Calling evil "good" and good "evil"

Post Reply New Topic

There is no such thing as good or evil.

Look at terrorism. To many, they are evil people killing for the sake of it. To others, they are fighting to get foreign oppressors out of their lands. So how can they be called evil? They aren't doing anything most people wouldn't.

It's not surprising when good people do good things.
It's not even surprising when bad people do evil things.
But when good people do evil things that takes religion.

There is no such thing as good or evil.

Look at terrorism. To many, they are evil people killing for the sake of it. To others, they are fighting to get foreign oppressors out of their lands. So how can they be called evil? They aren't doing anything most people wouldn't.

Your early comments are all very well in the case of new markets, where people don't yet feel (rightly or wrongly) that they *need* the product and where monopolies have not yet had the chance to develop. Now that banks are not lending, it is new markets that have little chance to develop, and we can all see that well-established and unregulated capitalism has destroyed itself in the west through monopolisation, particularly given that corporations are now the only major sources of capital. So, although I'm no lefty, I'd argue that a lot of the practices you mentioned are no longer needed. Society IS unravelling and creating your 'net utilitarian evil', which may still benefit the species in evolutionary terms.

Interesting - albeit tangential - comments about free will. - I've always experienced myself as a container 'passed through', as you put it, by contents, perhaps because my autism leaves me without an NT's high level of content (as this must obscure the fact that we all identify with the sense of 'container' rather than 'contents' at a deep level). The problem with imagining we already have even the will to overcome the 'evil' universe that created us is self-explanatory; Richard Dawkins' argument at the end of 'The Selfish Gene' is self-defeating, since if we are the product of 'selfish genes' alone, how can we possibly wish to challenge our own selfishness?

I once heard the following...



So what's the problem? The lack of love.

1 John 4:8 states "God is love." It does not say God "has" love or that God "displays" love... He IS love. It is his primary attribute; it is what motivates him. For example the words found at John 3:16 state "For God loved the world so much that he gave his only-begotten Son, in order that everyone exercising faith in him might not be destroyed but have everlasting life." And 2 Peter 3:9 read, "Jehovah is not slow respecting his promise, as some people consider slowness, but he is patient with YOU because he does not desire any to be destroyed but desires all to attain to repentance." Since love is God's dominate quality this attribute would be found in those who worship him.

(1 Peter 4:8) Above all things, have intense love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins.
(Matthew 13:35) By this all will know that YOU are my disciples, if YOU have love among yourselves.”
(Galatians 5:22-23) On the other hand, the fruitage of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, 23 mildness, self-control. Against such things there is no law.

Jesus expounded on the love we would have not only to God but to humanity in general at Matthew 22:34-39 :

After the Pharisees heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they came together in one group. And one of them, versed in the Law, asked, testing him: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” He said to him: “‘You must love Jehovah your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. The second, like it, is this, ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.’

At Romans 12:17-21 Paul takes Jesus' words even a step further:

Return evil for evil to no one. Provide fine things in the sight of all men. If possible, as far as it depends upon YOU, be peaceable with all men. Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but yield place to the wrath; for it is written: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says Jehovah.” But, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by doing this you will heap fiery coals upon his head.” Do not let yourself be conquered by the evil, but keep conquering the evil with the good.

If love is the dominate quality that worshipers of God must exhibit, it make you wonder what sort of teachings a religion has if it encourages its members to strap on bombs and walk into a crowded area and detonate them. That's NOT love of God or love of neighbor.

God is love? Love that destroys people? Has people sacrifice their daughters to him? Asks his followers to bash their enemies children against walls and stones? How is that love? Don't return evil when your god demands that people who blaspheme him or don't believe in him are killed in violent manners? Also, Jesus just happens to be VERY prominent in the Islamic faith... second most quoted prophet aside from Mohammed I believe. Islam is incredibly similar to Christianity, the only difference tends to be that the Muslims actually follow what their book says not just pay lip service to it.

You're looking at the wrong god. If you want to blame god for all those problems you should put the blame squarely at the foot of the real ruler of this system of things. The bible tells you who it is.

(2 Corinthians 4:3,4) If, now, the good news we declare is in fact veiled, it is veiled among those who are perishing, among whom the god of this system of things has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, that the illumination of the glorious good news about the Christ, who is the image of God, might not shine through.

(1 John 5:19) the whole world is lying in the [power of the] wicked one.

(Luke 4:6-8) the Devil said to [Jesus]: “I will give you all this authority and the glory of them, because it has been delivered to me, and to whomever I wish I give it. You, therefore, if you do an act of worship before me, it will all be yours.” In reply Jesus said to him: “It is written, ‘It is Jehovah your God you must worship, and it is to him alone you must render sacred service.’” (Deut 6:13)

The God I worship has taken steps to fix the damage Satan has done, and soon all the damage he caused will be fixed including humanity's greatest enemy: death. (Isaiah 25:8; 1 Corinthians 15:26; Revelation 21:3,4)

Thankfully as well we have things like the tax code that can be built to encourage splintering of monopolies. One of the things that both Huntsman and Romney have talked a lot about is that when something becomes 'too big to fail' its just too big period.

