[Serious] Good vs Evil

[Drich]

Germany actually had 'absolute' standards in the 20's and 30's. Like 'Deutschland Ueber Alles' or good-old 'Gott mit Uns' (God is with us). Moreover, all totalitarian countries tend to have a set of very strict 'absolute' standards, often backed up with Religion.

I see you are not familiar with positive christianity.

It was a move by the state to regulate the 'absolute standards of god.' to loosen the rules and allow the people to not only accept the final solution but to demand it.
In essence positive christianity was a break from the absolute standards of god (not based on the apstole's creed nor has any outside church influence)and a new standard based on german righteousness was superseded in the church the rest of the world knew.. When the germans stated  'Gott mit Uns' they referred to the father of positive christianity which was not the God of the bible but the chancoller himself. As According to mein kampf Religion was a tool that was to be used for a time which was to be replaced by state law and regulation.

The german people where slowly weaned off of God and the bible and set on a diet of their own self righteousness. The problem with self righteousness is there is no unity everyone is at a different level of evil and society breaks down because of it. for even if the majority are good with killing off a segment of the population, not everyone is and this sows discord into the community at large, when the opposition comes with absolute standards, it comes on a unified front.

If the Ten Commandments are the absolutes you mean then they are not so absolute, too. Per say, the most strict taboo placed upon murder is so omni-present only because it's generally agreed that living without a threat of sudden deadly attack is much better for the most people and because the consequences of murder are irreversible.

No the 10 commandments are not absolutes unless you are one of the unsaved.

And yet there are exceptions to this taboo. The most prominent one is of course War. More often then not even a strictly offensive war is a'ok with the Religion. Just look into a history book or watch the news from the Middle East. Under certain conditions even peace-time murder is encouraged by the Religion - see stoning people to death for things that are not even crimes by today's standards. So the commandments are relative even within borders of a single faith. They have too much fine print under them.

you do understand there is a difference between murder and killing right?

To murder is a sanctioned taking of human life. To take a human life in of itself finds no prohibition in the bible. as you pointed out there are clear examples of it. however where the sin comes in is not simply taking life but the unauthorized or unsanctioned taking of human life. One can not go out on his own and start taking life based on his or her own self righteousness.

[vulcanlogician]

P. S. speaking of 'why it's hard to comprehend'... I guess it's hard to settle with 'Good' and 'Evil' being relative because it makes the world seem much more brutal. No absolute justice, no higher help etc.

Plenty of atheists (such as myself) are moral realists. Why do I reject moral relativism? Because the arguments for relativism are not logically sound. And that's a problem.

---

Cultural Relativism is a theory about the nature of morality. At first blush
it seems quite plausible. However, like all such theories, it may be
evaluated by subjecting it to rational analysis; and when we analyze
Cultural Relativism we find that it is not so plausible as it first appears to
be.
The first thing we need to notice is that at the heart of Cultural Relativism
there is a certain form of argument. The strategy used by cultural
relativists is to argue from facts about the differences between cultural
outlooks to a conclusion about the status of morality. Thus we are invited
to accept this reasoning:

1. The Greeks believed it was wrong to eat the dead,
whereas the Callatians believed it was right to eat the
dead.
2. Therefore, eating the dead is neither objectively right nor
objectively wrong. It is merely a matter of opinion, which
varies from culture to culture.

Or, alternatively:
1. The Eskimos see nothing wrong with infanticide, whereas
Americans believe infanticide is immoral.
2. Therefore, infanticide is neither objectively right nor
objectively wrong. It is merely a matter of opinion, which
varies from culture to culture.

