Obviously, she is exposed to many things
she does not see in America. On her blog she tells about seeing little children
with bowls or containers all around the markets and other public places
begging. The containers are used to hold the money they beg for on behalf of
Islamic leaders and teachers to whom their parents have given them away to.
The leaders exist on the money collected
by the children. If a child comes back to them with no money, they are severely
beaten and not fed. My friend's daughter chooses to give money to each child
that asks. Her goodness overcomes the evil, as the children will be saved from
beatings and starvation.
So it is in our lives in this World. We
are constantly challenged on how to react to things around us. We are in
conflict to judge or not to judge, complain or not complain, help or not help,
forgive or not forgive, sin or not sin, give or not give. This human predicament
is only resolved through a close relationship with God in our daily living. He
will guide us if we allow him to do so. This is our ultimate choice: to trust
Him or not trust Him.
Albert Einstein was one of the smartest
people on Earth in his time. I never thought that he would’ve been a believer
in a creator God. I read some of his quotes recently that changed my opinion of
him. In regard to good and evil Einstein said, “God did not create evil. Just
as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of God.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way,
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word
in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil
triumphant.” Reverend King’s thoughts give
us hope in this world. Good will prevail. Evil may do damage, but good will
triumph.
God did not want a bunch of robots as
His children. He gave us ‘free will’ so that we might choose to love Him as He
loves us. You might say He put the ball in our court. If we were created robots, it couldn’t be said
that we have a choice in things and we would basically be perfect without
knowing it. It is in our Godly dealing with temptation that we become true
children of God in this world.
There is a danger for us in this world
when we don’t always recognize evil for what it is. Joyce Carol Oates describes
it in this way, “And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that
evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power
to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active
accomplices.”
Another take on good and evil by Kahlil
Gibran in The Prophet states, “And
one of the elders of the city, said, speak to us of good and evil.
And he answered : You are good in countless ways , and you are not evil when you are not good .”
And he answered : You are good in countless ways , and you are not evil when you are not good .”
Putting Shakespeare’s words in
contemporary language he tells us, “Inside the little rind of this weak flower,
there is both poison and powerful medicine. If you smell it, you feel good all
over your body. But if you taste it, you die. There are two opposite elements
in everything, in men as well as in herbs—good and evil. When evil is dominant,
death soon kills the body like cancer.”
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