Dualism

So, I finished Bosch this last weekend, and surprisingly I don't have many comments about the last 80 pages. But, one of the main points of the whole book was brought to mind tonight when I was reading some stuff about eastern religions.

Eastern thought sees the world purely dualistically. If that word is vague to you, think of a ying-yang. To the eastern mind, light is counter balanced with dark, night with day, pain with joy, and ultimately good with evil. To the Eastern mind good is co-dependent on evil. Without evil we would not know what "good" is. We are born into a world of contrasts where opposite extremes are always battling, but not battling to win. They battle "just because". That's the way things are. We may not like it when evil wins out, but if evil never won out we would be incapable of discerning good. This is the gist of the philosophy of good and evil held by Hinduism, Buddhism, and many traditional religions of the East. It is also a major undercurrent of postmodern thinking that is silently creeping in around us right here at home.

Truthfully I think on a philosophical level, the Eastern view is right. We're talking about a philosophy that outdates Greek philosophy by a few thousand years. In Eastern thought we have people who hundreds of years before Jesus was born, realized the futility of knowledge of the empirical world and moved on. Western history has unfolded for hundreds of years now, seeking desperately after objective reality that Easterners gave up on long ago. Now as we sit on the rubble of the modern paradigm many are realizing what gurus and buddhist monks have known for millennia. But, I am speaking only of philosophy.

On a theological level I think Eastern thought is wrong. Not inferior. Not simply differing because of culture or worldview, or anything like that. I think it's inherently wrong. I'll get to why in a second.

I think one of the problems Christians have faced as Eastern religions intermingle with ours, is that we attempt to prove ourselves philosophically. Our message to those who practice Eastern religions is one in which we rely on categories of "good and evil", or "sin", etc. This runs us into a dead end with Eastern thought. For them, good needs evil. Which, taking that to the next step would imply that God needs Satan. It would imply that somehow without evil, God would cease to be God. Ultimately that God's character is only determined as it is contrasted with evil. However good God is, Satan must be equally as bad. In the end, God and Satan are equal in opposition.

One can see in this how easy it is to fall into Eastern philosophy, which as I've already said, is a superior philosophy to the modern nonsense that we rely on so heavily. C.S. Lewis does a great job of explaining how dualism doesn't really work. At least not in regards to Christian thought. The truth is that Christianity leaves no room for dualism. It states that good is not good because we like it, but because God prescribed everything to be a certain way and when it is that way, it is good. It is good because God says so. Evil is not evil because it scares us and works against our preferences. Evil is a perversion of what God has prescribed. Yet, it seems we never speak of good and evil this way. When Christians talk of good and evil they rarely think of it theocentrically (God-centered). Most often, we speak of good and evil anthropocentrically (human centered). We speak against evil because it's bad for us, and speak for good because, well, it's just good. When we approach this topic with a human-centered attitude, we eventually have to admit to the dualism prevelent in the East. We've fallen. We now require contrast to choose the light. Sin and evil have become our crutch to determine what is good, to determine who God is!!!

Praise God that we are not left to our own capabilities to know him or his ethics.

I didn't really get to the stuff from Bosch, but I have homework, so I'll write the rest tomorrow.