THE INNER CONFLICT … GOOD VERSUS EVIL!! NIGHT AND DAY!! YIN – YANG!!

In religion, ethics, and philosophy, “good and evil“ is a common dichotomy. In cultures with Manichaean and Abrahamic religious influence, evil is usually perceived as the dualistic antagonistic opposite of good, in which good should prevail and evil should be defeated.

In cultures with Buddhist spiritual influence, both good and evil are perceived as part of an antagonistic duality that itself must be overcome through achieving Śūnyatā meaning emptiness in the sense of recognition of good and evil being two opposing principles but not a reality, emptying the duality of them, and achieving a oneness.

These basic ideas of a dichotomy has developed so that today:

Good is a broad concept but it typically deals with an association with life, charity, continuity, happiness, love and justice.
Evil is typically associated with conscious and deliberate wrongdoing, discrimination designed to harm others, humiliation of people designed to diminish their psychological needs and dignity, destructiveness, and acts of unnecessary and/or indiscriminate violence.
the dilemma of the human condition and humans’ and their capacity to perform both good and evil activities.

The nature of being good has been given many treatments; one is that the good is based on the natural love, bonding, and affection that begins at the earliest stages of personal development; another is that goodness is a product of knowing truth. Differing views also exist as to why evil might arise.

Many religious and philosophical traditions claim that evil behavior is an aberration that results from the imperfect human condition (e.g. “The Fall of Man“). Sometimes, evil is attributed to the existence of free will and human agency. Some argue that evil itself is ultimately based in an ignorance of truth (i.e., human value, sanctity, divinity). A variety of Enlightenment thinkers have alleged the opposite, by suggesting that evil is learned as a consequence of tyrannical social structures.