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This has a thought provoking message no matter how you believe. Does evil exist? |
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The university professor challenged his students with this question. Did God create everything that exists? |
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The professor answered, “If God created everything, then God created evil since evil exists, and according to the principal that our works define who we are then God is evil.” |
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The professor was quite pleased with himself and boasted to the students that he had proven once more that the Christian faith was a myth. |
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Another student raised his hand and said, “Can I ask you a question professor?” “Of course”, replied the professor. The student stood up and asked, “Professor, does cold exist?” |
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“What kind of question is this? Of course it exists. Have you never been cold?” The students snickered at the young man’s question. |
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The young man replied, “In fact sir, cold does not exist. According to the laws of physics, what we consider cold is in reality the absence of heat. Everybody and every object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body or matter have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (- 460 degrees F) is the total absence of heat; all matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction at that temperature. Cold does not exist. We have created this word to describe how we feel if we have too little heat. |
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The student continued. “Professor, does darkness exist?” |
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The professor responded, “Of course it does”. |
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The student replied, “Once again you are wrong sir, darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in reality the absence of light. Light we can study, but not darkness. In fact we can use Newton’s prism to break white light into many colors and study the various wavelengths of each color. You cannot measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into a world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you know how dark a certain space is? You measure the amount of light present. Isn’t this correct? Darkness is a term used by man to describe what happens when there is no light present.” |
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Finally the young man asked the professor. “Sir, does evil exist?” |
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Now uncertain, the professor responded, “Of course as I have already said. We see it every day. It is in the daily example of man’s inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. “These manifestations are nothing else but evil.” |
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To this the student replied, “Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is not like faith, or love, that exist just as does light and heat. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God’s love present in his heart. It’s like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light.” |
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The professor sat down. |
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Some people claim that young man’s name was Albert Einstein |
YOGA 
not so:
http://www.snopes.com/religion/einstein.asp
John,
Thanks for stopping by. It’s been a while.
I hope you saw my last statement from this post.
🙂
Peter
yes I did note your last sentence – but thats no excuse!
While the story’s definitely inspirational, I gotta say it’s very misleading and logically flawed in many ways.
http://www.rationalresponders.com/debunking_an_urban_legend_evil_is_a_lack_of_something
My beef with these stories isn’t about your faith… but rather the clear ignorance that most xtians have of how “logic” really works. For example stories like this thrive when it’s obviously a very poor argument.
kk well ill step off my soapbox now… if anything, just ignore my rant and check out the reply in the link.
Dan,
This basic conversation is a clash between Dvaita – dualism and Advaita-non dualism.
For me good and bad are relative presumptions. The bigger picture is that there is a supreme system with respective laws.
Thanks for your attention and valuable comments.
🙂
Sorry for being a spoilsport: though your intentions are clearly noble for the cause of Advaita, yet you seem to be ignorant of the fact that the Holocaust is evil, flood are evil and very real to those who have to suffer. Eg. when you are reading this you are feeling snubbed, the feeling is not Maya, or illusion nor is it pleasant. I am putting your down. Notice you are reacting to this. So what according to the Upanishads is evil? or for that matter, what is evil according to Monism?
Evil is that which deludes. There is a force which creates confusion. Brings in illusion and misleads us. So is this evil created by God ( in which case we are in the realm of Dualism) or is it God Himself (it) who deludes us. If the latter, then this Brahma is Himself capable of deception and not worth our times. So what is in fact the nature of Hitler, say? Now if you study the original Sanskrit and be patient and read most literatures available on the subject then you shall see that evil certainly exists and unless we are ourselves Paramahamsas, we do great disservice to Hinduism and mankind by denying evil. It is only the Karma Yogi who can ever hope to become an Advaitist.
I spent quite some time as an itinerant monk in the lower Himalayas and now am a professor who believes that Hinduism is more distorted than understood. One needs to read the original Sanskrit ( like New Greek for the New testament) to understand the nature of the Scriptures.
rhapsodysinger,
There is good and evil only for human beings. From Divine point of view there is an established system and this system is working in perfect harmony.
You know that if you exceed the speed limit you will get the thicket. In the same way the Divine system has her means and methods to control everything.
🙂
But getting me hurt is not in divine system, per se, God/Brahma etc. cannot be omnipotent or one without a second if I the system is maintained by letting some one go along and be clobbered!
The hurt and the pain are mistakenly accepted as bad thing. If you accept them as a divine guide and advise you will be very thankful.
Jesus says, when someone slaps you on the cheek, give them the other cheek. This is the real understanding of Divine system.
Positive thinking is the best way to reveal every Divine message.
🙂
First off, I believe that the student was not Einstein, and I don’t need anything but the text to prove it. Einstein was an extremely intelligent man, and the faults that exist in the text show me that he couldn’t have said such a thing. Light and heat are physical properties, which can be measured, emotions are not. So by saying that evil is the absence of good, you could very well say that good is the absence of evil and replace every ‘God’ insert with Satan.
Brian,
It is not so important if the person is Einstein, it is important the human perception for good and evil.
You are right that elements do not have emotions. Human science is working only with five elements/matter/ that’s why the science does not have emotions or morale.
the logical discrepancies don’t disallow truth within the meaning. just because it isn’t following patterns doesn’t mean it isn’t valid. just because an argument is rudimentary and gross doesn’t make it less than a sharp and intelligent one. No less is our worship of intellect as a narrowing of the mind to a single point, than is our misunderstanding of the simple, the subtle, and the truths which are lies, simply because we have yet to accept what we do not yet believe.
The argument has become so jaded when an honest conversation could have ensued here. Brahma is one without a second. since it is one without a second, you’re simply not going to figure it out. Best to realize that math can pin anything down to a miniscule point, but that which has no place and no time, and no point whatsoever, cannot be found by any instrument, nor the mind.
Good is good, evil is evil. The difference between the two is a matter of being on the way of uncovering the truth as to why the one we value less continues to be presented to us by the cosmos.
If you no longer have evil in your life, then surely you have attained brahma. So long as you speak, so long as you act, so long as you are alive, and so long as you have a perspective, it is not a lack of god which brings us evil, but an existence of life that ensues then violence, and evil.. Prakriti…my friends.
peace
Not that I’m impressed a lot, but this is more than I expected when I stumpled upon a link on SU telling that the info here is awesome. Thanks.
Enjoy… 🙂
Evil is not the absence of “god”. God is neither good nor evil, and does not exist in some beliefs.
Evil is the absence of good. Which is subjective in that what one person believes to be “good” another may believe to be the “absence of good”, or evil. This is based on our bias and indoctrination in the culture we grew up in.
Good and evil are human categories.
🙂
A lie repeated a lot can be taken as true.
Theres no God, theres no Evil
Theres only DNA code!
Nothing else!