ElvenDestiny

Ratbastid I think your idea was noble and just, but that was a very bad example try using someone that didn’t use genocide as an answer.

__________________

A trees touch could be so soft it could steal you from reality.
A winds whisper could be so fierce it could steal your life away.

ratbastid

It was just an example. And yes, I know that the first person to invoke Hitler loses the argument.

My point is, if you can look from a bigger picture than your own personal perspective and your own position in history, even Hitler can't be authentically called evil, and he's maybe the single person that I'd come closest to using that word for. If Germany had won WWII, I guarantee you wouldn't feel that way about him. It's ALL subjective, even something as huge as that.

A lot of times, we see something that harms people, on whatever level and scope, and we say, "Well, it's Evil," as if that explains it, and then we don't have to think about it anymore, because it's uncomfortable to think about. Then we're off the hook of doing something about it. That's how the notion of "evil" blinds us and keeps us from dealing with the things that harm people. Aren't you interested at all in the historical, social, and psychological factors that led to the Holocaust, for instance? I mean, things happen for a reason, don't they? Or is "it was evil" a sufficient explanation for you? And if so, how will you ever hope to prevent that sort of thing from ever happening again?

This conversation has become pretty circular. I believe I've thoroughly stated my opinion. I'll keep an eye on this thread, but unless somebody has something new to say, my contribution here is complete.

Lebell

Ratbastid,

I would actually say that Hitler (who referencing is entirely valid in a thread like this) strongly speaks against your argument of moral relativism.

From what I know of him (and I know somewhat more than the average person), if anyone can be called "evil", it's him. Had Germany gotten what they wanted, an armistice with them in control of Western Europe, 6 million people would still be murdered in the most brutal fashion.

And I do believe he passes your "Dick" test

I really would encourage you to read "People of the Lie", as it addresses and allows for exactly what you talk about.

__________________
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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martinguerre

Though i doubt this would be Ratbastid's point, here's my complication to that assessment.

Is there a sinner so bad, that even Jesus cannot save them?

Is there sin so grave that it can *completely* wipeout the image of God that we are created in from the one who commits it?

If salvation depends on us not sinning *that* much, whatever *that* might be...i'd say we're all in a heap of trouble.

I don't argue for the absolute universality of redemption...but that none of us is ever driven so far from God that redemption would not be possible if we chose it.

__________________
For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

tecoyah

Yes....there are in my opinion.

Say...oh...perhaps....Someone who poses as the servant of this God, and then uses the trust garnered because of it to molest a child in his care. Or maybe someone who claims to be the mouthpiece of this God, and then condones murder because he does not like(love) another of this Gods children. How about someone who blows up an abortion Clinic ....or a Bus in Isreal. Maybe fly a plane into a building.

As I have said in this thread, I really dont see things as good/evil. As a matter of fact everything I wrote above is simply to prove a small point:

By invoking a "God", in an attempt to define Evil....you pretty much remove any clear personal opinion, and instead begin to state religious opinion.

__________________
Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

Salomon

back button instead...

martinguerre

That's bollocks, and i think you know it.

Personal opinion=clarity? The moment someone capitolizes Evil, they recognize some moral authority that differentiates between good and evil, one that makes absolutes possible. So you personally don't beleive in absolute good and evil. But anyone in this thread that says that evil exists is talking about some knowledge of a framework by which human actions can be evaluated. and how exactly, would this be some how completely and categorically different than religious evaluations of human action?

What you state here isn't just an unjustified attack on religious thought, but also represents the obsfucation of the pitfalls of non-religious approaches to such questions as evil. You (or anyone's) personal opinion is not a guarantee of clarity, truth, or anything else.

An a priori dismissal of the religious is nothing to be proud of.

/for the record, i don't think any one of those actions listed could permanently remove a person from the realm of grace. Those responsible for the death of Jesus, who commit nothing less that diecide, are forgiven.

__________________
For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

asaris

Deicide, Martin . Just for the record, nothing in my position is incompatible with either the position Martin Guerre advances, that no action can remove a person from the realm of grace.

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

powerclown

Are you saying then, that in the eyes of God: Stalin, Hitler and Saddam Hussein are morally equivalent to Mohandas Gahndi, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr.?

And haven't the Jews been almost universally vilified for the last 2000 years give or take?
This is Forgiveness?

martinguerre

No. Nothing i said could support that repellant idea. What i am stating is that i believe evil to be real. It is a grave and serious problem, stemming from disrelationship with God and causeing all manners of injustice and atrocity.

But i also believe that God's reconciling love is greater than any evil, and should the guilty repent, that God offers forgiveness, and shows the path away from destruction and evil. To my knowledge, none of the tyrants you listed have/did repent, and seek forgiveness and reconciliation. It is not my place to judge the living or the dead. But as far as we know their works, these men did great evil. I do not know how any of us will meet God's justice, but i confess that i do believe all come to account for what they have done.

