—-“Good and evil were invented in the middle east to facilitate cultural warfare between the middle east and the indians. European religion used chaos and mischief vs order, and our gods were ‘real people’ with real frailties.” – Curt Doolittle —“The concepts “good” and “evil” are actually Indo-European in origin. Etymology dictionaries are useful. Better perhaps to say that our misconceptions about what exactly those terms mean are influenced by Middle Eastern philosophy…”—AunMarie Grooms
Indo european a language and cultural family of genetically west eurasians of the proto-European, proto-Caucasian, proto-Iranic but NOT proto-turkic post glacial maximum peoples. The proto-caucasians and anatolians appear to have been lost to us. As far as I know, good and evil are indo-iranic not indo european. It’s unlikely that I err. The division between European, iranic, indo-iranic results in European (aristocratic egalitarian and martial), Persian(aristocratic authoritarian and martial), and Hindu( caste, duty-role, and ‘priestly’) pantheons. The argument put forth by others which I got from Karen Armstrong, was that it appears that the north and west europeans developed more so in the corded ware culture(material), and the iranics more in the vedas (spiritual), and that this is largely because etherial religion as we understand it evolved in what we call Mesopotamia-Anatolia or, more precisely, along the euphrates. It’s most likely that religious pantheons developed differently due to differences in indo european ethnicities, and strategies. The west pretty much killed everyone they came in contact with (or at least the males) because the neolithic farmers were not developed enough to resist them. But as the iranic people migrated east to india, then south of the caspian, then west back into Mesopotamia they encountered developed peoples that they had to conquer. So, iranics and indo iranics used hierarchy to rule an compete with others like the indus valley people and the Mesopotamians while europeans maintained aristocratic egalitarianism and didn’t develop authoritarianism until the late roman empire – and even then – they would have been more successful if they’d been much more authoritarian and much less tolerant.