RE: a bad person
December 6, 2015 at 11:11 am
(This post was last modified: December 6, 2015 at 12:00 pm by Homeless Nutter.)
(December 6, 2015 at 10:50 am)Sappho Wrote: If there is no god, then there is no universal moral law, which means morality can be reduced to a social construct coming from an evolutionairy goal to protect the species, but nonetheless adapted to our modern society.
Why then do we call people bad when they break such a rule, other than they do something which is arbitrairy forbidden by previous generation.
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It's a damn word. If you don't like it - use a different one. Words change meaning over time, which I'm sure you're aware of. Assume "bad" now means "someone, or something, that breaks the rules of the construct coming from an evolutionairy goal to protect the species, but nonetheless adapted to our modern society". You have to admit - "bad" is much snappier.
I still often say "Jesus Motherf*cking Christ!" when I stub my toe, or something. It's not because I believe Jesus is god, and neither am I making a statement about the relationship between him and his mom, but it's merely an expletive my mind automatically goes to in such situations, because religious zealots forcibly drilled that word into my psyche (which, btw used to mean "soul", but now we often use it to mean "personality", "sub-consciousness", or "intellect"). Similarly - "bad" is a description of an emotion we feel, when we encounter something distressing - it doesn't mean "against god's will", or even "against morality" (that would be "immoral"). It doesn't matter what other connotations the word may have gathered over the millenia.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw
