Purple State of Mind: Meet Craig and John (coming 4/21)
Add comment December 16th, 2008
Archive for December 16th, 2008
Greenwald: Pure Good and Pure Evil
Glenn Greenwald, of the left-sided online magazine Salon.com, articulated the concern of many on the left in looking at the role of faith in the public square in our foreign policy during Bush administration. Interestingly, he assigned this to a Manichean view of reality, a faith that existed before Christianity that saw everything as an ultimate battle between good and evil – a very simplistic faith he said early Christians rejected “as not appreciating the complexities of how the world actually is and the moral ambiguities of who most of us are in most situations.”
“When you see the world [through the lens of pure good and pure evil] what it means is that if you’re on the side of pure good… it means that anything you do, no matter how limitless, no matter how brutal or how immoral, is inherently justifiable because it’s being enlisted for the service of the good. And by contrast, anything you do to those on the other side is inherently justified as well because they are pure evil… To say that the world is not divisible into pure evil and pure good is not to deny the existence of pure evil. Pure evil exists, it’s just the exception and not the rule. And to view the world in these clean and clear and absolute moral categories will inevitably lead you astray. It will do worse than lead you astray, it will lead you to abandon the moral principles that you claim make you on the side of good in the first place.”
Whether you agree with this or not, I like this quote because I think it reduces the noise of the fuss between the left and right on faith to the essential ’signal’; it distills the difficulty down to the essence of what the issue is – from a view from the left, anyway.
Stay tuned for my assessments of what the problem might be from the view from the right…
Add comment December 16th, 2008
