Quote:
Originally posted by DJzen
*the master of Zen cracks his spiritual knuckles*
Okay, let us begin with "evil". What is evil? Evil can not be clearly defined. The only premise that I hear over and over when "evil" is defined is things that are harmful. Now, let's go out on a HUGE limb right here and say that there IS a definition of evil and that it IS things that are harmful. Harmful would include fighting and therefore by fighting Satan, the "embodiment of 'evil'", you would just be committing an act of "evil". Now, this obviously makes no sense because how can combatting evil be an act of evil? Okay, let's expand our definition of "evil" a bit. Let's say that evil is an act which only causes harm and does not protect. Hence, defending oneself against evil would not be qualified as evil. However, simply joining the side of "good" without being personally attacked is not defending oneself. This is what is called a "pre-emptive attack" which is an attack that is made to counter a POTENTIAL attack. Given that humans are capable of error, a pre-emptive attack uses flawed logic. Watch Minority Report. Now, the only POSSIBLE conclusion that I personally can make is that the only way to fight against evil while remaining good is to defend oneself as is presently necesarry. This means only fight back as much as you personally have to in order to survive (and feel free to use as loose of a definition of survive as you like, I won't debate it). After that, you would only be commiting an act of "evil" of your own. Now, to fight Satan in this manner you would have to be personally threatened by Satan and fight back only until it was no longer necesarry. This means as soon as he "runs away like a wussy", you have to stop fighting or you would only be committing an act of evil.
Now, this STILL makes no sense whatsoever because Satan is the "embodiment of 'evil'" and therefore, if he is fought in an "evil" method, you are still fighting "evil", and therefore cannot POSSIBLY be committing an act of "evil". This brings us back to the question of "what is evil?" Well, let's try a different method of thinking. Let's start at the other end of the problem. Let's start with Satan.
Satan is "evil" incarnate, right? Well, on this assumption we can only assume that Satan is only capable of acts of evil. Given this assumption, we must only look at Satan's acts to see what "evil" is. For example, the act that got Lucifer cast down from heaven. Lucifer (god's favorite, right?) took the form of a snake and tempted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. From this, we can see that taking on alternate forms, manipulation, deception, temptation and knowledge are evil. In addition, the icing on the cake was that God SPECIFICALLY said NOT to eat the forbidden fruit. It's hard to misunderstand that one. Lucifer talked Adam and Eve (well, Eve really...) into disobeying God, and they disobeyed God. We can therefore assume that God is "good".
Well, we know that you can't simplify the definition of "evil", so you can't just say an act in and of itself is "evil" because it may be an act of "evil" done in order to do "good". The example of a man stealing bread to feed his starving family comes to mind. Therefore, the acts of taking an alternate form, manipulation, etc. are not evil in and of themselves. The qualifier that makes them "evil" is that they were done to disobey God. This must make God "good". It can therefore be concluded that "evil" acts are acts that are done in defiance of God. This makes some amount of sense, as God created the universe according to the bible. Thus, all one has to do to be "good" is to be in accordance with what God commands. Simple enough, right?
Now we get to another interesting subject.... Fighting Satan. Let's assume God commanded us to fight Satan. This would be a futile effort, as Satan is more powerful than any human. We're not talking Superman or Magneto here. We're talking about something that cannot be killed. Not by a human anyway. It seems that God would be able to destroy Satan since God is omnipotent, but hasn't for some reason. Let's not question this since that would be digression. Now, this means that to do "good" would in this case be futile. However, looking at this from a more metaphorical standpoint, you can fight Satan in a non-literal way. To do this you would simply have to obey God and defy Satan.
The only possibility I can think of as far as "fighting Satan" is living according to the bible, and giving a quick glance to select passages from the Old Testament, we're none of us doing that.
Now that I've wasted your and my time I'd like to say this much. I only wrote this as a mental excersize. If you're upset by this, I apologize and say to you that you're taking me far too seriously. I am not trying to say who's right and who's wrong. If you take this as anything more than something to think about, you are misinterpreting me completely. I just wanted to give people some brain fodder.
You said what I was about how can we fight the epitome of evil without being evil if fighting is evil. The only way to fight it is not to fight but to resist evil. Not fight "resist".