I cannot with 100% certainty claim to know if all cultures (major, minor, historical or current) have or endorse use of good/evil. I do not even know if such concepts are present in all languages, or if translations into good/evil are contextually correct. Since Lee Daniel Crocker knows that such is the case, i'll leave the current wording in the fist paragraph alone, although I usually prefer vaguer statements :-) --Anders Törlind
I have nothing against "weasel words" when appropriate, but there actually is quite a bit of good research in this area, and there are many universals of human culture and human language; among them a concept of good and evil (and even more specific concepts like formalized marriage). Margaret Mead may have set back anthropology for decades, but she's been thoroughly debunked now, and we're coming out of the dark and realizing that there is indeed such a thing as "human nature" and it influences all cultures. I'm all for vague prose when there is a genuine lack of knowledge, but not for the sake of dogmatic relativism. --
LDC
I don't like it (or perhaps even the whole article) because I personally don't believe in good or evil as such; perhaps I'm just a "slippery relativist" but I often notice that what is "evil" for one person is "good" for another (substitute "cursed" or "blessed" if you want). We do what we do; some things are beneficial to some people and detremental to others and calling them "good" or "evil" is trying to turn a value judgement into an absolute. --
Justfred
Such relativism is a common viewpoint, which is why I mentioned it specifically. But this is an encyclopedia; our job is to accurately report what the various cultures and individuals believe.
Every culture has a concept of good and evil; some are more absolutist than others, but they all have it. Whether or not we like that fact is irrelevant. To say anything else would be bad reporting. --LDC
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