Monday, August 24, 2009
Moral quandary
posted at 9:15 AM |
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Having just finished Danial Silva's engrossing current best seller, The Defector, I find myself in a moral quandary about good and evil as far as doing evil deeds in the service of good. I won't go into details about the plot in case a rare reader or two will read the book (the word "spoiler" never prevents me from reading on and then inevitably being sorry I did). Silva's books follow the life and experiences of a grandchild of German Jews who has become a superbly skillful soldier. Gabriel Allon and his mentor go through their lives trying to correct the significant evils done to people they love and to all the other millions attacked and killed by Hitler and Stalin, among others. They champion the bravery of those who withstood the attacks and profess to be doing everything in the name of people who went before them. Theirs is a tone of deep and intense beneficence and the moral high-road.
And yet they perpetrate great violence and kill many people, often viciously. Does God (if there even is a God, of course) distinguish between a bad man's prayers and a good man's prayers? Is it, in fact, morally acceptable for A Good Person to perform vicious and violent acts, to annihilate a many people, simply because he is good and they are not?
And yet they perpetrate great violence and kill many people, often viciously. Does God (if there even is a God, of course) distinguish between a bad man's prayers and a good man's prayers? Is it, in fact, morally acceptable for A Good Person to perform vicious and violent acts, to annihilate a many people, simply because he is good and they are not?
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