Assignment 3- Come to the dark side Karl Werner

People mention good and evil in a way that makes one think they are two separate entities entirely. A person is seen as good, or they are seen as evil. You are moral, or you are not. In my personal opinion, the reality is far from this common perception. Evil is to good as light is to darkness: they are almost never equal in amount, and sometimes exist without the other, but often times intermingle and exist simultaneously. 

There are cases where one almost totally eclipses the other. Charles Manson can be seen as a paradigm for absolute evil, and Pope John Paul 2 can be juxtaposed as the paradigm of absolute good. But, as much as we may not want to admut it, all good men have their falws, and all evildoers have some minisucle spark of good in them. I do not believe in the concept of absolute evil or good. Even in the Bible, if you're the religious sort, Jesus experienced temptation. Examples of this range from not wanting to sacrifice himself on teh cross to Satan's temptations in the desert. You can say that his resisting these temptations should his transcending goodness, but the fact that the so-called Son of God had these thoughts in the first places shows that there was a drop of impurity in him. 

This religious anecdote is a microcosm for human nature as a whole. We are a people of temptation. A good human being is one who does not act on the baser of these temptations. To rise above all of these temptations takes a saint, but the fact that they are there in itself disproves the myth of absolute good. If there is temptation and doubt, there is no absolute. 

Human nature is neither good nor evil. It is a gray canvas where both light and dark colors swirl. Some colors become more dominant in the painting, but underneath, all the colors are there. Our choices and actions define what our portraits look like, but even covered up by lighter colors, the dark shades are still there. There are wonderful people, there are abhorrent people, and there are average people. In all of them, there is good and there is evil. In the world of humanity, there is no absolute.