Good vs. Evil

I guess the most difficult thing when I came to this country was trying to fit into this culture. I believe that one's religion definitely shapes once culture. This is why cultures across the world, from all corners of the earth can find similarities that are particularly strong when bound by the same religion. The greatest difficulty I am having in this part of the world, is this dynamic challenge between the good vs. the evil. This country in particular has this kind of obsession with this concept. In conversations I am constantly finding myself challenging my colleagues, or friends misconception that man can be born evil. That there is such a thing as an evil person. I cannot and will not except that because it goes against everything that I have been taught by my parents and consequently through them by my religion. However, how to express that? How to explain that to someone that wishes to believe and has been ingrained to believe that evil in a person can exist? That has been a challenge. As I was reading the book "The Road to Mecca" I found the following passage that sheds some light on what I desperately try to explain to my christian friends and colleagues.

..."It is on the basis of this conception that Islam, alone among all higher religions, regards the soul of man as one aspect of his 'personality' and not as an independent phenomenon in its own right. Consequently, to the Muslim, man's spiritual growth is inextricably bound up with all the other aspects of his nature. Physical urges are an integral part of this nature: not the result of an 'original sin' -a concept foreign to the ethics of Islam- but positive, God- giving forces, to be accepted and sensibly used as such; hence, the problem for man is not how to supress the demands of his body but, rather how to co-ordinate them with the demands of his spirit in such a way that life might become full and righteous.

The root of this almost monistic life-assertion is to be found in the Islamic view that man's original nature is essentially good. Contrary to Christian idea that man is born sinful, or the teaching of Hinduism that he is originally low and impure and must painfully stagger through a long chain of incarnations toward the ultimate goal of perfection, the Koran says:

'Verily, We create man in a perfect state' - a state of purity that may be destroyed only by subsequent wrong behavior- ' and thereupon We reduce him to the lowest of low, with the exception of those who have faith in God and do good works.'"

p. 147 of "The Road to Mecca"

I just LOVE that recital from the Koran- "We create man in a PERFECT state."