Do we have any idea what selfishness is yet? We describe an outward trait with it but how deep does it go? Would it finally distill all the way down to the desire for brain stimulation that causes you to move your muscles rather than sit in a chair indefinitely? I don't think we love selfishness for its own sake - at least I can't relate to that, I can't think of many who do. Lots of people have a desire to constantly learn, grow, improve themselves, etc. (ie. self-actualization) but even that - its hard to call that selfishness unless we're going to say that the desire to move forward and evolve, enhance, increase efficiency, is selfishness - if we do that we have a terminology that starts caving in on itself.

In that sense I don't think its that simple, I don't think humanity is anywhere near where we'd need to be in terms of self-knowledge and understanding consciousness itself in order to understand how to walk the line in making an increasingly better world but at the same time how we would go about pruning back human instinct in ways that would keep us on the path to becoming 'better' without becoming apathetic.

You worship a god of hatred, anger, and death. Not a god of love.

smh. I really feel sorry for you.

You believe them? LOL

I was trying to make the same point, having spent the last 20 years of my life pondering the same and other such questions - Any will we have, and therefore any actions we take, are by definition 'selfish' in an ultimate sense, as long as we remain separate individuals - If something that benefits me also harms you, I have no ultimate reason not to do it unless it clearly harms me as well, therefore 'good' can also be evil and 'evil' can also be good.

In the case of autistics, will and selfishness can even exist in the absence of any concrete actions, and in every case, we must atleast acknowledge that that the learning, growth, self-improvement, and other forms of self-actualisation of others may (and even must) be to our own detriment.

smh. I really feel sorry for you.

I think its truly a strange situation where its perfectly correlated - that you'd do just as much harm to either yourself or the other person by which ever choice you'd make.

I think we have to realize then, as I mentioned before, that selfishness is a half-vacuous term. We really don't do well with defining its territory - where it begins, where it ends, how clinically or how negatively/emotionally we wish to define the word. That and, I've always assumed that we want to self-actualize for the sake of making things easier, giving ourselves more ability to work within the framework we have to live in and, essentially, reduce pain. Not sure how that works to our detriment.

Not sure what you mean here.

The problem is that motivations are always mixed together somewhere in our minds. There is a natural desire to have for yourself and damn the consequences for anyone else, but then there's also a natural (or atleast common) warm 'buzz' when you know you've made someone else happy, along with a sharp pain when you see you've harmed someone. If you take the widest sense of the term 'selfishness' (as in Hobbes' comment along the lines 'I am charitable because it makes ME feel good'), it becomes less meaningful to define it 'negatively/emotionally'.

{I didn't think 'selfishness' was ever really viewed negatively in America by the way.}

If you read all the words I wrote you'll see that I meant that OTHERS' self-actualisation, not one's own, can work directly to one's OWN detriment, or vice-versa. {The existence of others is automatically to our detriment in the sense that it limits resources available to us, but since others also create resources, this isn't as meaningful as I may have implied.} In the narrow sense of self-improvement though, self-actualisation is more usually a general good, and its absence a profound pain and a drain on resources.

Well, the rise, decay, and fall of Rome is a great example. Seems like for most cultures the hardest thing of all for them to survive is prosperity. Often times people who grow up in prosperity and haven't really gotten a good look at what they've been sheltered from....hard to find any other way of saying it..... they're not all there.


I'd suggest the same, and self-interest when looked at on its face is a double-edged sword; its value of outcome really has more to do with how society manages it than it in and of itself. Channeled productively it can be a great thing, channeled into fantasy and a very macho assertion of running from reality - its quite destructive.


Lol, one could say further that this is really the only touchstone to reality we have.


That and, I'd add, when you have a side of society that tries to force people to deny the existence of that nature (some of them who need fantasy, some of which are just fuzzy thinkers - can't get cause and effect right), and when people try to hammerheadedly beat their faces into reality and beat their faces into the human condition - all the things you'd expect happen similar to if a person wanted to walk off a cliff and not fall in order to protest the age old suppressive human lie (from the 'man') that gravity will make you fall.


Sure. As an animal no one can force you into 'right think', or at least we don't like the society we have left as a result when we push the rules down in a 1984-type manner. We have the choice of things like, say, dictatorship where there's no crime but the criminals are the government and military or democracy where people are free to succeed epically, fail epically, and just like in the dictatorship you can be killed by the government in a democracy you can get stabbed to death or shot for your shoes if your in the wrong place. I mean I'm giving a very simplistic version of it and obviously not all democracies have the same crime rates - there's more going on - but the freedom to make bad decisions or to decide that "I didn't ask to be put here, I'm not getting what I want, so....I should be able to take anything I want form people I perceive as weak" - you can give people incentives not to go to the darkside, you can give them a good list of consequences, but the end economics of such decisions are up to them. Similarly the person who doesn't have the integrity to dissect reality, would rather let their emotions run their logic and everything else, who gets to a high place of public dialog and wants to spout demagoguery and utter garbage irresponsibly - that's another thing that can only be corrected external to them and you need to have enough people in a given society with their heads on straight to ignore these types of people. However, if you grow up given too much and have a very strange/incomplete sense of reality - you can be talked into believing many very strange things.