"Good" versus "Bad"
I've said several times previously that we can only be measured by our interactions with each other. However, "measure" implies some sort of objective perception from the outside. This isn't an accurate description of how we observe each other. One person's interactions with another are entirely due to the "internal" conditions of that person's mind. Furthermore, these "external" events can only be understood by the "internal" changes they bring about in the thoughts and feelings of any observers. Thus there is no way to determine whether an event is "outside" or "inside" of anything because these concepts don't truly exist as separate things. Nothing can be thought of as "inside" or "outside" that isn't somehow connected with things on the "other" side. Therefore referring to the measurement of a person's life, I merely use that word to vaguely describe what is actually happening. Your can't really measure a person's life in the first place, because it doesn't exist separately from other people's lives. Also, saying someone is mostly good or mostly bad implies that anything can be better or worse than another thing. No event can be described as totally good or totally bad. There are "good" and "bad" results of every event. Even these results could be further broken down, ad infinitum, into smaller and smaller "good" and "bad" parts. Thus it is futile to say anything is good/bad or even better/worse than something else, because being better than something else implies some measurable quality of "goodness." Typically, the "optimist" sees the "good" in everything and a "pessimist" sees the "bad." However, though it may not seem this way, both are the two extremes of actually knowing about an event. Both pessimists and optimists attempt to categorize and break apart reallity. Both believe in a difference between "good" and "bad" which isn't really there (there can't be any difference between two things that don't exist in the first place). The difference between pessimists and optimists is only in what each believes to be the overall balance of "good" and "bad" in the universe. Thus there can be no "heaven" as opposed to "hell." Nature is neither good nor bad, because those qualities, at the very least, require something to compare it to, and there is nothing outside Everything. Humanity isn't all good or all bad, because it's made up of billions of individuals. But they aren't good or bad, either, because a person's life is made up of all that person's actions (karma, if you will). And no single action can be good or bad, because in addition to the original intent, there are the infinite effects of the action to take into account. Each of these is itself neither good nor bad, and so on. Obviously, there is still a difference between how one should act and how one shouldn't, but there are no words which can be used to convey this information in a neat little package. Every situation is different and constantly changing, so no frozen view of morality will suffice to dictate how a person acts. My own interpretation of the Fall of Man is quite different than that of most people, and almose assuredly different from the point the originator(s) of the bible intended to make. Instead of using that story to illustrate man's inherent sinful nature, I see it as the origin of a rigid conceptual view of the universe, which then led to suffering. At first, I saw the story as saying it was our moral sense that allows us to do evil, because, after all, if we can't tell right from wrong we certainly can't purposely do wrong. However, I now see it as the first time people used concepts of "good" and "bad" to break down the universe. This frozen moral view led to ignorance which in turn led to suffering. God didn't need to throw them out of Eden as punnishment for their disobedience, because their new ignorance led to suffering which made it so Eden was no longer paradise at all. There was no reason to throw them out of the garden because they had created suffering for themselves.