“I spend about as much time as any other well-informed person being concerned about the problems America is facing and, like everyone else, not having a clue about what I can do to help ameliorate the situation. I feel that I should be doing whatever I can. I certainly agree with Edmund Burke’s observation that evil can triumph only if good people do nothing. But evil has no objective, ontological existence. It consists entirely of the absence of the good, as darkness is merely the absence of light, not a black fog that can overwhelm the light. Only adult human beings can intend evil, and evil is always intentional. It is simply gratuitous malevolence, the intent to harm another human being (or perhaps any living being) when doing so is unnecessary. As Scott Peck argued, evil is a mental illness. It could conceivably be cured and eradicated. And that should be a goal of any and all genuine religions.”~Opening paragraph of Why We Must Help Those Who Cannot Help Themselves by Aidan Kelly
Your second mistake was that you failed to distinguish between Evil (with a capital “E”) and evil (with a little “e”). “Evil” is quite a bit different from everyday “evil.”
Jung understood this better than anyone. As he said, “The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semi-human, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, ‘divine.'” The evils (with a little “e”) you rail against later in the article, and rightly so, are better called by their specific names — perfidy, greed, maliciousness, and so on. Those evils with a little “e” spring forth from the unconscious. They aren’t going anywhere.
Big “E” evil is just as powerful and important as big “G” Good. As Jung said in The Seven Sermons to the Dead, in which his supreme god was Abraxas, “What the god-sun speaketh is life. What the devil speaketh is death. But Abraxas speaketh that hallowed and accursed word which is life and death at the same time. Abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible.” Jung’s vision isn’t unique. Every pantheon has an evil deity or two, except Christianity. But then, Jung would have remedied that by making the trinity a quaternity if he’d had his way.
In short, little “e” evil is ubiquitous, normal, not unique to humans, stems from the unconscious, and therefore can’t be eradicated. Big “E” Evil is part of the Godhead, and therefore it can’t be eradicated either. So it doesn’t matter whether you meant ‘evil’ or ‘Evil.’ Either way you were wrong.
You’re a gnostic. You should know this stuff.
You used an outmoded definition of religion.
You don’t understand the rules of the game.
Your love of the Golden Rule — you even quoted Hillel to close your article! — is destroying your chances of making the world a better place. To quote Carl Sagan from his article The Rules of the Game, “The Golden Rule is not only an unsuccessful strategy; it is also dangerous for other players, who may succeed in the short-term only to be mowed down by exploiters in the long-term.” The Golden Rule, is well, stupid. It just doesn’t work.
You aren’t going to have a tinker’s chance in hell of making the world a better place if you don’t understand the game.
Robert Mitchell Jr. 