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It's a fine essay, right up to this point: "The ostensibly moral face-off between good and evil is a recent invention that evolved in concert with modern nation

• taeric 9y ago
  What are the "God versus the devil" storylines you are referencing? Seems most of those are much more modern in origin.
  • sjsbsh 9y ago
    Well the temptations of Christ for one. The various demons Christ casts away. The Passion has references to the Evil Spirit entering Judas. The Nicean Creed mentions the harrowing of hell (can’t get more God vs. Devil than first asserting Christ is God. Then he dies and goes to Hell for our salvation. Then he arises from the dead to join the Father). And that’s sticking to material almost 100% of Christianity agrees on. If I’d limited myself to the Apostolic churches (Orthodox/Catholic) I could add from their rich history (they don’t agree w/ sola scritura)
  • humanrebar 9y ago
    The temptation of Christ. Revelations. The Garden of Eden. Job. There are plenty of teachings about how demons are evil and dangerous as well. 1 and 2 Peter, for instance.
    • taeric 9y ago
      Garden of Eden? At no point is that good versus evil, is it? They disobey and are cast out. Job? Everything done to him is with God's will. If anything, this would sway the other way. Good literally willed the killing of his family, and he accepts that. More to the point, where are the bad guys? There is a general sense of good, but evil is less present than "not good."
      • goatlover 9y ago
        > Garden of Eden? At no point is that good versus evil, is it? It's about eating the forbidden fruit which would give them knowledge of good and evil, similar to Pandora's box. Why the snake was in the garden and allowed to tempt them is not specified in the story.
        • taeric 9y ago
          The knowledge of good and evil is a far cry from the confrontation between good and evil.
          • humanrebar 9y ago
            The "Pandora's Box" was the introduction of the first sin, the first human evil, which had far-reaching consequences that Ian Malcolm would snicker and rant about. The Christian narrative starts with this and climaxes with the crucifixion of God himself. I'm honestly confused how people can think the Bible, as a corpus, doesn't have good vs evil and God vs the devil all through it.
            • taeric 9y ago
              This doesn't seem to contradict my question. Unleashing evil as something we have to live with is not confronting evil.
              • humanrebar 9y ago
• dvt 9y ago
  That same quote made me roll my eyes. You would literally be laughed out of an undergraduate English class if you made that claim. I guess Beowulf and The Odyssey weren't moral face-offs?
  • ChrisSD 9y ago
    What morality was The Odyssey supporting?
    • dvt 9y ago
      Are you just trying to goad me or do you seriously not know? The famous Greek virtues: courage, justice, temperance, prudence.
      • ChrisSD 9y ago
        So which antagonist embodies the negatives of all these traits?
        • dvt 9y ago
          Um, by definition, all of them? I feel like I'm being trolled here.
          • tlb 9y ago
            I agree with ChrisSD. None of the antagonists acted out of evil. Their motivations ranged from unrequited love to annoyance over having their livestock eaten by shipwrecked men. They put obstacles in Odysseus's way, but not anywhere near the worst things they could have done. Odysseus was able to propitiate some with suitable offerings, once he understood the offence he had given. There's certainly no Darth Vader in it.
            • eropple 9y ago
              Nor, for that matter, was the Iliad. The Trojans had differing goals, but they were not "evil" by even the Greeks' own metrics. (And, following up, Virgil's Aeneid continues this trend.)
• plafl 9y ago
  Christianity is about good and evil, but I don't think it's about good people vs bad people
  • humanrebar 9y ago
    It's not "about" good vs bad people, but it has a lot of them in the stories. But in that way, Star Wars isn't "about" aliens and robots.
• pjc50 9y ago
  The idea that "good" and "evil" are embodied with comparable power is actually a heresy in Christianity (e.g. Manicheaism).
  • sjsbsh 9y ago
    But it existed! And it was hardly the only good vs evil story line. Furthermore, even if St. Augustine claims that the Manichaeans are wrong for saying that evil is a fundamentally existing entity, he doesn’t claim evil doesn’t exist! Quite the contrary, he asks how can an omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent God create evil? Some claimed that there was no evil. St. Augustine resolved that evil exists in the absence of good. It feeds off good. But it exists. So a good vs. evil dynamic still exists
  • eropple 9y ago
    It's one that, in mainstream Christianity (be it Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox), is not particularly addressed, though. Not with results that believers would, for the most part, be satisfied with. (A relative of Manichaeism still exists today as Mandaeism, though. I thought that was interesting when I found that out.)
    • humanrebar 9y ago
      I'm confused what you mean by that. Basic escatology (God and believers win at the end, Satan and sinners lose) is extremely well addressed.
