To Kalixx,(kalixx;39497)
Hi Remagoen I am impressed with your tenacity here
. I also admire your frankness and single-mindedness. It speaks much of the sincerity behind your search.
Thank you for the compliment! I try to be a rather thoughtful, open-minded person, and I think that I'm a bit of a writer helps with the tenacity. If you ramble too much in stories...Anyway... Thank you again. (kalixx;39497)
I would like to dig a little deeper into one of your last points: As an atheist I also had to address this issue of evil. But I could not come to the same conclusion as you have here. I do not see your example of murdering one another as defining "evil", rather, in atheist terms, it can surely only amount to defining a mutual agreement of what is in the best overall interests of the community within which we want to live. In other words, if we accept people freely murdering one another, then it would not be in my best interests either because it would destroy the social structure that provides me with an acceptable lifestyle and the possibilities to gain in the future what I want from life. It also provides protection for those that I care personally for (another feeling that you addressed in one posts). Why else would I give a hoot if someone
else kills someone
else, and
neither of whom do I know personally? I.e. we have nothing more than an agreement purely based on perceived mutual benefit.
Let me expand on my original idea. At the very least, I do think that there is right and wrong. It's right to try to help your neighbors and it's wrong to try to hurt them for the same reasons why I listed above to Wakka. Would you agree with this? Stop reading here if not because the rest of my argument rests on that and just reply saying you don't agree.Now, using that premise, let's return to killing. That's wrong, very wrong. Is it necessarily evil? That's debatable, I guess, depending on whom you talk to. But let's take this a step further: If one of your neighbors kidnaps your daughter, binds her, rapes her, mutilates her, and kills her, is that "wrong"? No, I don't think so. Just like some people differentiate between "dislike" and "hate", there's a line, be it fine or not, which is drawn which makes his act evil.What Hitler did was evil, what Stalin did was evil, what Saddam did was evil. I guess, in a way, this is a game of semantics that I'm playing. I don't think evil is inherent in things, only that certain actions themselves are evil.As for everything else you say there, it makes perfect sense to me and I agree for the most part (aside of things not being evil). (kalixx;39497)
However, this only applied within the closed environment of my community. If I look at it globally, our insistence on maintaining a standard of living way above that in many poor countries results in thousands of people dying daily from starvation. Directly or indirectly, I have contributed to their death. Is this evil? Or is it simply that their welfare is not my concern because they exist outside of the social structure that regulates
my life?
This whole topic here is really beyond me, but let me try to respond and play in my mind.If you think about it, your very existence is effecting the lives of people in India. Thanks to the Butterfly Effect, things you do today will have drastic effects the further in the future you go, with limited, but still very real effects in the present and absolute immediate future. Does this make you evil that your buying a cup of coffee this morning sent money to an owner of a coffee plantation, which allows other farmers to harvest coca plants, which promotes drug dealing, which brought drugs back to the US, which split a family apart, which killed a 12yo girl by accident. Te me, it's all circular. Things I do effect them, things they do effect me. I can't call it evil, especially if they aren't going anything intentionally. You're just trying to get something to drink, how is that evil?
But...You have this knowledge of things you do effecting other people. What are you going to do about it? Take a stand like people who stand up against Global Warming, I think. Try to be procreative about it, instead of surrendering to the circle. (kalixx;39497)
So I came to the conclusion that the atheist view does not provide an explanation of evil, it only defines the process of agreeing what is the best social structure that optimises (not maximises!) my personal situation.
The atheist view can't provide any explanation other than "there is no god" just as the theist view only proclaims that "there is a god". The two words do nothing more than that. Now, of course, there are things under the theist banner like Christianity which does offer an explanation, just like there are things under the secular banner which offers something the same. (kalixx;39497)
So then I had to ask myself, does this mean that evil does not actually exist? Is it purely a concept that exists solely within a religious context? And I had to accept that in spite of my own analysis, I
do experience a sense of evil, that there
are things that
are intrinsically evil and disgusting. Now these things may well be, at least partially, the results of cultural upbringing and my familiarity and acceptance of my own social structure within which I live. But, on the other hand, I had to ponder could such intrinsic, subjective, feelings have some other source?
Concept! I think that's the perfect word for what I think about evil. It's not a tangible idea, but there's a concept behind it which you could take a stand after enough thought.I disagree with things being intrinsically evil. Guns aren't evil, nor is the purpose behind them, but rather the intent behind them. For instance, if someone runs into my store obviously having a bomb vest on, I feel that (if I'm able to, of course) I must do something. First, I would seek to subdue the person or the bomb, but that might not be the case. If I don't think I could do that, I would have to stop them in a different way: Harm. Be it breaking a hand, arm, or neck, I would stop that person from blowing up innocent people. Is the intent behind me evil? It might be crude, I may never forgive myself for taking a life, but I intended to kill a bomber to save other people. So how would killing me intrinsically evil?(As an aside and not part of the argument, there's a gray area too. Is it good? I don't think so. Is it evil? No. So like love, like, dislike and hate, it wouldn't be part of the extremes, but somewhere in the middle.) (kalixx;39497)
Just one example: There are certain people who gain pleasure from inflicting severe pain on others, torture purely for its own sake. I do not just see this as socially unacceptable practice because it damages our "program for optimised mutual benefit". I have an intrinsic abhorrence of such behaviour - why?
First, I noticed that you said that
you had an intrinsic abhorrence. Does this mean that it isn't the act doesn't have the evilness within it, but you who prescribe it to be evil. Hitler, Stalin and Saddam...do you really think they were evil people? I don't think so, but we called them evil because, to us, they did evil things.You asked why though, which is always a good question to ask. I think you answered it fairly well in the first point you made (first quote after the compliment) when you spoke of society.
To Wakka,(Wakka)
God gave us a conscience to clearly depict what is good and what is bad.
You asserted this again when I went into detail in my previous post and this post about how ethics came from our understanding of the world around me. You have still not replied in any form of attempt to disprove or poke even a minute hole in my logic.
EDIT: To Maverik,I took a REALLY long time to reply to the above, so I didn't see your reply.(Maverik)
Actually, we've just established that killing is not preferred by either of us. The question still remains, what is the basis upon which a thing is judged to be either good or evil?
You are correct. Kalixx caught me on that, and I expanded what I said to him specifically where I expanded on my idea.
