Without good would there be evil?

I find this to be an interesting question that I not only think pertains to Taoism but religious idealogies and philosophies as well.

Without good would there still be evil or without evil good?

Without idealogy would there still be religious movements?

Without commanding understanding?
Just some interesting questions in general

 

Without Evil, we wouldn't be able to recognize Good.....and vice versa. Every action has to have an equal but opposite reaction

 

There needs to be Black + White
There needs to be Dark + Light
There needs to be Evil as well as Good
Though best; I have heard it said is "the misty, shadowry shades of Grey - a compromising of ideology for a mutual acceptance of development - then we can all get along"
I must confess however that I prefer Green - maybe it is just that colour that one is, to think that the battle for a degree of supremacy will end up with nothing less than an eternal stalemate

 

without lamps there would be no light..

 

We give the world all the meaning it has for us.

 

If there were no good there would be no evil because in order for evil to exist there would need to be an opposite of itself. Or evil could exist without good and no one would be good because evil would be all that we know.

 

I don't know the answer to this, but I think that the tao te ching says

"because there is the right way, there is the wrong way. and because there is the wrong way, there is the right way

 

Might there simply be the way?

 

We have to use these idealogies to describe our personal experiences as humanity because we are incapable currently of expressing them in any other way. Should we always have the concepts of Good and Evil? Personally I think they are more of a stain on society than anything else.

 

Forgive me if you only intended Taoists to answer... I only noticed it was in this particular sub-forum after I posted.
It depends on how one defines evil, and if one believes God is perfectly and infinitely good. If evil is defined as a lack of a good that should be present, and one believes God exists as previously stated, then we may say that good can exist without evil. Assuming God is eternal and always was, and is ever unchanging, then even before all creation His goodness would have been present and evil would have been impossible.

As for the converse, it really depends how hypothetically we are speaking. Might we imagine a universe where it was an evil God? This really would depend on what philosophy a person subscribes to.

Yet again I think it depends on what sort of God a person believes in. I think most Christians would believe that God would still reveal himself to his people since the purpose of their existence would simply be to serve him in perfect happiness.

I don't understand this question.

 

A better way to use our powers of distinction would be, is it true or false, correct or incorrect, pleasant or unpleasant, and we can determine these things by asking "what is it for".

 

The Christian ideal is nothing more than that, an ideal. The same as the Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish, pagan, etc etc beliefs are nothing more than ideals. So without idealogy there would be no need to have ideals on God or faith or even the afterlife.

In order for the modern human being to be able to do something they must first be commanded to do so by another human being, hence the concept of governments, religions, even bosses at work. Once we've been shown the first time we often can do it ourselves after that but imagine a world where everyone would know how to do what needs to be done without ever being told, and willingly does it.

In the jewish tradition God was both the creator of good and evil acts, but in the christian one God and Jesus embody good and satan evil so without the satan evil there would be no need for Jesus/God good. Without a punishment for sin or even more so without sin itself why need a redeemer to aid you in doing away with your sin?

 

From this standpoint it would be impossible not to have ideals, they develop quite naturally. To imagine a human race completely devoid of ideals and ideology is to imagine a human race without the ability to reason, have culture, etc. In the light you show here, your question seems impossible to answer, because it puts forth an existence beyond human possibility.

Not true. A baby need not be told to suckle milk, it does it by instinct. Humans act on their own volition, with or without the influence of others.

For these to work, yes, humans must be told how to act within them in order to form what we might consider an 'ideal living'. This seems to show the impossibility of a human race living without ideology.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this is exactly what the human race was before the fall.

Speaking from the Christian tradition, a redeemer was not necessary before the fall - so even by a Christian's own standards it is true - pre fall there would have been no Christianity. It simply would have been people living simply and as evidenced by early Genesis, probably enjoying God's presence on a level almost unimaginable (not that I or any reasonable person take the Torah literally, but I'm speaking in terms of the 'gist' of it). The only government and ideology present would be the most basic that would have existed pre-fall - an understanding and obedience to the few laws that had, as believed in the Judeo Christian tradition, been set down (by God himself, allegedly).

