblem of the human condition.
