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Comment by ccleve | Hacker News Reader

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 nationalism – and, ultimately, it gives voice to a political vision not an ethical one."

What utter drivel.

The moral face-off between good and evil is core to a great many religions, most notably Christianity. Concepts of right and wrong, and the clash between them, has formed the core of many strains of philosophical, religious, cultural and literary thought for 2,500 years, at least.

Such thought, particularly Christian thought, has influenced the literature of Western Europe for many centuries. It's hard to find a writer who was not at least aware of God-vs-the-devil story lines.

Sorry, professor, but western civilization has existed for much longer than you imagine. Not everything is political, ok?

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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

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.

>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.

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.

Technically, Yahweh allowed Satan to test Job as part of a bet that Job was only faithful because Yahweh treated him so well.

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.

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.

The idea we aren't mere pawns in games of the Gods is a rather modern idea.

The idea that "good" and "evil" are embodied with comparable power is actually a heresy in Christianity (e.g. Manicheaism).

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.)

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.

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.

In Abrahamic ethics, evil is the absence of good, you describe all of it negatively: lack of love, lack of respect for life, lack of belief, lack of generosity, etc. So from that perspective, God created evil but only in the sense that he created vacuum by putting matter next to it.

> "Well, we're gonna just wrap this up now but we could have at any point" is nutty.

That's explained in 2 Peter 3:9: "The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance." From that perspective, God has the motivation of a captain refusing to launch the last lifeboat until the last ensign is in it.

People construct ethics different than biblical ethics, sure. Biblical ethics is entirely about fidelity to God. Some people hate that ethical framework, but good literature is allowed to be divisive.

What are the "God versus the devil" storylines you are referencing? Seems most of those are much more modern in origin.

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.

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."

> 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.

The knowledge of good and evil is a far cry from the confrontation between good and evil.

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.

This doesn't seem to contradict my question. Unleashing evil as something we have to live with is not confronting evil.

The story is evil confronting good. It's a tragedy of evil ruining paradise. The knowledge of good and evil could have been supernaturally imparted, but it could just be describing the experience resulting from doing evil.

> At no point is that good versus evil, is it?

The serpent is the embodiment of the devil and talks humans into their first sin.

> Job? Everything done to him is with God's will.

God mostly pulls back and lets the devil have his way to prove the devil wrong. The devil had some philosophical argument about man's love for God being purely utilitarian... that Job loves God like a cat with a full food dish loves its master. The story was about evil putting good to an empirical test. So, in that sense, it's certainly about good vs. evil.

You're mostly arguing with the text's perception of good, which is common, but if the text is granted its own moral perspective, it's clearly about good vs. evil.

> More to the point, where are the bad guys?

In both cases the bad guy is literally Satan, which is why I chose those. There are plenty of other Biblical stories where the are evil characters and evil people groups, but I was responding to a question about the devil.

And the temptation of Christ is as literally God vs the devil as you can get.

It's entirely possible that the "Satan" in Job is a different entity than the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and that neither is meant to also be Lucifer, the Devil.

If you go by what the Genesis account says, the serpent in the Garden of Eden is just a snake that can talk.

And if you go by A New Hope, Darth Vader murdered Luke's father. Context is important, too.

Context is important, but so is intent.

Darth Vader did murder Luke's father in A New Hope. George Lucas didn't decide he was Luke's father and that the murdering was of the abstract "from a certain point of view" variety until he was making Empire Strikes Back. Which context is the valid one, that of the story actually described by the film, or what Lucas decided, later on, that it should have been?

So, as with the Genesis account, I think it matters what the ancient Hebrews intended the serpent to symbolize. When people say the serpent represents "the devil," that concept tends to be overloaded with centuries of Christian history and Lucasian retconning to make what are disjoint parts seem like a coherent narrative.

The curse that God places on the serpent is that he will strike at humanity's heel, and humanity will crush its head. Is that meant to symbolize the eternal enmity between humanity's divine and profane nature? Is it a political message, with the snake being a debased version of a Babylonian deity? A just-so story about why snakes bite people? Maybe it is the devil - but it's not the Christian devil.

> The temptation of Christ. Revelations. The Garden of Eden. Job.

Job isn't God vs. the Devil (well, not in the sense of hostile conflict, at any rate) and, while its a popular interpretation to associate the serpent in Eden with the Devil, that's actually not in the text.

The other two (especially Revelation) are valid points.

God and Satan weren't punching each other in Job bur their conflict was the premise of the whole story. Even if you think the serpent was a proxy of Satan and not Satan himself, does it matter?

