Good moral core (Re: Dirty Harry/Clean Harry)

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 117121


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" 
<dumbledore11214 at y...> wrote:

Alla:
 
> I agree with you about free will, I guess I am just thinking that 
> free will has to come from somewhere too, initially at least.
> 
> OK, let me try to rephrase my question again - how does Harry KNOW 
> which decisions are right? What helps him: higher power? generation 
> memory? What?

Geoff:
Enlarging a bit on what I said in messages 117060/117100, I believe, 
from my own personal standpoint as a Christian, that we were created 
with the ability to recognise that there are certain moral absolutes.

We, as individuals with free will, can choose to accept those or fly 
in the face of them. Some of us may have more of an initial 
disposition to lean to one side or the other. 

However, some folk may start to go against those "good" choices for 
one reason or another - some of which may appear to be perfectly 
valid - and find themselves on a slippery slope where their sense of 
right and wrong becomes blunted and numbed because they have 
continually overriden their consciences.

In message 117108, Steve wrote:

"I've said many times before that Voldemort has a grand vision of
himself standing on a balcony looking out over the wizard world as
they bow at his feet. But to run an effective functional practical
government, you can't spend all you time standing on the balcony
waiting for people to bow. Voldemort's world would be a world in ruin,
its underpinings crumbling under the ineptitude of tyranny. Commerce
and international relations destroyed, the economy in ruin."

My immediate mental picture was of Saruman in LOTR - it was the 
balcony that did it(!). He initially tried to serve Middle-Earth in 
good faith but then by doing things which ran counter to what folk 
would have thought good.  As a result, he became corrupted by power 
and enmeshed in his own plans; so he turned into a tyrant and fell 
into the kind of traps which Steve outlined above.

The interesting thing to know would be when and where Tom Riddle 
reached the point where, having begun to go against what we would 
consider to be good in small things, he began to "actively" seek the 
bad and to seek the self-aggrandisment which he seemed to be 
following when we see him as a diary memory in COS.

Geoff
http://www.aspectsofexmoor.com