So I was wondering recently if people decide how to behave based more on good examples they see or bad examples they see. Imagining for a second that people are either good or bad (which I don’t believe)- are good people that way because they’ve seen and admired goodness, or because they’ve seen and been repulsed by evil? Do we only know what good is because evil exists? I suppose this is the premise of the garden of Eden story. Adam and Eve didn’t know good or evil. Once they found out good was a thing and evil was a thing, they could compare one with the other and see good is much nicer than evil. If we somehow created a paradise here on earth could we keep it? Or, lacking evil to remind us how things could be, would we screw it all up? What are we dismissing as unimportant today because we don’t see it? I’ve never seen war or even a single person dying. If I saw these things often or even once, would I leave my job and spend my whole day trying to stop war and death? I know for a fact that my attempts to be accepting of those deemed different or weird by society are directly related to my own negative experiences as a child feeling ‘weird’. Maybe the best way to learn is by a bad example.
I visit churches—I write about it.