Clearly, these arguments are variations of one fundamental idea They
are both special cases of a more general argument, which says:
1. Different cultures have different moral codes.
2. Therefore, there is no objective "truth" in morality. Right
and wrong are only matters of opinion, and opinions vary
from culture to culture.
We may call this the Cultural Differences Argument. To many people, it
is persuasive. But from a logical point of view, is it sound?
It is not sound. The trouble is that the conclusion does not follow from
the premise— that is, even if the premise is true, the conclusion still
might be false. The premise concerns what people believe. In some
societies, people believe one thing; in other societies, people believe
differently. The conclusion, however, concerns what really is the case.
The trouble is that this sort conclusion does not follow logically from this
sort of premise.
Consider again the example of the Greeks and Callatians. The Greeks
believed it was wrong to eat the dead; the Callatians believed it was
right. Does it follow, from the mere fact that they disagreed, that there is
no objective truth in the matter? No, it does not follow; for it could be that
the practice was objectively right (or wrong) and that one or the other of
them was simply mistaken.
To make the point clearer, consider a different matter In some societies,
people believe the earth is flat In other societies, such as our own,
people believe the earth is (roughly) spherical. Does it follow, from the
mere fact that people disagree, that there is no "objective truth" in
geography?

https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/...chels1.pdf

---

[Foxaèr]

You read that right, folks. Just better hope that little voice in Drich's head doesn't give him the go ahead on killing you.

[Losty]

Since I made the thread, I’ll answer the questions. (Also, not really sure why I posted this in the religion forum, can’t remember lol)

I don’t believe in good and evil really. Not like that. I think subjectively things can be good (better than neutral) or bad (worse than neutral). Good is a word I use often. Just to mean something I like or something I think benefits myself, others, or the world. Evil is a word I never use. The concept of evil is silly to me, because it seems to imply some sort of supernatural meaning to the word bad.

The thing is I think everyone is good by their own terms. No one sets out to be bad. No one chooses to be a bad person. I think I read once that human beings tend to base their morals on what they want to do rather than basing what they want to do on their morals. So there’s a lot of justifying that goes on, with all of us. But I think everyone tries to do good based on what they believe to be good. This is likely an evolutionary trait? I’m assuming. Being “good” and doing “good” gives us a better shot at surviving and at happiness I guess.

So to you there is no evil?

Yet if I take my wild child who is being abusive and destructive in a public setting and give him a controlled and measured spanking each and every time he steps over a line, then I become evil.

But if a child takes an rpg and blows up a squad of marines because his mother conditioned him to hate americans/anyone not muslim. The child retains his innocences and the mother is not a bad or evil person....

Seriously?!?!?

Spanking breaks the line of evil  but training children to be jihadist murders is "good?"

Again you have some sort of working definition of evil, can you please explain how spanking a child is evil but training a child to be a murder is not.

or are we back to self righteousness? where you are the measure of good and evil, meaning anything you do not like is evil and anything that does not directly effect you can be considered a form of good?

If that is the case can you see how self righteousness can be the heart of all things evil?

First of all, fuck you for being a liar. I never ever said training a child to be a murderer isn’t bad. So fuck you. I never said that shit.
If you spank a child, it really depends how you spank them how I’m going to feel about it. It could range anywhere between you’re wrong to you’re a disgusting piece of garbage child abuser.
If you train a child to be a murderer, there’s no range you’re just a disgusting piece of garbage child abuser.
In either situation, the child is innocent.
You intentionally misrepresented my position, because you’re an asshole.

[Chad32]

If a young child runs up to a group of people, and blows them up with a bomb, they're as much an innocent victim as the people they blow up. The evil ones are the adults who convinced a kid to carry an explosive, and detonate it. Granted, someone could be born a sociopath, and go the Michael Myers route, and get a kick out of causing pain, but those are some small odds.

Would I be able to shoot the kid? Maybe not. That's why my job doesn't entail holding a firearm, and making those kinds of decisions. It would likely be my last act in the armed forces if I absolutely had to pull the trigger.

you are speaking to a state of mind of the child. something you can not know, unless you look at history. you assume because children you know of that age are open books of blank sheets Child soldiers are like other children. Child soldiers are not atomotons blindly carrying out acts they can not understand the consenquences of... they have been trained to think and out maneuver their enemies. enemies who have been targeted since they could walk.

