500 Words of Evil

Good and Evil Don’t Exist
Thinkers of the past used to wonder, if God is good then why does suffering and pain exists? God must either not be all-powerful or he is not completely good. The idea of the devil was made-up to keep the idea that God is good. Without the devil, God must be both good and evil. If God is both good and evil then how can anyone worship such a schizophrenic being? This must have been the reason why pre-Christian western culture was polytheistic.
Nature exists on the same wavelength as “God”—neither good nor evil. If a mammal, besides humans, felt its children threatened, they would defend instinctively. The essay will later explain why humans are excluded from this. Any right thinking mammal will protect its children. But why? It is because children represent the parent’s genetic make-up. That is not to say that parents think, “the baby has my genes therefore I will protect it.” What is being said is that animals protect their children because their children represent their bloodline.
An old saying used to be, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” A more important question is “does the chicken control the egg or does the egg control the chicken?” Are animals controlled by their desire to produce offspring and ensure the survival of their bloodline? Or do the animals control the situation and choose to have children? It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that animals do not have the power to reflect and make decisions based on pre-meditative thought.
If this were applied to humans then we would act the same. If a mother, who owned a house where her infant children played, saw a poisonous snake with its own children, then the mother would act instinctively and kill the snake along with its children. But in reality there is no guarantee. The mother has the ability to reflect upon the situation and look into the eyes of the serpent. Therefore it is this reflective ability that has jeopardized our natural instincts.
Imagine if the mother had looked through the serpents eyes and decided not to kill it. The mother could have placed the snake somewhere else, which would require the danger of moving it. If the mother moved the snake then the snake could come back, she runs that risk. Or the mother could think “the snake needs shelter too, it has its own children” and run a larger risk to her children. The best alternative would be to kill it.
Humans seem to want to put things into white and black, good and evil. Nietzsche noted in his book The Genealogy of Morals that we used to think instinctively what is best for family is best for me. With Judeo-Christianity we have flipped our values into focusing on ourselves instead of on our bloodline. Instead of focusing on having the most children and ensuring their survival, we focused inwardly until we became too focused on ourselves to have children. Today there are many people who do not want children, a strictly modern idea.