Good/Bad Balance

[Yusayoh]

What I mean is like, if a good thing happens to you, will a bad one happen to you of that same intensity.

I partially believe this because I've tried to keep track of good things that happen to me and then the bad.

Example: I went to Great America yesterday. = Good
I walked around the park three times looking for my friends = Bad

[TaCktiX]

An interesting hypothesis. Perhaps a psychological conservation of good and bad? One must cancel the other to zero?

I personally do not believe in this. If you're religious, everything has a purpose. If you're Christian, everything has a purpose to make everything work out for good in the end for all believers (paraphrased from one of the Gospels, I forget which). If you're logical, it might work. However, by that same token, every very evil person in the world would at the same time have to have done some good, or had some good happen to him IN EQUAL MEASURE to the bad. Doesn't really make sense in that light, because last time I checked it's really hard to excuse Adolf Hitler for killing 13 million people.

[Darksage]

I be;ieve in a balance between good and bad things. but not necessarily the wy you mean it. One good thing of x value doesnt have to mean one bad thing of x value, it could be a series of bad things equaling x, etc.

[gakekuroi]

Quote"every very evil person in the world would at the same time have to have done some good, or had some good happen to him IN EQUAL MEASURE to the bad"
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Thats not necessarily the case , how I think it should work is, for every really evil person there should be a really good person right? and if something happens good to someone,then something bad happens to someone somewhere else to maintain balance or Equaliberium(sorry if spelled wrong)
and depending on how good or bad the person or that sercumstance was it may take a few lesser to equal just that one.

also Adolf Hilter did kill a lot of people , but so did Stalin or did everyone forget and it was his own people to top of it off

[bakafish007]

well that is an interesting theory. but think about: if everyone had a good thing and a bad thing happen to them, each one cancelling each other out, there are no good people and no bad people. after all, if someone did a good thing to someone, then they'd also have to do a bad thing, because that would mean that for every good thing they did, they would cancel it out with a bad thing, and vice versa.
i think a better way of phrasing that theory is thus (you're free to poke holes in it):
the universe is nothing but an attempt to balance itself out. for every good deed done by someone, a bad deed will be done by someone. when that balance is shifted in a great way (eg: genocide), there will be a shift in the opposite direction to counteract the imbalance created. as a result, chaos and respite are both needed to keep everything in balance (the big bang, for example, could be chaos, and the millenia afterwards is the respite. in which case, sooner or later there will be an imbalance of respite, meaning a sudden increase of chaos in order to nullify that imbalance created.
did you mean something like that?

[gakekuroi]

kinda like what I was saying , but yours had better vocabulary :p

[SoC Kemaro]

That sounds really cool Bakafish, it sounds a bit more plausible. Heh, and if you think of it that way, after Hitler killed millions of people, the US had the Baby Boom 20 years later.

[bakafish007]

Exactly! that's what i was thinking! it's actually part of the wave theory. another example can be money: i know this guy who cheats ppl out of their money. i don't know if it's a klepto issue, or if it's greed, but he does it. okay, he has a load of money, but he has already had 2-3 mini-heart-attacks.
they say that the wheel of god grinds slow but fine

[gakekuroi]

yup thats so true baby boom, didnt all of north america have one though ?:/

[bakafish007]

not just NA, but england too i believe

[TaCktiX]

The Baby Boom was because of all the soldiers coming back to their wives ready to enjoy life...to the fullest extent. Sure Hitler and his war was the cause, but him killing Jews in the tens of millions in no way influenced the soldiers to want to reproduce excessively. It was generic economic post-war prosperity, especially considering the Great Depression had just ended. I think you're sticking a framework of "good/bad balance" and ignoring the other true causes and effects.

[bakafish007]

we were talking in a philosophical sense mate. we didn't mean it was a direct influence, we're saying it is nature's way of maintaining balance

[Turaizuru-san]

It is my opinion that "Good vs. Evil" is actually against nature - it is an invention of mankind. True peacefulness comes with complete equality. This may seem strange, but I for one enjoy the tranquility of neutrality, (though I can only find it within myself occasionally).

[bakafish007]

the good/bad is an example of balance. entropy and order (aspects of nature, mind you) are another way of balance. expanding and contracting are also a part of balance. I just concentrated on one aspect of it to give the general picture

[wancs1]

Chinese philosohy says that there must be a balance between good and bad, the concept is called Yin and Yang, its my belief there is a reaction for every action a counterbalance as you might say, that balance the universe together.

[Darksage]

I think that this "balance" must exist in the universe, not in each indidual. For example, when something good happens to you, that doesn't necessarily mean something ba will happen to you, but someone else. it could be anybody as long as it balances out as a whole.

[TaCktiX]

We ascribe so much to this idea of "Nature." It's like giving god-status to a non-entity, just a collective whole. Somewhat of the idea of Gaia. I personally do not think Nature is so all-knowing that it maintains a balance, nor do I believe that Newton's 3rd Law can apply to the very human ideas of good and bad.

Scientists say it all the time, that humans are different mostly because they have emotions and, to our knowledge, nothing else does. Emotions are irrational and relative, and the feelings garnered from them are also irrational and relative. The feelings of "good" and "bad" are by their nature purely subjective, especially when trying to ascribe HOW good or HOW bad something is.

A simple example of this would be a football game with two rival teams. If one team wins, they at once have done something good and something bad. To the opposing team's fans, they did a bad thing by beating their favorite team. To their own fans, they did a good thing by beating the opposing team.

Certainly, inside of this example there is at once a good/bad balance, unless the fans for one team are more numerous than the other, or more fervent in their feelings than the other, both quite likely.

My overall point is this: the idea of a good/bad balance cannot be ascribed to a nonintelligent entity (Nature) when the very ideas of good and bad are completely inventions of a very intelligent and conscious beings. I of course ignore religion and the idea of the supernatural in this argument, though those are not my personal feelings