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Another perspective on evil

By David Fisher - posted Wednesday, 22 October 2008


If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Orthodoxy is less influenced by dualism than western Christianity that sees evil as external, possibly in the form of a devil.

John Töns has implicitly equated religion with Christianity and has assumed Original Sin is accepted by the other monotheisms but it is primarily a concept in western Christianity.

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The idea of sin and an individual, or a people, cursed for sinning is found in the earliest known writing. Samuel Noah Kramer translated ancient Sumerian clay tablets And one of the tablets written in about 2300BCE told of the destruction of Agade, a Sumerian city-state. Naram- Sin, the fourth ruler of the Agade Dynasty had , according to the chronicler, sinned by desecrating the Ekur, the god Enlil’s great sanctuary. In order to soothe Enlil eight of the most important deities of the Sumerian pantheon laid a curse on Agade that it will forever remain desolate and uninhabited.

Although western Christianity links Evil, Sin, Original Sin and God the ideas arose separately and are not necessarily linked. John Töns has taken a Christian concern, the problem of evil, and made it a universal concern. If one thinks of evil like Solzenitsyn, “Who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

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About the Author

David Fisher is an old man fascinated by the ecological implications of language, sex and mathematics.

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