World Religions

My Christmas this year involved several gifts that made me question what was right and wrong. For starters, I purchased a game called Braid using some gift money. Normally, a video game would not make me question what was right and what was wrong, but this one did. Braid is the story of Tim, who is questing to find a princess, and the game is ironically remniscent of the Mario games. However, when you get to the end of the game, you realize that the princess does not want to be rescued by you, and when you attempt to, she runs away. This made me stop for a second. Is it right for you to violate anothers rights out of love? I don’t believe so. If the princess does not want to be rescued, you should be able to respect that, after all, people do tend to know what is best for them, unless they are crazy, or very immature. The other moral dilemma I got for Christmas this year was in the form of the latest installment in my favorite book series, Dusk Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. Dusk Watch tackles the common theme in literature, Good and Evil. Once again, I found myself asking me, is good really all that different from evil? In Dusk Watch, Good and Evil do whats necessary to achieve what, in their opinion, is right. The best metaphor I can think of for these two powers is Communism(Good) vs. Capitalism(Evil). Now you may think that since capitalism is evil, they author actually thinks that, but again, they really are the same in the book, they just want different things. The “good”" guys want everyone to be happy, whereas the “evil” people wish for survival of the fittest. I personally side with evil myself. The good guys wish for an impossible goal, one that is blocked by human nature itself. Even though they live only for others, their powers come from happiness in other people. In order to survive, they must eat happiness, making others miserable, and is that really all that good? Evil lives off of suffering, alleviating others of their pain, that does not sound all that bad. Also, they aren’t your typical bad guys, they occasionally donate to others, and their “seflish” actions are better defined as self-interested, which as a calss we previously deemed “alright”. In the end, this Christmas made me question not only who I was as a person, but made me think about my actions. Should I really try to rescue that metaphorical princess, and, in the end, what is the difference between good and evil, aside from their goals?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.