There is little to no difference between a child soldier and one who is of 'fighting age.' The civial war bore this out, the revolutionary war also bore this out. They fought bled and died just like their older counter parts, they faced death they faced hardship and pain, the same hardship and pain the veterans faced. Granted their jobs may have been different (drummer or fife player) but the drums where critical in fog of war communication. in essence they order the company or sometimes the battalion to fire a volley, free fire, advance bayonet charge or retreat. these 'boys' where given a monumental task of litterally pulling the trigger on hundreds of weapons just by playing the orders given. or f the messed up they could have cause the deaths of hundreds of their fellow soldiers. so to say a child soldier is like the ones you are familiar with is nuts.

Just look at some of the documentaries of the warring tribes currently in africa who employ child riflemen. some as young as 8. those kids are war harden monsters who could dispatch any of us before we knew it.

My point is evil know no age limitations. if their is consciousness evil can exist.

only the biggest fools wrapped up in their own self righteousness pretend evil can not exist. if people could just be honest with them selves they could label the men who train children to be combatants that put them in harms way or to be sacrificed as human bombs, if the self righteous could be honest they could see those men who do this sort of stuff as evil. But because the self righteous aligned themselves with evil inorder to invalidate God's righteous standards they can not identify anything evil as evil, which means they are only able to identify God's righteousness as evil.

Which is consistent with what the bible says about the last days. The evil men will change the standards of 'morality' and good will be come evil and evil will become good.

Yes, they have been trained. Indoctrinated, brainwashed, and robbed of their childhood. I still place full blame on the adults who did so. Not helpless children who had no real choice. Your god may not place value in children, and a lot of Humans don't either. But that doesn't make it the child's fault. A six year old who uses a gun to kill someone, on an adult's orders is not evil, because there's no real agency there. There's no choice. If he doesn't pull the trigger, he will be killed by his superiors, or coerced until he does it. Even adults can be victims of culture. 

Usually when people do bad things, it's because of pressure. They don't have enough food, or money, or someone above them is forcing them to. Honestly, there's probably much less evil in the world than you think, if you dig deep enough.

[Anomalocaris]

Self righteousness is what fuels men to rename or lable 'good and evil.'  

Hallelujah  ... finally  .... now will you burn that bronze age goatherders goat fucker book you keep pushing?

FTFY.

It ain’t no diligent hard working humble herder would have attempted to hoisted the fictional hyperbolically vain, jealous, domineering, murderous, abusive sky creep upon his fellow men so as to better rule them.

[Smaug]

P. S. speaking of 'why it's hard to comprehend'... I guess it's hard to settle with 'Good' and 'Evil' being relative because it makes the world seem much more brutal. No absolute justice, no higher help etc.

Plenty of atheists (such as myself) are moral realists. Why do I reject moral relativism? Because the arguments for relativism are not logically sound. And that's a problem.

Consider again the example of the Greeks and Callatians. The Greeks

believed it was wrong to eat the dead; the Callatians believed it was
right. Does it follow, from the mere fact that they disagreed, that there is
no objective truth in the matter? No, it does not follow; for it could be that
the practice was objectively right (or wrong) and that one or the other of
them was simply mistaken.
To make the point clearer, consider a different matter In some societies,
people believe the earth is flat In other societies, such as our own,
people believe the earth is (roughly) spherical. Does it follow, from the
mere fact that people disagree, that there is no "objective truth" in
geography?

Stricktly speaking, by considering this statement you cannot derive that there is any objective truth about moral absolutes either. The only thing you can firmly say is that there are conflicting moral codes. On the other hand, relativistic hypothesis works well enaugh in explaining moral behaviour without invoking moral absolutes at all. Rejecting moral relativism on the grounds of the aforementioned arguement is like rejecting Einstein's Relativity on the grounds that he did not strictly disprove the existence of an absolute reference frame.

If you feel like having a 'moral constant' then you can reason along this line: certain set of rules of social interaction allow societies _and_ most of their members to thrive (or at least live a bearable life). Such a set of rules may be considered 'optimal' at least for a very generalized case.

[Smaug]

Germany actually had 'absolute' standards in the 20's and 30's. Like 'Deutschland Ueber Alles' or good-old 'Gott mit Uns' (God is with us). Moreover, all totalitarian countries tend to have a set of very strict 'absolute' standards, often backed up with Religion.

