Essay: Good and Evil in
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Good and Evil in Fractured Paradise
Within Addewid, there is no native notion of "good" and "evil" in the Judeo-Christian sense of those words. Judeo-Christian theological dualism is a world view which insists that everything falls into one of two broadly defined catagories of "good" and "evil". Everything created by, and associated with, the Judeo-Christian deity (YHWH, or Jehovah, or simply "God") is "good", and everything else is "evil". From a very young age, let's say eight years old (as an example), each individual brought up in a Judeo-Christian context, even if it is in the ambient culture (such as the United States), as opposed to the direct perspectives of that individual's immediate family, is inundated with the idea that one should be able to tell "right" from "wrong", as though there is some absolute measure of all things that will determine the relative "goodness" or "badness" of something. This form of dualism is a "weighted" form of dualism, where one of the two opposing forces is necessarily "good" and the other is necessarily "bad". This is the world view of much of religious fundamentalism found within Fractured Paradise's Earth Side and in the perspectives embraced by the Addewin manifestation of religious fundamentalism, known as the Alliance of Truth. There is a form of dualism native to Addewid, but it is not weighted in any direction, at least with respect to any notions of "goodness" or "evilness", but rather as simply opposing forces. There are male and female forces in Addewid, as will as forces of lightness and darkness, and within the varied efforts of the Henin themselves. There are the "Controllers" ( Deveg, Nerth, Ruvel ) in opposition to the "Liberators" ( Treven, Cren, Hesbrid ) and the "Enhancers" ( Gebod, Temlad, Dothen ) in opposition to the "Tricksters" ( Resam, Amser, Newid ). But even these categories of "opposition" are not clearly deleneated, just as life in general on the Earth Side is not cleanly divided into what is "good" and what is "bad". Any particular entity on Earth Side can, depending on the context and world view, be considered "good" or "bad", which means that the reality of Earth Side is that everything is relative. There is no absolute, in spite of the growling emitted by religious fundamentalists on the Earth Side. This is what gives rise the fundamental conflicts within Addewid as humans start to appear on the scene. Humans bring their own predispositions into Addewid, predispositions that were cultivated by a variety of societal, religious, genetic, environmental, technical and personal factors. Religious fundamentalists believe that they know what is "good" and "evil" and they believe that they know what the afterlife is like, and they are universally appalled at what the reality of Addewid is, relative to what their various fundamentalistic perspectives led them to believe that it was. This sets off a reaction which is cataclysmic to everything within Addewid. The religious fundamentalists (Zoroastrianism, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Baha'i, Morman, etcetera), unified by their chagrine at the reality of Addewid, feel compelled to coordinate their efforts, in spite of the differences in the details of their absolute perspectives, into bringing about a collective force strong enough to coerce some sense of monotheistic, male-dominated, "weighted" dualism into Addewid. How this is done, and to what extent they are successful is what the Fractured Paradise narrative will present. |
