From: ibshambat@gmail.com   
      
   When I talked about honoring the wishes of someone who was departed, someone   
   asked, “What if the person wanted to be evil?”   
      
   My response is that, if the person wanted to be evil, he probably was   
   confused. There are many possible areas of confusion.   
      
   The biggest possible area of confusion is  that between a value and the   
   misuses of the value. Wrong things done for a value discredit the value   
   itself.  Abuses in families, such as incest and domestic violence, discredit   
   family. Abuses in societies, such    
   as extreme conformity pressures and anti-intellectual attitude, discredits   
   society. Abuses done for beauty, intelligence and money discredit all of the   
   above.   
      
   So when faced with ethics being practiced in cruel and hypocritical ways, that   
   discredits ethics. And that leads many honest people to become anti-ethical.   
   Most of these people aren’t evil, they are confused.   
      
   To avoid that kind of situation it is necessary to practice values better.   
   Ethics needs to be preached and practiced in ways that aren’t cruel or   
   hypocritical. Misuses of value need to be done away with; value needs to be   
   preserved.   
      
   Ethics, as such, is necessary. Without ethics everyone would be screwing   
   everyone else, and very little of anything could get done. To work with a   
   person one needs to know that the person is trustworthy. Confusion between the   
   value and the misuses of the    
   value must be cleared up. Then there will be no identification between the   
   value and the misuses of the value, and wrongdoing done in the name of the   
   value will be eliminated while value itself will flourish.   
      
   So for a long time I was anti-family and militated against society. Then I had   
   a family of my own and figured out how foolish that stance was.  The value   
   itself is a good one; what’s bad is wrong things done in its name. Most   
   people will want to have    
   family, and most people will want to live in society. I want to see more   
   people have better family life, and I want to see them forming societies that   
   are vibrant, honest and humane and that have a greater place for culture.   
      
   When something that’s not good masquerades as good, some people may decide   
   that goodness is the problem. It is not; the problem is bad things   
   masquerading as good things.  Then many people make a very bad error. It is   
   that of identifying the good with    
   the pretence and deciding that the good itself is bad. This gives the usurpers   
   of the good too much credit. They neither invented nor own the good, and good   
   has existed for far longer than have they. With beauty, it is not owned by   
   stupid teenagers and    
   unethical plastic surgeons; and attacking beauty, which has existed for a very   
   long time, for the sins of stupid teenagers and unethical plastic surgeons is   
   a stupid thing to do.   
      
   If somebody wants to be evil, most likely he has made that miscalculation. He   
   saw things pretend to be good that aren’t, and he decided that the problem   
   is the good. In this situation, the reason for rejecting ethics is an   
   understandable one. The    
   solution is to make a distinction between the value and the abuses of the   
   value. Then many people who are at risk for criminal or antisocial behaviour   
   will avoid this confusion and take a better path.   
      
   Different mistakes have different reasons. Here the reason for the mistake   
   comes from sincerity, which speaks in favor of the person who is making it.   
   Rather than seeing such people as evil, the solution is to see what they are   
   right about and correct    
   the underlying problems. Make a radical break between the value and the   
   misuses of the value and see the value flourish while wrongdoing in its name   
   is corrected. And see the genuine good thrive all across the board.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)