I see you are not familiar with positive christianity.

It was a move by the state to regulate the 'absolute standards of god.' to loosen the rules and allow the people to not only accept the final solution but to demand it.
In essence positive christianity was a break from the absolute standards of god (not based on the apstole's creed nor has any outside church influence)and a new standard based on german righteousness was superseded in the church the rest of the world knew.. When the germans stated  'Gott mit Uns' they referred to the father of positive christianity which was not the God of the bible but the chancoller himself. As According to mein kampf Religion was a tool that was to be used for a time which was to be replaced by state law and regulation.

The german people where slowly weaned off of God and the bible and set on a diet of their own self righteousness. The problem with self righteousness is there is no unity everyone is at a different level of evil and society breaks down because of it. for even if the majority are good with killing off a segment of the population, not everyone is and this sows discord into the community at large, when the opposition comes with absolute standards, it comes on a unified front.

If the Ten Commandments are the absolutes you mean then they are not so absolute, too. Per say, the most strict taboo placed upon murder is so omni-present only because it's generally agreed that living without a threat of sudden deadly attack is much better for the most people and because the consequences of murder are irreversible.

No the 10 commandments are not absolutes unless you are one of the unsaved.

And yet there are exceptions to this taboo. The most prominent one is of course War. More often then not even a strictly offensive war is a'ok with the Religion. Just look into a history book or watch the news from the Middle East. Under certain conditions even peace-time murder is encouraged by the Religion - see stoning people to death for things that are not even crimes by today's standards. So the commandments are relative even within borders of a single faith. They have too much fine print under them.

you do understand there is a difference between murder and killing right?

To murder is a sanctioned taking of human life. To take a human life in of itself finds no prohibition in the bible. as you pointed out there are clear examples of it. however where the sin comes in is not simply taking life but the unauthorized or unsanctioned taking of human life. One can not go out on his own and start taking life based on his or her own self righteousness.

The only difference of the 'Positive' Christianity is that you consider it false. While many Germans at that point in time did not. Also it's known fact that Vatican supported another dictator, Mussoulini.

Speaking of sanctioned taking of human life... on the one hand having a divine ban on murder seems good. On the other hand, dealing with lunatics that go into homicidal mode on a flip of a switch does not   As for the sins and heresies, those concepts easily bend to the will of manipulative leaders.

[tackattack]

---

If I had to define good and evil in terms of good people or bad people I'd say
good = a degree of empathy that spurs selflessness
evil = a degree of selfishness that comes from a lack of empathy

and if you want me to factor in my religious perspective, since this thread is in that forum:

natural evil= The axiomatic degree to which people act against God's will
natural good= The axiomatic characteristic of God's empathetic and compassionate nature towards positive outcomes for the most people

moral good = the ethical correctness of God's revealed will
moral evil = sin (going against God's will)

what do you use to define the types of good and evil?

I've never seen a biblical examples subdivided like this. There was man's good and God's version as well as evil but it seems you have fond deeper meaning?

just asking not trying to start a debate..

What or why does empathy have anything to do with Good or evil? I can perform evil acts with or without consideration to anyone or anything, or i can do acts of evil out of empathy according to this defination..

for example I know lying is wrong. if my wife asks do I look fat, the answer is always no even if she is pouring out of a dress like an over filled muffin pan. One I did this out of empathy, but doing so is a lie which is a sin that I am now defending as good which literally is a form of evil.

So then how oes emotion play into good and evil and is there some sort of example you had in mind?

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I see morality as a tiered system, as I've stated elsewhere.
The most personal and smallest moral realm is subjective morality "I feel xxx is bad" - bad for you but not necessarily for everyone else
The next tier with increased moral realm to include the prior is community morality "We feel xxx is bad" - bad for the society of the time, but times change
The third tier with increased moral realm to include the previous 2 is objective morality "God feels xxx is bad" - bad with relation to a standard from outside the universe and revealed

I wasn't referring to moral values of acts as your are but a evaluative assessment of a person, place or thing. If you want to talk good and evil actions I probably have an entirely different definition for that.

