Evil and Devil

Jan 31st, 2009 by Norman

In my last post I talked about evidence of spirit and the divine coming out of synchronicity which implies an intellegent design, a patterner. Meanwhile, personally, I have not seen evidience, directly, of a corresponding malevenlent grand entity. There may well be one, a Lucifer, a Devil, but our stupidity, in itself, can explain much of the evil in the world, as Watterson has Calvin and Hobbs articulate…

There a puzzle that philosophers call “the eight match puzzle”, that I learnt as “Walking Camels”. Imagine you’ve got these eight matches, or camels on a mountain path… two camel trains of four camels each, coming to meet eachother on the path on which there is just enough width for one camel, and the two trains meet with just one camel-space left between them. The camels (matches) cannot go backwards! They can jump/climb over one camel (only one)…
—-o —-o —-o —-o o—- o—- o—- o—-

So you demonstrate the puzzle and solution once quickly to someone

—-o —-o —-o —-o o—- o—- o—- o—-
—-o —-o —-o o—- —-o o—- o—- o—- and et cetera
and then get the someone to try to do the puzzle. Most people, when they get to the place shown above, again and again and again make the wrong move. They can take hours stuck making the wrong move even though it is really one of the simplest of puzzles and the wrong move is obviously wrong (well, I guess not).

The point of this is that our brains/minds are wired (through our evolutionary history) in such a way that we survived, but they are not wired to reflect “truth”, and the same impulse that has most people flummuxed by the eight match puzzle has us floundering as a species. (I thinks that it is what underlies “Capitalism”.)

(So, is this substandard wiring malevelent, or happenstance?)

There are certainly “evil” people.
Scott Peck, in his People of the Lie, says that “sin” is falling short of the mark (and we are all therefore “sinners”) and that evil is the denial of sin. (And a guide to spotting evil, he says, is one, a queesy feeling in the stomach, and two, that evil folk are often labeling stuff as evil.)

Write me, please, if you wish, and tell me about evil and the devil…

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