It’s that time again; over the next year or so, many things will make you question life itself and whether or not all this is even worth it.  The temptations of evil are and will be overwhelming, as they always have been, and many people will fail to arrive intact to their eternal satisfactions.  I talk about good and evil a lot, which I am very interested in discussing.  And I always intend to stay true to do good in the world, no matter the temptations.  Yet to do that, you have to have a perfect definition of what evil is and what it isn’t so that the good work of good can be done.  To that point, the old movie The Never Ending Story, I have always thought, did the best job of talking about the nature of evil.  Because without good definitions for things, it is easy to become lost in chaos, and evil proliferates under those conditions.  So, what is it, and why should we not like evil and fight for good?  What’s the purpose of any of it, especially since it’s so hard.  Well, the eater of everything in the movie Never Ending Story was the “Nothing,” sort of an all-encompassing consumer of everything, like a black hole in the imagination.  Something that “doesn’t exist.”  At all.  And the Bible is nearly entirely dedicated to this examination, the fight for good against the temptations of evil.  The pantheon of gods that Yahweh is fighting and trying to save humanity from is quite a vicious struggle that often gets lost after the opening pages of Genesis.  Why was god so furious with Baal and the gang of Mesopotamian deities who inhabited the land of Canaan explicitly?  An even better question is, why should people care if a public school board turns the other way when pedophilia is on the minds of the administrators and other employees?  Or care about the massive crimes of the Biden administration?  Without a good definition of evil, evil grows and consumes everything, which of course, it wants to do.  The only thing that can stop it is righteousness rooted in a desire to do good.  And the first thing evil does to destroy good is to destroy the definitions of goodness, which is undoubtedly the problem of our modern times.  But to put it simply, evil cannot exist without good to suck off of for its own sustenance.  In the beginning, there was no evil.  Evil only arrives as a byproduct of free will and the decisions of thought to produce or destroy.  Something has to exist first to have any consideration, so evil will always be a parasite of good.  Not an entity onto itself. 

So I’m happy to provide the Rich Hoffman definitions of evil because it works and will do quite a lot to destroy evil in the world, which is a hobby of mine.  I don’t think I enjoy anything more than destroying evil.  I do sincerely love it.  I wouldn’t want to do anything else.  But that is because of my definitions of good and evil and the nature of evil.  So essentially, going back to the Book of Genesis, God said let there be light, so there was, and our story begins.  Something was created, and it was good.  Good, by definition, is a value judgment given to something that is created.  The intentions of the powers of creation in human culture could be said to be good.  Now relative to other people, they may not like the product or have different opinions on its value.  But in essence, creating something with the imagination of human intellect, we could say, is to mimic the acts of God at the beginning of creation, and the universe views the process as “good.”  Evil is committed when something attempts to undo that creation or hinder that creative process.  Evil is all about destruction; it is the anti-creative force.  Something that tries to destroy that which is created. 

The ultimate form of evil in the world is laziness.  Someone who doesn’t want to create and desires to destroy the creations of others because they don’t want to live up to a high measure set by the excellent work of others.  To me, it is evil to do bad work or not work at all because they deny the world the acts of creation from the human intellect.  Drug use is wrong because it seeks to blunt the effects of human thought.  Financial scams are bad because they seek productive enterprise rewards without the actual effort of wealth creation.  And AI is wrong because it seeks to think for people who otherwise should be performing the work of a feeling being.  When someone wants to cheat because they are too lazy to do something, under my definition, they are committing evil because they don’t want to do the work of thinking.  And at the most primal stage of existence, the review was the purpose of creating human beings in God’s image.  We were meant to do on earth what was in heaven.  We were told to make heaven in the world and expand God’s kingdom.  The fall in the Garden of Eden was a tragedy more about the nature of free will than what the temptations of a snake could provide through eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  To do so was to be like the Gods, and that was not the point; the various forces that conspired to work against Yahweh in the Divine Council since before the beginning of time itself, which was a creation in and of itself to the excellent work of good in the universe, against the forces of nothingness too lazy to do anything else but consume the world around them for their sustenance.  Adam and Eve were supposed to know better and maintain heaven on earth to continue good.

With that definition in mind, then why am I against public schools?  Isn’t that trying to destroy something made by the government to educate children?  That is the mask of evil in how it tries to contort reality.  Public schools are designed to eliminate the mind of children and make their natural ambitions toward goodness unachievable, and, hinders their creative process making them agents of evil by the time they grow up.  Which I consider reprehensible.  And along that line of thought, why should we care about pedophilia, especially in public schools?  It is a very evil thing to do to a new and growing mind to rob it of its individual will toward goodness, to grow up to be productive and creative, and to expand the fruitful nature of the universe through heavenly output.  A ruined person in the form of an adult who has made many mistakes in their life has no right to rob a young person of their full potential.  Evil has no right to destroy the efforts of creation from the mind of the good. Suitable as a product might be relative to the beholder, but the process itself is good by the needs of an ever-expanding universe and is the point of all existence.  And the lazy way out of a troubled life is to consume from others what they couldn’t do for themselves, either by stealing virtue or innocence before a mind is fully formed and can act on its own accord.  That is why pedophilia is evil, public schools are wrong, drug dealers are horrendously bad, and a lazy employee is detrimental to all existence.  That is why we should all fight for good and destroy evil wherever it presents itself.  Then, of course, the world will be a much better place.

Rich Hoffman