Emotions are intrinsically good and bad

[bennyboy]

I will actually make one last point here.  It is a logical argument that supports my view:

1.)  Emotions themselves are value judgments.  Positive emotions are always good emotional value judgments and negative emotions are always bad emotional value judgments.

No. A judgment is an intellectual construct based on knowledge and opinion, and an emotion is a neurochemical triggering of biological response systems. They aren't the same thing.

2.)  Emotions are qualities. They are a quality of euphoria and dysphoria and they are also a quality of a good or bad emotional value judgment. Not only are emotions simply value judgments of good and bad, but they are also profoundly beautiful or profoundly horrible value judgments that take on various tones, atmospheres, and personalities. For example, you can judge, through your thinking, a certain character and his/her traits and personalities.

No, that is not what emotions are. Emotions are neurochemical triggering of biological response systems. We can experience them as positive TO US, or negative TO US, but they are not intrinsically positive or negative.

3.)  The thought/rational/reasoning form of value judgments are not any real quality of good or bad value in our lives.

They are ideas.

If you had the thought of water, then that is not any real water. If you had the thought of pain or pleasure when no feeling of pain or pleasure was there, then that thought itself is not any real pain or pleasure. If you couldn't feel a positive emotion and you judged a positive emotion to be there, then that thought itself would also not be any real positive emotion. The same rule applies to negative emotions.

You need thought/rational/reasoning to establish goodness. "Feels good" and "is actually good" are not necessarily the same thing. If it feels good for a man to strangle and rape children, would you say it's "actually good?" I wouldn't. That's because we have a societal consensus (read: rational agreement) that certain behaviors are bad.

Conclusion:  Positive emotions are the only things that can give our lives real good value and our negative emotions are the only things that can give our lives real bad value just as how having actual water and not a personally defined version of water is the only real water we can have.

Your attempt to conflate an actual objective thing, like water, with a highly subjective thing, like feelings and attributions of good or bad, is illogical.

I think that's why you shy away from logic. To be frank, you don't seem to really get the basics of it.

Emotions are value judgments too. If they weren't, humanity would not be distinct from other mammals; we would be biological machines with no autonomy, acting purely on instinct. For example, if you are physically hurt, and the doctor treating you causes you pain during treatment, do you become angry and bite him? No, because you are able to override your instinctive anger and fear at someone causing you pain with your ability to reason that the treatment is necessary and the pain is temporary. But a dog can't reason, and will bite to stop the person causing the pain. Both the instinctive emotions AND the reasoned thoughts are value judgments.

Eh?

I see what this is now. You were once Christian, and you still have these goofy ideas about spirit and feelings that make people magi-special snowflakes, but you no longer want to associate yourself formally with the religion. Animals are much more capable of evaluation their environment and the actors in it, and understanding contexts, than you seem to think they are.