>[President George W. Bush] has a vision which can be described with two other words: Manichaean paranoia... the notion that he is leading the forces of good ag

>[President George W. Bush] has a vision which can be described with two other words: Manichaean paranoia... the notion that he is leading the forces of good against the empire of evil, that in that setting, the fact that we are morally superior justifies us committing immoral acts. And that is a very dangerous posture for the country that is the number one global power. ... The fact is he squandered our credibility, our legitimacy, and even respect for our power. -Zbigniew Brzezinski, Former National Security Adviser, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, March 14, 2007 Cultural side note: "For Hindu thought there is no Problem of Evil" -Alan Watts, The Way of Zen There is great anxiety among the Western Judeo-Christian tradition about "Evil winning out over Good" that is not so much felt by far Eastern cultures (Hindu, Zen, Taoist etc.). For instance, the concept of Yin and Yang and how they define each other and rely on each other. St. Thomas Aquinas actually paralleled this concept quite briefly in The Summa contra Gentiles, though such an idea is quite taboo among many fundamentalist Christian traditions today: >There are in the world many good things which would have no place unless there were evils. Thus there would be no patience of the righteous, if there were no ill-will of the persecutors; nor would there be any place for a vindicating justice, were there no crimes; and even in the physical order there would be no generation of one thing, unless there were corruption of another. Consequently, if evil were entirely excluded from the universe by the divine providence, it would be necessary to less the great number of good things. This ought not to be, since good is more powerful in goodness than evil is in malice, as was shown above. Therefore evil should not be utterly excluded from things by the divine providence.