Skip to main content

World without Evil



Imagine a world without evil.

Goodness everywhere. People are as good as angels or better. Roses have no thorns and tigers don’t eat deer. No bugs and worms. No virus and bacteria to infect us with deadly diseases. No slander and plunder. No ruler and the ruled. Plain goodness, happiness, beauty…

Impossible? Why? Nicholas, the neighbourhood saint, chastises me for uttering blasphemy. “How can there be good without bad, light without darkness, joy without sorrow?”

“Do you believe in heaven?” I ask Nicholas.

“Of course.”

“Is there good without bad, light without darkness and joy without sorrow there?” I repeat his words trying my best to conceal my scorn.

“That’s heaven!” He is scandalised. “We’re on earth.”

“My question is why we can’t have heaven on earth if there is a God who created it all and has the power to create the kind of world He wants.”

“You can’t question God,” he stamps his foot impatiently.

“Why not?”

“Because He is God. And you’re…”

“… the crown of His creation,” I complete it for Nicholas who most probably wanted to say “just scum” or something of the sort. Every non-believer is ‘scum’ for Nicholas.

Nicholas believes that God is omnipotent but He won’t give us a better world. He can, but He won’t.

“Why not?” I question. “He must be a sadist to let so much evil exist when He has the potential to do whatever He wants.”

“He gave man free will and evil is a by-product of that,” Nicholas says rather sheepishly.

“Is the tiger that eats the deer a by-product of man’s free will?” I wonder. If I ask whether the coronavirus a by-product of man’s free will, I’ll be trapped. “Yes,” Nicholas will clap his hands and assert gleefully. “It is an outcome of what we have done to the planet.”

But the snake’s venom is not man’s creation. Nor are the claws of the beasts. If the same God who made the tiger also made the gazelle, then He must be a sadist, what else? If God can have his heaven without any evil but insists that His creatures on a planet called the earth must have all possible evils, He must be worse than…

“Than what?” Nicholas the Saint snarled at me.

“Than you.” I said.

Evil is a mystery. That’s the most fantastic explanation I have ever heard. It is uttered from every pulpit of every religious preacher on earth. Whatever you can’t understand is mystery. Why not admit that you don’t have an answer?

I have an answer, Nicholas. Evil is an integral part of the cosmos. The cosmos is amoral. It doesn’t care two hoots about good and evil, joy and sorrow. It has its own laws like gravitation. And black holes. And entropy.

Utter disorder, sheer evil, is the ultimate truth, dear Saint. Science calls it the second law of thermodynamics. In simple words, it means that everything in the cosmos tends towards more and more chaos. Leave your garden untended for a week and see what happens. Leave your house for a week to itself and see how many spiders and cockroaches and other unwanted creatures will invade.

You know what I’ll ask for if your God appears before me with the blessing of a boon? I ask Nicholas.

Nicholas stares at me like a wounded serpent. He knows that I am going to utter blasphemy. Every Saint knows when blasphemy is going to make an apparition to him/her. My experience tells me that saints go looking for blasphemies. They regard it the very purpose of their incarnation to purify the earth of all blasphemers like me. Otherwise Nicholas would have abandoned me long ago. He can’t abandon me, you see. He is the barnacle and I am his rock.

Nicholas doesn’t answer. He keeps staring.

I’ll ask your God to remove all evil from this earth. If He doesn’t know how to do it, I can teach him. It’s not difficult. Freedom of choice does not necessarily mean choice of evil, hai ki nahi?


PS. Written for Indispire Edition 329: Suppose you're given the boon by god to change one thing in this human world. What will you change? #UltimateChange



Comments

  1. Renu VyasJune 13, 2020 at 6:56 AM

    What you say is not blasphemy at all, it's the only thing that makes sense in this crazy world..but than, I have been called a rebel far too many times.

    ReplyDelete
  2. DashyJune 13, 2020 at 10:26 PM

    There would be no goodness without evil, no scale of comparison. It's hard to imagine such a scenario. Even if it's an integral part of the cosmos, we'll have to constantly fight it to keep the balance.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 14, 2020 at 6:54 AM

      Goodness can have its own scale. Contrast is not always necessary. That's why i brought in the example of heaven where presumably there is no evil.

      Delete
  3. जितेन्द्र माथुरJune 14, 2020 at 3:52 PM

    Your thoughts expressed herein are a thing of joy for an agnostic. Very logical. An auxiliary question is - Why the hell God allowed so many religions to emerge and continue on this beautiful planet which must have been a far better one in the absence of religions ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 14, 2020 at 4:54 PM

      So many questions that would render god redundant and impossible. Yet we have so many gods and religions. We ate not as intelligent or rational as we claim to be.

      Delete
    2. जितेन्द्र माथुरJune 15, 2020 at 8:43 AM

      Right you are. Our rationality and intelligence is more often than not pretended and showy only.

      Delete
  4. Sunbird IndiaJune 16, 2020 at 12:01 PM

    I just discovered this blog. I will be reading current and past blogs. This post is Great. Thank you for this. Can I share it with my website?
    Modular Kitchen in Nashik and Pune

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
37 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
34 comments
Read more

X the variable

X is the most versatile and hence a very precious entity in mathematics. Whenever there is an unknown quantity whose value has to be discovered, the mathematician begins with: Let the unknown quantity be x . This A2Z series presented a few personalities who played certain prominent roles in my life. They are not the only ones who touched my life, however. There are so many others, especially relatives, who left indelible marks on my psyche in many ways. I chose not to bring relatives into this series. Dealing with relatives is one of the most difficult jobs for me. I have failed in that task time and again. Miserably sometimes. When I think of relatives, O V Vijayan’s parable leaps to my mind. Father and little son are on a walk. “Be careful lest you fall,” father warns the boy. “What will happen if I fall?” The boy asks. The father’s answer is: “Relatives will laugh.” One of the harsh truths I have noticed as a teacher is that it is nearly impossible to teach your relatives – nephews
16 comments
Read more

Zorba’s Wisdom

Zorba is the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek . I fell in love with Zorba the very first time I read the novel. That must have been in my late 20s. I read the novel again after many years. And again a few years ago. I loved listening to Zorba play his santuri . I danced with him on the Cretan beaches. I loved the devil inside Zorba. I called that devil Tomichan. Zorba tells us the story of a monk who lived on Mount Athos. Father Lavrentio. This monk believed that a devil named Hodja resided in him making him do all wrong things. Hodja wants to eat meet on Good Friday, Hodja wants to sleep with a woman, Hodja wants to kill the Abbot… The monk put the blame for all his evil thoughts and deeds on Hodja. “I’ve a kind of devil inside me, too, boss, and I call him Zorba!” Zorba says. I met my devil in Zorba. And I learnt to call it Tomichan. I was as passionate as Zorba was. I enjoyed life exuberantly. As much as I was allowed to, at least. The plain truth is
19 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
8 comments
Read more