@AndyD273 Honestly, you might very well be right.

@NexTerren I keep noping out of there and I'm the one who asked it. :-/

@AndyD273 I've been meaning to read World War Z for a while. What did you think of the writing style?

@HDE226868 I really liked it, though I listened to the audiobook. It's one of the few books that I got all the way to the end and started immediately back at the beginning. That's partly because I was in the middle of mowing the lawn and didn't have any other books loaded on my tiny mp3 player, but I didn't mind either.

I think it's one of the best representations of how a global outbreak might go, and not just zombies.

urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=darkness

Hmm that make me curious. How to describe darkness in mystical terms such that it is not immediately associated with evil

and how to describe darkness not in terms of the absence of light

Darkness could be an absence of almost anything really. Absence of light, good, morals, God, etc. Most of those things would be associated with evil, though I suppose you could have an absence of morals that is just indifference. If good is caring for others, and evil is sacrificing others for your own benefit, then you could have an absence, with not actively seeking to harm others, but not going out of your way to help either.

The other way is to just change the perspective. For a dwarf,who lives their whole life underground, darkness isn't evil, but going up into the sun might be undesirable. Or in the game Hollow Knight, where the evil is "The Radiance", which is a being of light that wants to mind control and enslave everyone, and "The Void" is a living darkness that is being used to fight against it.

The problem with indifference is that the tipping point into full evil of treating people as things and using others to your own benefit is really really close.

I think that the issue with the whole "light = good, darkness = evil" schtick is that it just doesn't work with the full panoply of how light behaves

yeah, and that fixation also obscured many true properties of darkness in general

if someone wanted to espouse that, I'd just let them chew on a double-slit interference pattern ;)

and let them mull over the idea that light can cancel out light, leaving darkness in its wake