Sure I can give you an example. America is good. America can act evil. America can act good. Since it is not in relation to a person I believe The axiomatic degree to which people act against God's will, as a whole, in America is in line with God's will and therefore good.
Trump is evil. Trump can act good. Trump can act evil. I don't believe trump exhibits a degree of empathy that spurs selflessness so I define him as evil. I also believe that a lot of what he has done is sinful (if I were to judge with my limited perspective) and I would surmise he is most likely morally evil as well.

Hope that clears it up
-Dave

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If I had to define good and evil in terms of good people or bad people I'd say
good = a degree of empathy that spurs selflessness
evil = a degree of selfishness that comes from a lack of empathy

and if you want me to factor in my religious perspective, since this thread is in that forum:

natural evil= The axiomatic degree to which people act against God's will
natural good= The axiomatic characteristic of God's empathetic and compassionate nature towards positive outcomes for the most people

moral good = the ethical correctness of God's revealed will
moral evil = sin (going against God's will)

The problem with selflessness is that it can easily become evil against oneself.  Why not think of oneself as if one were another person?  We certainly can do more good for ourselves than most anyone else.

I consider "natural evils" to be such things as spontaneous abortions, earthquakes, diseases, and so on, for which no one is to blame unless God exists.  If God exists, he has to answer for natural evils.

From an atheistic perspective, "sin" so defined doesn't exist without a God existing, though evil still does.  Good and evil are defined in terms of human interests.

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Yet despite the fact we have the most ability individually to affect our own happiness and well being, many people still will treat their dogs better than themselves. I believe that is because empathy is a necessarily outward tool and inwardly whatever empathy we have for self is overrun by self-preservation and other instinctual reflexes. Evilness has intent though, and up until it's acted upon, a degree of empathy would be a good metre stick for outward actions related to other people and valued as such. If we were one man on an island in all of humanity, I don't believe morality would be much of a thing as we'd have little outside reference or need for empathy and would resort to good is what's best for me/not as good as what's best is evil. I understand the atheistic caveat regarding sin. I wasn't asked for a dictionary defintion, because that would be a short thread, I just gave my perspective for what it's worth. I wouldn't claim that all atheists believe evil exists. That's more of a moral realist/relativist/nihilist stance, since, as you pointed out, it would have nothing to do with God.

[Amarok]

you are speaking to a state of mind of the child. something you can not know, unless you look at history. you assume because children you know of that age are open books of blank sheets Child soldiers are like other children. Child soldiers are not atomotons blindly carrying out acts they can not understand the consenquences of... they have been trained to think and out maneuver their enemies. enemies who have been targeted since they could walk.

There is little to no difference between a child soldier and one who is of 'fighting age.' The civial war bore this out, the revolutionary war also bore this out. They fought bled and died just like their older counter parts, they faced death they faced hardship and pain, the same hardship and pain the veterans faced. Granted their jobs may have been different (drummer or fife player) but the drums where critical in fog of war communication. in essence they order the company or sometimes the battalion to fire a volley, free fire, advance bayonet charge or retreat. these 'boys' where given a monumental task of litterally pulling the trigger on hundreds of weapons just by playing the orders given. or f the messed up they could have cause the deaths of hundreds of their fellow soldiers. so to say a child soldier is like the ones you are familiar with is nuts.

Just look at some of the documentaries of the warring tribes currently in africa who employ child riflemen. some as young as 8. those kids are war harden monsters who could dispatch any of us before we knew it.

My point is evil know no age limitations. if their is consciousness evil can exist.

only the biggest fools wrapped up in their own self righteousness pretend evil can not exist. if people could just be honest with them selves they could label the men who train children to be combatants that put them in harms way or to be sacrificed as human bombs, if the self righteous could be honest they could see those men who do this sort of stuff as evil. But because the self righteous aligned themselves with evil inorder to invalidate God's righteous standards they can not identify anything evil as evil, which means they are only able to identify God's righteousness as evil.

Which is consistent with what the bible says about the last days. The evil men will change the standards of 'morality' and good will be come evil and evil will become good.

So long rambly pretentious  blather