Comparing The Thoughts Regarding The Source Of Evil And The Way To Eliminate Evil Between Confucianism And Christianity

As the reflection of the life style, philosophy ought to care about human's destination, devise the happy life for human and guide human to get to the ultimate good. The philosophy advocates good. But evil ,as the lack of good and the opposite side of good, makes the human life fragmentary and destroys the human's happy expectations of life. In contemporary society historical relativism and nihilism are in vogue, which is just the reflection of evil's corrosion to the life and philosophy. But it is not nowadays that evil exists. Evil has deeply taken root in the depth of society and humanity. On one hand it is holding back the realization of good, on the other hand it also urges the human beings to reflect themselves and the society as well as the philosophy. So evil is one of key points in philosophy thoughts and becomes the question that the philosophy is unable to bypass.Confucianism and Christianity, as two great sources and spiritual props of Chinese and the western culture, have paid attention to the problem of evil since they came into being and proposed their own different thoughts with regard to the way of eliminating evil and the result of eliminating evil. These thoughts took effects in molding special characteristics of the eastern and western culture.About the source of evil, Confucianism has the relatively consistent view. But the viewpoints of Neo-Confucianism in Song Dynasty are most typical, which are very elaborate, and are quite fit for acting as the representation. It divides the human nature into principle nature and temperament nature. Principle nature is the display of celestial law, which has only good except evil. Temperament nature is formed by "qi". It is good when temperament nature accords with celestial law. It is evil when temperament nature doesn't accord with celestial law. Therefore, Confucianism thinks that evil originates from temperament nature. Christianity thinks that humanity is created by God according to his own image and thus is good. Human has free will alone that was bestowed by God. But because "the degenerating of original sin" has ruined human's free will and caused free will to depart from the word of God and...