(September 30, 2014 at 10:43 pm)KentuckySkeptic224 Wrote: I've been thinking about this lately. The main reason I became an atheist is because I saw the disgusting inhumanity in the Bible. I thought the actions of Yahweh and the Hebrews to be barbaric, cruel, and all-around evil. But, I've thinking to myself recently, is that because of something basically built into me,(empathy) or is it because we don't (or at least should) see the kind of behavior as portrayed in the Bible as cruel and brutish due to our norms of morality today? After all, there have been plenty of societies throughout human history that viewed behavior that we see to be cruel as perfectly acceptable. So what I'm asking is, do you believe the concepts of good and evil to be universal truths, or just ideas that can vary from culture to culture or society to society?
I think you see it that way because you have no way of understanding it. Culturally your bound by an imperfect system and judge everything else from that perspective. So you look at the bible, for example, and see hurt as bad. Justice and fairness are superseded by an egotistical, yet not intentionally so, viewpoint.
