Why I Am Not a Dualist

After the recent earthquake in Perú that killed over 500 people, survivor Richard Stallman made the following comment on Linux.com:

I read that a church collapsed on worshipers during mass; later I heard that the priest had been rescued. Believers surely attributed the rescue to the good will of a benevolent deity. They probably did not attribute the collapse to the ill will of an evil deity, but it would be equally logical.

As one commenter put it on another board, "Wow." The sheer audacity of those two sentences is shocking.

The rough-and-tumble discussion that ensued gave me pause for thought. What exactly was it about Stallman's comment that was so abrasive? Was it the timing? Certainly that was part of it. Was it his brazen rudeness to the faiths of his hosts in Perú? Possibly. But I think the fingernails on the chalkboard came from one phrase: "the ill will of an evil deity," and the accompanying assertion that this is somehow "logical."

This is not "logical" by any stretch, for those who believe in ultimate good and evil. If there are (at least) two "deities," and one is good, while the other is evil, how can either claim superiority over the other? Or, if one deity is indeed superior, how can the inferior power claim "deity" and legitimately demand obedience?

I see good as ultimately powerful over evil, and whatever purpose the good has for allowing evil for a short time, does not mean we should simply tolerate evil until some Omnipotence smacks it away. The dualistic idea that good and evil have parity is repugnant to me, and negates the very notion that one can be called "good" and the other not. They become simply two hostile forces between which we choose.

If Stallman was trying to be "good," using human deaths in a natural catastrophe to make some agnostic/nihilistic point is hardly the way to do it. On the contrary, Stallman the opportunist saw fit to denigrate a 2,000 year old system of belief to make some out-of-the-blue point about faith on Linux.com, possibly even the faiths of his hosts in Perú.

When Pat Robertson the opportunist did something similar after Hurricane Katrina, ostensibly trying to make a point for Christianity, he was told in no uncertain terms to "sit down and shut up." Richard Stallman deserves the same treatment for the same bad behavior.

Posted on Aug 29, 2007 at 2:55:33 AM EDT.