And further, any Christian anti-semitism is a serious problem. As followers of Christ, Christians owe not just tolerance, but loving respect for our brothers and sisters. It is ours to own that our tradition has been used to persecute and create the conditions for genocide. It is an evil which we must repent, and bear the burden of attempting repair for what we have collectively wraught.

I take evil seriously. But i still hold that grace is the final word of God. For God so loved the world that God gave God's only Son, that *whosoever* believes in him shall not perish, but have ever lasting life.

There's no fine print to that. No "offer only valid in certain states, and if you haven't been really bad."

__________________
For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

powerclown

I believe that this is what the conversation here is all about. That evil does, in fact, exist in the world. In this we are in agreement. I understand you from this board as a religious man, and I meant to cast no aspersion in this regard.

Let me quickly add that I think that some of those who refuse to assign a code of moral interpretation upon human behavior are simply doing so as a defense mechanism. These are people who've been burned emotionally, and seek to rationalize emotion away by placing little value in it. Those life events which are almost entirely experienced through the senses (Love, Trust, Committment, Faith, etc) are discredited on a philosophical level (ie., not based in reality) and then cast aside.

nothingx

It's funny... I wandered into the Philosophy forum intending to start a thread on this subject, but it has already been done for me.

Today, while driving to work, I started thinking about good and evil. A common belief among scientific minds (that believe in such things) is that good and evil are subjective things and if something is good or evil lies somewhere on a continum. That is to say, there are many shades of gray between the two.

Another belief is that good is a positive force, and evil is mearly the absence of that force. For instance, cold is the absence of heat. There is no actual thing called coldness... it is just the concept of something without the real thing called heat. The same is true for light and dark. There is no darkness, there is only the absence of light. Therefore, good is the only real thing, and evil is just wherever there is no good.

This is all fine and well... but how do we really know that good is the "real" force? How can we be sure that evil isn't the only real thing, and what we think of as good is just our own struggle against it? Maybe animals killing each other - doing whatever they have to survive - things we generally think of as evil and try to avoid... maybe that's the only thing that's real. "Evil", or what we call evil, is just the natural state of things, and we're just fighting against it.

Just to tie this thought into the thread:
The pure evil inside of you does exist. It is all you are without personal intervention. The greater abundance of pure good you speak of, is not an actual thing, but the elimnation of evil within yourself. Putting a spin on your last sentence, evil is the LACK OF desire to do NO harm to other or to NOT allow others to come to harm. Interesting, eh?

The bit about evil being the only real thing was my revelation for the day. I'm not saying I believe it's true, or any of it is true, but I do like to think about these things. That's the whole point of philosophy, right?

asaris

I think there are a number of reasons to think that good is a real thing, even that good is the real thing, and that evil doesn't really exist. Firstly, no one ever does evil for the sake of evil, but only for the sake of some good, but people sometimes, though perhaps rarely, do good for the sake of good itself. Even if people are doing evil just for the pleasure of doing evil, they're still doing evil for the sake of a good, because pleasure is a good. Secondly, good is a prerequisite for doing evil. The attributes of a being which allow it to do evil -- its power, its intelligence, even its existence -- are all in themselves goods. It's just like a knife used in a murder -- even though it is being used for evil purposes, it can still be a good knife.

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

analog

"Good" and "evil" are both forces. I don't believe that either could simply be the "lack of" the other. I believe that good and evil coexist in pretty much everyone, with rare exception. There are those who are so pure in heart, that evil is only (if at all) superficially present. Not even enough to be noticed. Also, there are some who have absolutely no good in them. On the whole, however, most people live with a mixture of good and evil, and the mixture strengthens towards one side or the other from time to time. For most people, the mixture is fairly constant, and might only waver if someone makes them angry, etc. Also, there's "conflict"...

Let's take for example that both good and evil exist in people, in units up to 100. Most people might have 10 - 20 evil, and 70 - 90 good (we're not adding to 100, so don't start doing that, this is not a balance thing). For those who feel the conflicts of their good and bad sides, it might be more like 40 - 50 evil, and 70 - 90 good. There's the same amount of good, but there's more evil to temper it, and to cause conflict.

I would say I'm likely a 90 or 95 good, 80 evil. There is a lot of conflict, but good always wins because there's more of it. The evil is a constant battle though, so it's far from a "background" feeling.

nothingx

Actually, I thought of a knife as a perfect example of everything being evil. All sharp blades cut indiscriminately. If an innocent child picks up a knife by the blade, it cuts him. It doesn't matter that he is innocent, it acts in an evil way upon him. In fact, no matter who you are, how good or evil you are, if the edge pulls across your flesh it will hurt you. If the knife itself were truely good, it would not cause anyone harm... even if used for that purpose. The knife does not do that because it exists for one reason, to rend what was whole. To do this so indiscriminately sounds evil to me.

