Dilip Simeon's blog

St Augustine's theory was that evil was 'nothing other than the absence of good ' The friction between the presence of evil in our world and belief in a loving creator God sparks some tough questions. For many religious people these are primarily existential questions, as their faith contends with doubt and bewilderment. The biblical figure of Job, the righteous man who loses everything that is dear to him, remains a powerful example of this struggle. But the "problem of evil" is also an intellectual puzzle that has taxed the minds of philosophers and theologians for centuries. One of the most influential responses to the problem of evil comes from St Augustine. As a young man, Augustine followed the teachings of a Christian sect known as the Manichees. At the heart of Manichean theology was the idea of a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. This, of course, proposes one possible solution to the problem of evil: all goodness, purity and light come...

NB:  Tony Judt was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize in 2007. For the first decades after 1945 the gas chambers were confined to the margin of our understanding of Hitler’s war. Today they sit at the very center: for today’s students, World War II is about the Holocaust. Inmoral terms that is as it should be: the central ethical issue of World War II is“Auschwitz.” But for historians this is misleading. For the sad truth is that during World War II itself, many people did not know about the fate of the Jews and if they did know they did not much care. There were only two groups for whom World War II was above all a project to destroy the Jews: the Nazis and the Jews themselves. For practically everyone else the war had quite different meanings: they had troubles of their own. ..And so, if we teach the history of World War II above all—and sometimes uniquely—through the prism of the Holocaust, we may not always be teaching good history. It is hard for us to accept that...

Our leaders talk a great deal about vanquishing the forces of evil. But their rhetoric reveals a failure to accept that cruelty and conflict are basic human traits When Barack Obama vows to destroy Isis’s “ brand of evil ” and David Cameron declares that Isis is an “ evil organisation ” that must be obliterated, they are echoing Tony Blair’s judgment of Saddam Hussein: “But the man’s  uniquely evil , isn’t he?” Blair made this observation in November 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, when he invited six experts to Downing Street to brief him on the likely consequences of the war. The experts warned that Iraq was a complicated place, riven by deep communal enmities, which Saddam had dominated for over 35 years. Destroying the regime would leave a vacuum; the country could be shaken by Sunni rebellion and might well descend into civil war. These dangers left the prime minster unmoved. What mattered was Saddam’s moral iniquity. The divided society over which he ruled ...

The war against radical evil requires us to take Nietzsche's project seriously: «  Ask a big question rather than deliver a grand statement : » This means: instead of focusing on God, look to ideals, and their absence in order to make them known and reassessed NB : As a reminder that love can persist in the midst of evil, here is a forgotten piece of history:   The Christmas truce, 1914 - Steven Johns The adolescent is a believer The child king that lies dormant inside of all of us, according to Freud in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), would be a "laboratory scientist”:  all his senses awakened, he seeks to discover where babies come from. This insatiable curiosity is so attractive that it overshadows adolescent characteristics: precisely because there is no adolescent without the need to believe. The adolescent is not a researcher in a laboratory, he is a believer. We all are adolescents when we are passionate about the ...

Google is knowledge. It’s where you go to find things out. And evil Jews are just the start of it. There are also evil women. I didn’t go looking for them either. This is what I type: “a-r-e w-o-m-e-n”. And Google offers me just two choices, the first of which is: “Are women evil?” I press return. Yes, they are. Every one of the 10 results “confirms” that they are, including the top one, from a site called sheddingoftheego.com, which is boxed out and highlighted: “Every woman has some degree of prostitute in her. Every woman has a little evil in her… Women don’t love men, they love what they can do for them. It is within reason to say women feel attraction but they cannot love men.” Next I type: “a-r-e m-u-s-l-i-m-s”. And Google suggests I should ask: “Are Muslims bad?” And here’s what I find out: yes, they are. That’s what the top result says and six of the others. Without typing anything else, simply putting the cursor in the search box, Google offers me two new searches and I g...

This is the Preface to Susan Neiman's acclaimed study in moral philosophy, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002). Links to reviews are available at the bottom of the page The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his inquiry do not strike a person at all. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful .  Wittgenstein , Philosophical Investigations , #129 'Every time we make the judgment this ought not to have happened, we are stepping onto a path that leads straight to the problem of evil. Note that it is as little a moral problem, strictly speaking, as it is a theological one. One can call it the point at which ethics and metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics meet, collide, and throw up their hands. At issue are questi...

When carnage is reduced to numbers and development to just economic growth, real human beings and their tragedies remain forgotten. Empires collapse. Gang leaders/Are strutting about like statesmen. The peoples/Can no longer be seen under all those armaments —  Bertolt Brecht German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt gave the world the phrase, “the banality of evil”. In 1963, she published the book  Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi military officer and one of the key figures of the Holocaust. Eichmann was hanged to death for war crimes. Arendt’s fundamental thesis is that ghastly crimes like the Holocaust are not necessarily committed by psychopaths and sadists, but, often, by normal, sane and ordinary human beings who perform their tasks with a bureaucratic diligence. Maya Kodnani, MLA from Naroda, handed out swords to the mobs that massacred 95 people in the Gujarat riots of 2002. She wa...