Well, Kabbalah is definitely NOT Evil. on the contrary, there is so much goodness and compassion, grace and mercy in Kabbalah.
Throughout the history, Kabbalistic teachings explain, that the supreme providence affects one’s mental condition according to one’s actions and moral status.
Usually, God tends to the side of grace and the person is judged for goodness. When a person is jealous of another person, he is allegedly appellant at God’s decision making regrading a specific person- as saying “why he deserves to receive all this wisdom and wealth”.
Philosophy of Good and Evil In The Bible
I think that Kabbalah is evil is a myth, in a way, unless you think one of your holy books was dictated by the creator of the universe, and there he told you what good and evil are, you’ll just have no basis for morality. I mean you need religion in some sense to have a generalize morality.
Without religion there’s no way to say the Nazis were really wrong to do what they did, or believe what they believe. I think that’s clearly untrue, I think we have some very serviceable intuitions about what good and evil are, and what constitutes an ethical life, and we converge on those intuitions.
I mean every culture agrees that cruelty is wrong. The taking pleasure in the suffering of others is wrong within the context of your in-group. There are many cultures think it’s good to take pleasure in the suffering of people who are not part of your tribe. But in terms of who you’re going to admit into your moral sphere, we have some very serviceable intuitions about how we treat the people we accept in our sphere.
The challenge for modernity the challenge for civilization, is to extend the sphere of our moral community, to include the entire species.
Our us-and-them boundaries are really propped up by dogmatism, I mean they’re propped up by nationalism, they’re propped up by racism and there’s many ways to divide your world dogmatically.
The most insidious us-and-them boundary, from my point of view is religion. It religion posits a transcendental object between you and this other person. Not only are you different because of your skin color, or your political persuasion, or because you speak a different language, you were different for all time for what you believe about God and what he believes about God, are so opposed and it’s going to require eternity to of punishment in his case to work out that difference.
This question of morality is an important one to focus on because, many people are attached to religion not because they’re convinced that the metaphysics make sense, but because they just see no other alternative to teaching kids right and wrong.
I think there’s a few obvious things to point out. One is that, we clearly don’t get our morality out of our holy books, because when you go into the holy books they are bursting with cruelty. Maybe the Old Testament, the New Testament, these are profoundly cruel and morally ambiguous books at best.
The Ten commandments – the first four commandments have nothing to do with morality they have to do with theological offensives, don’t take any other gods before me, don’t take God’s name in vain, don’t work on the Shabbat.
What are you supposed to do when people break those Commandments, you’re supposed to kill them, and this is unbelievably immoral. And yet and what we’re not doing that now not because the book itself is so wise, I mean to take a more relevant example- slavery is clearly endorsed in the Bible, it’s endorsed in the Old Testament, it’s endorsed in the New Testament. We all agree that slavery is wrong, we conquered that ground morally through some very hard-fought conversations, and also wars.
Religion was a very little help in that, it’s true that abolitionists were cherry-picking scripture trying to find ways to justify their project. But their project wasn’t coming from scripture, because scripture is clear, it supports slavery. The evil of slavery is not recognized in the bible and it is it is certainly not repudiated in the bible, and so the slaveholders of the south were on the winning side of that theological argument, and it religion was an impediment to making that moral progress.
Again, If it were not impediment, even if it were extremely useful that would not be a reason to believe that any of our books were dictated by an omniscient being.