      • eropple 9y ago
        If you treat the generally accepted Gospels as, well, gospel, then sure. But these are literary and ethical works, too, and that hangs on an "at the end" that is neither justified textually nor earned ethically. The god of the Abrahamic faiths has, what with the "omnipotent" label and all, no need to allow evil to exist, or to exist, at any point. Yet an omnipotent god can't make a burrito so hot that they can't eat it. So it goes with evil; the power to end evil must be circumscribed or there's no goddamn point to any of it. "Well, we're gonna just wrap this up now but we could have at any point" is nutty; the only reasonable explanation that I've ever seen come down the pike--unless you invite ones that make the Abrahamic deity a real shithead, and I can't stop you from that--is that there is a can't somewhere in that causal chain, even if the authors who dreamed it up didn't want to circumscribe the powers of their deity.
• xorcist 9y ago
  There is no God-vs-the-devil story lines in Christianity. Not in the canonical sources.
  • eropple 9y ago
    Job?
    • humanrebar 9y ago
      And the Garden of Eden?
      • xorcist 9y ago
        Both examples are good examples that there are no omnipotent evil power in Christianity, and that there certainly is no facing off. Both of these stories serve to show the power of God. There is no power struggle. The one exception where there is a struggle against evil is perhaps Revelation, but that is a bit of an outlier in Christianity as it serves very little liturgical purpose and clearly speaks in images more than anything else.
        • humanrebar 9y ago
          Why does it need to be an even match to make it a good vs. evil story? Tolkein is the classic example of high fantasy. Does Frodo square off against Sauron on equal footing? > There is no power struggle. This is an interesting but very different point. Are there implication in modern good vs. evil action films that violence is the answer and that the pursuit of power to conquer evil is good? Those are arguably recent trends in film. Though, again, they're hardly new themes.
    • indigochill 9y ago
      Satan accuses Job of faithfulness merely as a means to an end, and dares God to let him wreak havoc on Job's life in order to prove it. God grants Satan's request, but Job remains faithful. The story of Job clearly shows Satan as being constrained by God. There's no good-vs-evil to the story beyond Job's struggle to remain faithful.
• majormajor 9y ago
  It's hard to read those in quite the same way. Jesus, of course, famously got in trouble for associating with "bad" people more than "good" people. Faith vs works is an age-old debate in Christianity. And the Old Testament God was angry and violent, and in many ways would qualify as a "bad guy." Look at what he did to poor Job, whose only crime was being faithful. Demanding obedience is somewhat different than demanding moral action.
  • sjsbsh 9y ago
    Jesus associates with “bad” people is a gross simplification. Rejects is a better term. Jesus teaches two points. One that “bad” people are bad because they are rejects. Two. You must repent. He never tells an adulterer, tax collector or prostitute “live and let live”. He orders them to sin no more. The ones thrashed in hell (and he’s graphic here) are the ones who don’t repent on time.
  • goatlover 9y ago
    Technically, Yahweh allowed Satan to test Job as part of a bet that Job was only faithful because Yahweh treated him so well.
    • majormajor 9y ago
      That's pretty messed up, though, right? "I'm gonna put my relationship with this devil above my relationship with my devoted follower and ruin this poor guy's life and kill a bunch of other people just to win an argument"? It's blurry, at best. However, to the point in the original article, a good-vs-evil interpretation of Christianity is something that goes back a while, and I haven't personally read enough pre-Enlightenment church doctrine to know when precisely it developed.
      • goatlover 9y ago
        Sure, but I've read the point of the story was to combat the idea at the time that you only suffered bad things if you deserved it. IOW, it was showing that bad things do happen to good people. The part about Satan & Yahweh was just to provide a theological context for it.
• coldtea 9y ago
  >What utter drivel. The moral face-off between good and evil is core to a great many religions, most notably Christianity. What utter naive sophomoric putdown. Christianity has much more nuance in its tenets than some crude "good and evil" battle. It's only in modern-ish naive protestant readings when it reduces to that. There's huge nuance in Christian theology, beginning with how evil is present in all of us, the "good guys". From the biblical Fall from Edem, to the Gospel's parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (and tons of other things besides), and onwards to two millenia of theological writings. "Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone" is not about some naive Good vs Evil battle with clearly defined good and bad guys. In fact people who did thought that Evil and Good are clear cut and embodied in people (a person could be evil etc) where thrown away from the church and considered heretics, because it was seen what harm their naive stance would do to society.
• dang 9y ago
  This comment breaks the HN guidelines against name-calling in arguments, and also against snarky dismissals—especially snarky dismissals of other people's work ("sorry professor... ok?"). It also breaks the guideline that asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." The internet comment genre makes this sort of thing nearly irresistible to post, but on HN we all need to resist it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • ccleve 9y ago
    Name-calling point taken. Were I able to edit the post now, I would delete the last line. I don't think it breaks the "strongest possible interpretation" rule, though. The specific quote I'm responding to isn't ambiguous. It's not taken out of context, either. The balance of article reinforces the argument made in the quote.
• dragonwriter 9y ago
  > The moral face-off between good and evil is core to a great many religions, most notably Christianity. Well, Christianity is particularly familiar to modern Westerners, but really I'd point to Zoroastrianism, from which much the of the dualistic elements of Christian mythology are almost directly imported.