Let's imagine for a moment that in this tradition there was no Satan - lets use a bit of speculative theology and say he never fell from heaven and not a single evil act had been committed. Would good then not exist? I would say yes, since evil is simply a lack of good, similarly as cold is a lack of heat, it does not require the other to exist.

The concepts of what is good and evil have long been abused to manipulate persons in society by just about every form of government and religion; from this standpoint I absolutely agree. In order to find what things qualify, to my mind, requires an extensive study of human behavior through history and time and through many human cultures and societies.

 

You can have culture and reason without idealogy. But we don't need culture. Culture is a divider that seperates people and causes over all tension among us. Not much less than religion does. As for reason I can reason that without idealogy we would no longer be held down by dogma and the concepts of My religion or faith is righter than yours!!!! and Your God is less or not equal to my God so that makes mine right!!!! Religion is a way of expressing the beauty of the world something that science cannot do. But imagine if one day we learned to meld both the rational of science and the beauty of religion and philosophy into our everyday lives and as such no longer needed either idealogy to succesfully express things the way we want to. A world where we no longer need art because each moment of each day is a work of art to us, where we no longer need song to express beauty because beauty is something we all understand and cherish? Just a thought.

All throughout history there are examples of the mass populace not being able to do anything without someone starting it. Just because you may not literally command someone to do something doesn't mean that you aren't in some form commanding or being commanded.

Already answered that basically

You seem to misunderstand me still my brother. Without the concept of evil there would be no concept of Good because we would see Good as something that we experience every day at all times and we have no measurement to compare it to to say that it is good. Would good exist if good was all we knew? No it would just be what is.

 

You're only giving a reason as to why culture can be a negative, not actually giving any proof as to why we don't 'need' it. Every single person and every single society either in some aspects adheres to or has culture. I would expect you should be able to provide an example of any culture that doesn't have an ideology, or any group of people who don't have culture.

And yet here I am chatting with you without any command whatsoever. No matter how you slice it, people have free will and are able to act upon their own volition with or without the input of others.

It seems you are confusing your own position. We were talking about if good would exist without evil. Perhaps people would have a concept of it, and perhaps not (impossible to say one way or the other with any conviction - people conceive of things all the time that don't exist - evil can be conceived of without the actual 'doing' of it), but good itself would exist regardless of people's ability to recognize it.

 

without good evil would be made redundant

 

Come on brother, big brother (just the imperfect law-maker) is not explaining to you how to be good willed.

 

I'm not confusing anything. As I said if beauty, love, and good were all something we expressed in everyday living as easily as we currently express ugly, hate, and evil and if these negative concepts no longer had a place in our social "culture" as a whole we would not need the words beauty, love, and good to express things that are such because they would be as something we all knew and all expected day to day. Does this make sense? It does to me and it did to me when I was first taught this concept but if not tell me what does not make sense and I'll try to put it into better perspective for you. Oh and yes I can say with absolute conviction that without the concept of evil we would not need to express things as being good.

 

Once again you are talking about the expression of these concepts; you are either deviating from your original post or you were not clear in your original post which was:
Without good would there still be evil or without evil good?
The question you seem to be answering is: If humanity had not experienced or known evil would he express good?

It is almost as though I say something about a topic, and you seemingly contradict it... but on a different topic. I'm talking about existence, you are talking about expression. Was it your intention, in the original post, to have this discussion regard the expression of good and evil and not their existence? Whether or not humanity expresses a thing is not germane to whether or not a thing exists. I think we've both already agreed on that earlier in this discussion.

I think a major source of our disagreement is how we view good and evil. You don't seem to think good and evil really exist on any real and objective level - that they are just terms we apply to things that we decided were either 'good' or 'evil', whereas I see, in some cases, the difference and existence of good and evil being real and universal.