Maybe you were making a narrower claim that God and Satan never physically punched each other. That is certainly true but narrow enough to be uninteresting.

> 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.

Christianity is about good and evil, but I don't think it's about good people vs bad people

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.

There is no God-vs-the-devil story lines in Christianity. Not in the canonical sources.

Job?

And the Garden of Eden?

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.

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.

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.

Revelations isn't canonical?

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?

What morality was The Odyssey supporting?

Are you just trying to goad me or do you seriously not know? The famous Greek virtues: courage, justice, temperance, prudence.

So which antagonist embodies the negatives of all these traits?

Um, by definition, all of them? I feel like I'm being trolled here.

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.

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.)

It's pretty obvious Poseidon was unjustly messing with Odysseus. It's pretty obvious Odysseus was justified in acting in self-defense against Polyphemus. It's pretty obvious Circe was taking advantage of Odysseus' lack of prudence.

If you seriously think the ancient Greek world was devoid of morality, you need to read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

I don't think anyone is claiming that "the ancient Greek world was devoid of morality". Only that it lacked an embodiment of evil as an antagonist.

If the point is that Hades isn't the basically-Satan from the Disney cartoon, fair enough. But some characters are atrocious. Like Minos. And Diomedes of Thrace.

No, you’re imposing modern ideals on the ancient Greeks. Respect for, and obedience to, the gods was a cardinal virtue for them, such that many Ancient Greek tales seem cruel or arbitrary to us because they were about virtues we don’t venerate as much. Odysseus was punished for his lack of proper respect for the divine. You don’t have the slightest inkling of what you’re talking about.

The Trojans. They stole Menelaus's wife. They weren't the opposite, but were certainly (to any Greek hearing the tale) the bad guys.

Certainly the Greeks wanted to paint them as strong warriors, just as any sports team when they win will say how good of fight the opponent put up.

Illiad is very much good vs evil. That's not the totality of the story, but it's there.

>I guess Beowulf and The Odyssey weren't moral face-offs?

No, they aren't.

What's the "moral face-off" in Beowulf? He goes to help the King of the Danes defeat the monster Grendel. Then he returns home to become king and eventually dies fighting a dragon. Who is the "bad guy"? It's not a moral lesson about good and evil, but about virtues and qualities like bravery important to Anglo-Saxon society.

Same with the Odyssey. What's the "moral face-off"? Who's the bad guy? Odysseus has to wander because he had angered the god Poseidon, and goes through a series of adventures and ordeals as a result. It's not a moral struggle of good and evil, it's again a tale about important qualities like obedience to the gods.

Neither of those stories are "good guy vs. bad guy" stories in any way.

Really? Why is Grendel characterized as "evil" and a "fiend in hell"? Why does Beowulf exemplify traits of courage, bravery, and self-sacrifice? Why is Beowulf already famous for his "good" and "glorious" deeds?

I was re-reading the intro, and ran into this gem[1]:

    105
	the wretched creature      ruled for a time
        since him the Creator      had condemned
	with the kin of Cain;      that killing avenged

Totally forgot about this literal reference to Cain (of Cain and Abel fame). I mean, you're about as wrong as wrong gets.

[1] http://www.heorot.dk/beowulf-rede-text.html

Nope. You’re confusing “antagonist” with “bad guy”. I’m fact, much of your confusion, and the confusion in the other comments, stems from conflating “protagonist” and “antagonist” with “hero” and “villain”.

Beowulf is a tale of a brave warrior vanquishing monsters, not a struggle of good and evil, anymore than a story about someone hunting a wolf described as “monstrous” or “evil” is a moral tale.

It’s similar to what the author points out about the Arthurian stories. The original French tales were about brave knights fighting beasts and monsters to display their strength and bravery. It was only later versions that transformed them into moral paragons fighting representations of human weaknesses and evils.

I also note you conspicuously forgot the Odyssey in your response.

>Beowulf is a tale of a brave warrior vanquishing monsters, not a struggle of good and evil, anymore than a story about someone hunting a wolf described as “monstrous” or “evil” is a moral tale.

Beowulf is a story about Beowulf displaying favorable virtues by overcoming a bunch of challenges. The Odyssey is a story about Odysseus displaying favorable virtues by overcoming a bunch of challenges. These virtues include justice, honor, courage, honesty, prudence, and so on -- this is the GOOD. The challenges include monsters, hardships, annoyed gods, and so on -- this is the EVIL.

Your analysis is highly reductive. I guess the New Testament about a cool dude that made 12 friends.

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