Re: Salinger turns to the Dark Side

Jim Rovira (jrovira@juno.com)
Tue, 29 Jun 1999 06:32:51 -0400 

On Mon, 28 Jun 1999 20:42:17 -0700 (PDT) Thor Cameron
<my_colours@hotmail.com> writes:
>OK, Jim,
>You had me up until you started critcizing the Force.  You stated:
>
>>The "Force" is, well, watered down Vedas, so far as I can tell.  You
>>can't really have a conflict between good and evil if its the "same"
>>force on both sides.  Lucas is trying to have his cake and eat it 
>too.
>>At least the real philosophies seem a bit more honest and thoughtful
>>about it to me...
>
>But, in truth, the ONLY good/evil battle is with the same forces.  
>Name one 
>thing, one single thing, place, or event that is either good or bad.  
>Does 
>not exist.  Everything is both.
>
>More like the Vedas, the Upanishads, etc., and far less like Christian 
>
>mythology, God & Satan aren't warring Gods; they're the same guy, on 
>the 
>same team.  It's just a matter of perspective.
>
>Heads or tales, buddy, that's what it's all about.  The entire REASON 
>that 
>the good/evil battle is interesting is because it's opposite sides of 
>the 
>same coin.
>
>I've got one more really good example to this point, but I'm not sure 
>if I'm 
>belaboring it yet, so I'll stop & wait for response.
>
>Thor
>

It's really going to be hard to reply to this one because we're talking
about fundamental principles here, and I don't know on what grounds we
can proceed with a dialog.  In Christian belief, Good and Evil aren't two
equally powerful but separate Gods.  Rather, evil is something of a
parasite or deviation from the good, without any independent existence of
its own.  This is a different version of your "other side of the coin"
analogy, but is radically different from Vedic theology as I understand
it.  But in this there is a specific heirarchy of values and being, and
good and evil are defined within the context of the divine point of view
alone.  So the argument (for example) that "a cancer is bad because it
kills a person, but a doctor is bad (to the cancer) because it kills the
cancer" just doesn't apply here.  A cancer is a deviation present in a
created order that was made to be good but has gone bad or wrong.  So a
cancer is "bad," and the treatments to kill it are good.

Now if you go from there to interactions between animals -- say, the
cheetah and the deer, which is bad?  Is the cheetah bad for killing the
deer?  Here, we see two creatures that are not in themselves evil or are
themselves a deviation, but one is killing the other.  In a Christian
framework the existence of animals killing one another is itself an
product of a fallen world, and Christian and Jewish eschatology predict
that one day this killing will cease...the lion will lay down with the
lamb.  All fundamental antagonisms existent in this present natural order
will one day be abolished.

So Christianity is consistent in this area.  But if we want to argue
Vedic theology against Christian, well, we can try, but again we'd have
to establish some groundwork first.

So far as what makes something interesting, well, that's pretty much a
matter of personal taste.  

In the Vedas (at least some of them) the distinction between good and
evil is purely illusory.  My complaints about Star Wars is that it tries
to maintain the reality of that distinction and still keep to the same
basic ontology.  Star Wars theology is more of a pretty primitive animism
than anything else, and not very well thought out.

Jim

___________________________________________________________________
Get the Internet just the way you want it.
Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month!
Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.