(This
is another restatement of my deduction of the origin of evil from the blessing
of free will. In spite of an apparent redundancy, I am still insisting on
including this additional entry in the Good and Evil sequence, because
of the great significance of the subject under our consideration.)
In
the past I used to believe in the literal existence of Satan (but mind you, I
never accepted the Manichaean interpretation of Ahriman), but later on,
I gravitated toward a metaphorical understanding of him, which has a lot
to do with my better elaborated understanding of the nature of evil. Here it
is, in a nutshell.---
The
bad is a side effect of the good. Evil, as we have stated before, is a
byproduct of the freedom of choice. The ethical integrity of the universe is,
however, maintained by the lesser significance of the side effect in the
formula than the value of the good, which has caused this side effect. To some
extent, this last elaboration is rather close to the utilitarian formula, but,
although I do not approve of utilitarianism as such, I cannot deny some of its
tenets a certain validity, which, in this instance, just happens to be the
case.
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