in the garden of good and evil, bad and sin, maybe innocence

I wanted to make a distinction between sin and evil.  Thus far I have been considering evil to be the lack of good, like dark and light.  Say some guy cheats and steals and ends up with all the money in town and spends it all on himself and lets the townspeople die of starvation.  That seems pretty evil.  I guess if he feeds his family that makes him a little better, but if he starves them that makes it worse.

What about his son who inherits the money?  He didn't cheat and steal to get it, he got it fair and square, but does he have an obligation to feed the town come famine?  It seems to me (and Beagles will correct me) that the bible, even that evil Old Testament, puts as much stress on doing good as it does on doing bad, but your run of the mill Christian of the present day is mainly concerned with avoiding doing bad and doing good does not extend beyond what goes into the church plate.

It seems like maybe I should be using the word bad for the stingy son.  Evil is kind of like doing bad for the sake of doing bad, whereas bad is just something you do out of laziness or indifference,  You are a bad boy for not mowing the lawn, but to be evil you would have to like chop down the tree because you knew your sister loved it.  (Isn't it odd that the three of us have sisters but no brothers, don't know what that means, just tossing that in there,)

I would like to define sin as pertaining to a specific act, regardless of the consequences.  Maybe you conceived a beautiful child out of wedlock, maybe you won enough money at dice to save the orphanage, maybe you got so drunk you couldn't shoot straight and the life of the prez was spared. All these acts had good consequences, but that does not change the fact that they were sins.

I chose sex, gambling, and drugs because these are the sort of things we hear about as kids, don't do them,and a patina of evil coats them, the cop of the feel, the toss of the dice, the toke on the reefer they are all accompanied by that clanging chord and the scent of sulfur.  Old Dog correctly points out that anymore when we head for the cheating side of town or the porno side of the net, or buy a lottery ticket, or enjoy a cold Blended pine, citrus, papaya and mango. Dank. Apparent biscuit, lingering, obscenely dry.  pale ale we don't feel a twinge anymore, but we know others think so, and I daresay we recall a bit of that forbidden fruit allure the first time we indulged.

But unlike altruism, which is right there in our DNA the moment the egg met that long tailed stranger,. sin is something we learn about.  If we were raised in a different culture we would have different ideas of what sin is.

I believe I hear Beagles rejecting original sin, and I couldn't agree more, I hate that evil old Saint Augustine.  The issue of innocence is something else.  When and how does one go from being innocent to being, well, guilty?  It seems like a subject not in the scope of the present discussion, unless somebody decides to make it so of course.


And what an honest man is Old Dog for reminding me of that wager which frankly I didn't remember at all.,  Oh wait a minute now I do, except I am pretty sure it was not one but a hundred bucks.

I was switching between CNN and FOX that night and what two different worlds.  Strangely they both showed the mini motorcade then the boarding of the plane then the plane disappearing into the sky.  If they had jet planes instead of helicopters I imagine they would have followed the plane all the way back to Washington.  I don't know which channel thought  of it first but I imagine once the other channel saw it they called out their chopper right quick.

Looking at CNN it looked like the fall of Duimp, looking at FOX it was all nothing to see here, move along, move along. It's still kind of that way.  Outside of a handful of their crew the repubs are all insisting that the emperor is wearing clothes.  See the way I see it, even though some of the reps see his loathsomeness and more importantly how he sabotages their agenda, they still like getting things out of him like that supreme court justice, and there is that 35% that will still love him when they notice that all the TSA guys have strange accents and are guzzling vodka and every now and then take someone to the back room where they are never seen again.  So they will have to make a deal with the dems who don't see President Pence as worth it.  There's that strange rule for replacing an inept prez, but that doesn't seem likely,  Impeachment seems the likeliest to me, but I don't see it on the horizon.  If Old Dog is willing I would like to double down on our bet over the next two years.