To dwell on good and evil is something most men and women would find daunting. Yet it is a practice they do everyday, whether wholly conscious of it or not. These terms are wholly constructive within the minds of mankind, yet there stems something within them a sense of justice and its seemingly unnoticed opposite, known as trickery. We all seem to agree on the term good, at least connotatively, yet what is good without evil?
If all that is perfect is good, could that which is imperfect be ascriptive of evil? We could look within the logic written long ago and take theological assumptions into consideration, yet that would be a whole range of different ideas of sin and its teleological presumptions that I can't afford to define. Instead let us take from it the notion: Do unto others as you wish to be treated.
It is a mantra of the mind to focus his decisions on what is wholly expected of him. We assume that this filter of thoughts (i.e. ones taken into consideration of the object of thought before it) is a guide in the decision making process. Yet what of this filter can we assume makes for a wholly good outcome? There would need to arise within his consciousness an awareness of the future to be certain that his actions create a precise outcome of good. Indeed, there is a similar faculty within our possession, which arises from our creative hemisphere. Its purpose and task, however, does not create euphoric outcomes within its workings like those of our active imagination.
We humans possess within us a trait that most animals do not have an equivalence of, and that is guilt. This emotion arises within us at very particular times, and often stays within our minds for long stretches of time; often becoming heavier and hard to bear. Yet it does not arise from a notion of God, as even an atheist would presume that there is benefits in doing "righteous" acts of kindness. It is the notion of where that benefit is received.
An atheist's guilt would manifest images of the wrong doings as affecting his earthly experience and nothing more. He sees his earthly experience as being the end all be all of his cosmic experience. What arises in his mind is hard to tell, yet assuming he thinks himself a saint or a demon, he must find some glory and wonder in his name and its significance. The theist would assume that in his cosmic experience there is a tally sheet of his deeds and that upon his leave it will be counted. This tally is then read by the gatekeeper and decides whether your credit score is permissible for eternal life in a certain form.
With a theological ultimate of a cosmic karma may not necessarily promote the essence of good at all. As, if such a tally were to be known by man, would not the demons of the world wish nothing at all to be his fate? A good atheist would know the benefits of having good in this life, regardless of there being nothing in the afterlife. In either respect the notion of good is valued in some degree.
Guilt then is an imaginative device to place one's self in the shoes of another and perceive our actions through a lens of possible temporal outcomes that affect our own lives. Guilt must then be a selfish expression of our own emotional psyches; that may or may not be wholly true, as our subjective experience is shaped by numerous illusions and filters, yet we are not always aware of what we know. Our own heuristic devices often lead to false conclusions and false guilt. Why then is such a device used at all?
For the sake of Good.
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