How do you know this? Is it faith, or do you have a logical reason to believe so? Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be an ass or anything... I, personally, do not know if one, both, or either actually exist. I'm always looking for reasons to feel one way or the other.

analog

You quoted the first two lines of my post... pretty much everything that followed (the rest of my post) was my explanation of that thought.

It's not a faith thing, it's just how I feel. I feel it's logical that they both exist in all of us for the reasons I outlined- people can experience inner struggle with their own forces of good and evil... people can be mostly good, or mostly evil, or really just so neutral that there's virtually none of either.

For another example:

Take me again. Assume i'm "80" evil and "90" good (everything out of a possible "100", to put perspective on "amounts" of good and evil).

Let's also make up a person names Zippy. Zippy is 5 evil and 15 good.

By both accounts, the difference in good and evil is only "10".

However, there's pretty much no real good or evil in Zippy, so Zippy is really just kinda passive with regard to most everything. Zippy doesn't care to help, but doesn't care to hurt, either. Zippy just doesn't feel those impulses.

Also, my difference of "10" is between two very high numbers- "80" evil and "90" good. I have a lot of good in me, so I do a lot of good. I also have a lot of evil in me which sometimes tempers my goodness, but never overtakes it. Because both levels are so high, however, they often clash because they're both very strong forces looking to occupy the same space or control the same person.

The crux of my argument is that, in every person, good and evil are separately-accounted-for portions of the personality, not impulses that counteract each other equally (as in, not "40" evil and "60" good, or "10" evil and "90" good- it's not a matter of them balancing proportionally towards a total- they each exist independently, and fight each other as other impulses do). As with any component of a person's personality, soul, whatever, some impulses are very strong, and some are not as strong... or even weak, or non-existent. I believe this because it is the result of my logical answer from many periods of thought on the subject, and a lot of time spent observing human behavior (I pretty much do that nonstop).

asaris

Analog -- what you give isn't really an argument, it's an explanation. You write "I believe this because it is the result of my logical answer from many periods of thought." What in these periods of thought led you to believe you could quantify (at least in theory) how strong one's impulses of good and evil are? And what makes you think they're more static than dynamic?

Nothingx -- you say the fact that a knife cuts everything indiscriminately makes it evil. First of all, note that given what you said above, this means that a dull knife is a good knife, which is counter-intuitive to say the least. If I'm trying to cut meat, I definitely want a sharp knife -- in fact, for pretty much everything I use knives for, I want a sharp knife. Second, it seems clear to me that, all other things being equal, a teleological account of good and evil is the best, since, among other things, it allows us to speak of good and evil in the same sense in different contexts. It's also fairly intuitive -- we're doing good when we're doing what we're 'supposed' to be doing. And, of course, it doesn't require a deity. Now, a lot of people object to a teleological account of human morality on the grounds that we either do not have an end or, if we do, we don't know what it is. But that's not the case when we're talking about inanimate objects; we know what they're for, because we made them. We know that a knife is for cutting, because we made it to cut things. So it just seems obvious that a sharp knife is a good knife, because it fulfills its ends.

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

analog

Oh no, I was by no means saying that people's impulses are static. Obviously people's emotions and impulses change frequently.

Also, seeing as everything is theoretical and nothing about "good" and "evil" can be proven in any way, then pretty much every argument is a person's experiences (or expertise) and opinions presented as a method of reasoning.

I can't think of a better way to get my point across.

Genom Screams

I have no definition of evil. If you're looking for one, look in the dictionary. If I had a definition I wouldn't come here asking for one. I do respect everyone's opinion. I can't grasp on to any one's belief, but your opinions with your experience does help my understanding to understand good and evil in a universal view. This thread should be ended because there is no true meaning or answer for this question. Let this help us understand other people and their feelings and hope for the best for all of us. Thank you for your many replies. This was one of my first threads and I am amazed by how many different opinions we have. Let us all grow together as a community to be responsible to our world and the future of tomorrow. Thank you all for everything. This is where I end this with my last reply to you all.

nothingx

I totally understand what you're saying, and I think its a pretty interesting model for good and evil in people. In particular because I'm into game programming and simulated behavior, and your theory is based on numbers which translates into code easily. What I was looking for is an argument for your theory, which you gave: "it's just how I feel"... and that's fine with me.

Hilarious! I didn't even think of it that way. I believe though, that the "good" you speak of there is a different kind of "good" than I was refering to. Good in that sense means well honed, while good in my sense means not evil. You certainly wouldn't call a dull knife a good knife, but you wouldn't call it an evil knife either, would you?

Your argument for inanimate objects is a good one, but it assumes that humans are not evil to start with. If an evil man builds a bomb to kill millions of innocent people, would the bomb still be a good thing? It served its purpose well, right?

asaris

Well, I'm a Christian, so yeah, I assume humans are not evil to start with. But I don't think you have to be a Christian to believe this.

And yes, the bomb would still be a good bomb, but the man would be an evil man.

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche