Good Will Always Triumph…

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. Martin Luther King, Jr., accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964

In digging up the quote by Dr. King I was trying to recall in our fourth podcast (see my comments on the Podcast #4 post), I retrievedthis other interesting quote from one of the last century’s most influential moral leaders.

Right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant, Dr. King said. This makes me think of an argument I had when I was a kid with a cousin my age. “If Skeletor and He-Man were pitted against each other, who would win?” my cousin asked. I insisted at the time that He-Man would win, simply by virtue of his being a Good Guy. My cousin said Skeletor was more powerful and He-Man was a wuss. But good always wins over evil in the end, I protested.

If only BSG’s moral dilemmas were that simple. First off, I think that whether you believe in Dr. King’s philosophy about good and evil depends on your personal beliefs, but I look at it this way: even if good appears to lose, no matter what, we always win when we choose Good simply because it’s the right thing to do. That doesn’t mean Good can’t get its ass kicked. But this quote and this philosophy help explain why, in an earlier post, I took the position that the destruction of humanity in “the good fight” would be preferable to humanity’s survival as something less than human (e.g., by having what makes us uniquely human taken away from us). Is our humanity more important than our survival? Ultimately, I think it is.