There is no such thing as evil. Evil is a fairy tale to bring some sense of cultural order and compliance to world. Good and evil do not exist as separate entities. There is only degrees of cultural acceptance. If one murders is not evil it culturally unacceptable.
Cultural acceptability differs from culture to culture so it cannot be said that their is some higher order what is and is not culturally acceptable.

What world you been living in?

Actually good and evil are a way to help people understand 'right and wrong' but the context both are used in are very blurry.

Good and evil are very valid concepts but I think the Buddhists had a very beautiful way of describing the concept...

oh...that's good!

Can I have some of that crack...I love living in a fantasy world

Good and Evil, I think we judge too quickly and not too well.

Good and evil, right and wrong are religious terms. When you eliminate religion from the equation, what is left? These concepts cannot exist outside of religion.

Good one

Your comments are a bit ambiguous as is your use of the ying/yang. Please explain. It is common for people to use the yin/yang without truly understanding it's origin.

"In Taoism, the Yin/Yang symbol is called known as the "Taichi." Both spheres contain an element of the opposite: the white containing a small black sphere, and the black containing a small white sphere. One cannot exist without each other, and one contains a part of the other. Life cannot exist without death; darkness without light."
"Buddhists believe that when a person dies, their souls are judged according the amount of good deeds they have done. Therefore, the goal is for Yang to triumph over Yin - but in different relation from the Taoist tradition."

http://buddhismtaoism.suite101.com/article.cfm/what_is_yin_and_yang

You are quick to label my ideas as fantasy, but you fail to say what exactly your problem with it is or tell me where I am wrong. Statements such as this do not add any enlightenment to your views, they only make you look foolish and ignorant.

In nature, "Good" and "Evil" exist in balance. It is in the denial of evil and acceptance of only good that we create unbalance and an outpicturing or more evil.

I don't believe in good and evil, but I can see a lot of truth in the Taoist ideals of yin and yang.

In good there is evil and in evil good.

Example:

Good doing evil: Welfare as it is perceived by our government.

Welfare was to help financially strapped people (who had jobs or were employable and lost jobs) to survive in tough times while they tried to get back on their feet.

Great idea.

The evil reality of it?
Welfare fraud, rewarding unwed mothers to have children out of wedlock, taxation that grows on us to feed the need for money, greed and human self interest.

Evil doing good:

This one comes straight from the pages of a Draconian book!

War. Innately evil in that people die. At times it is necessary to go to war and other times it was enacted for conquest and greed. War leads to destruction.

The good in it. Destruction clears the path for growth and rebuilding and modernizing. Weak blood is thinned out allowing for stronger blood to grow. War makes (forces) people to be stronger. Japan after WWII is a total all out example of this concept!


Good and Evil were around as concepts LONG before we had writing. So was religion. For as bad and stagnating as religion was (the evil of it) it did give us a frame work that helped us develop society as we know it which is actually unique among all life on earth in that we defy certain animalistic principles of more basic behavior. The ideas of good and evil and right and wrong are human constructs to frame out our basic behaviors for us to have guidance of some kind rather than rely on anarchy which does not work on large numbers of people. To have order requires an understanding of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. To minimalism good and evil in such a light. Anarchy leads to oblivion. Religion is guilty of pitting good and evil against one another when the idea is to balance the two.

Example. Just because you do not like to fight should not mean you are not willing to defend yourself from harm. To protect yourself fighting is a virtue.
To go out and intentionally seek to harm others for self gain and self gratification makes fighting a sin.

To not have an idea of what is good and evil or right and wrong just makes you immoral and egocentric. It also means that you will act only on instinct because in instinctual behavior is only self interest. Knowing right and wrong and good and evil is the one thing that mentally elevates us above being baser animals but then again I had pet rats that were smarter than a lot of people. They were taught not to bite and they knew not to. If a rat can do that as well as come to me when I called their names then that means everything we think of as "Intelligence" is jaded and wrong.


Take a Tiger. It is a killer by nature. Right for a tiger is making a kill that does not gt it hurt in the process. Is killing wrong for a tiger? No because it needs to to survive. is killing a female right? Not to a male tiger because the species would die out if he killed females interloping into his territory. Is killing a human wrong to a tiger? Hell no! Outside of being bony and greasy we are food to them!

Even Killer Whales show a certain sense of conservation adn also seem to have some kind of "morality" they operate by among themselves and in the rare cases where they have regular contact with humans like at theme parks!

Heck, it has been observed in zoos and in the wild that chimpanzees AND apes show remorse, favoritism, and culture along with a vocabulary and language of their own that is almost as refined as ours.

The one things humans can do is define things and even concepts are definable but it is how we subject them to interpretation is how we personally define the world and its concepts we are surrounded by. That is how we cope with the reality that life is meaningless anarchy!

The notion that one needs a god to validate or even explain morality is absurd. People knew long ago that murder was "wrong" in that they did not want to be murdered. They knew that stealing was wrong in that they saw the effects of stealing and so, again, did not want to be a victim of theft.

I think it's interesting when people talk about the idea that without being born again, sinners would simply act in a vile and disgusting way. If so, perhaps someone will explain to me please why we are not seeing mobs of atheists roaming the streets, zombie-like in their destruction of everything they come in contact with?

I heard someone say once that the reason they did not rob or steal was directly related to being saved by Jesus. Fine and while I'm not going to beat up on the guy for that belief, when I turned the question around (i.e., why then aren't atheists being picked up and locked up for crimes against humanity on a regular basis) he had no real answer. And that begs the point. We are either totally depraved and incapable of doing one good thing (without God) or we are not so depraved and are capable of doing many good things, despite God.


-D

Culture and societies decide what is and is not acceptable. Many would call cultural morals right and wrong as if right and wrong are ideals or entities that exist outside of culture. Murder is the US is not same as murder for other cultures. If right and wrong exist outside of culture then all definitions of right and wrong across all cultures would be identical.

Thank you for your explanation.

We are designed to be depraved.

http://www.zimbardo.com/
http://zimbardo.socialpsychology.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00F88wBoivU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsFEV35tWsg



Great thread Thomas, here are some excellent links to work done by a man who knows about good and evil in a very real sense, and how what we accept as right and proper is a very plastic notion.

Just what we'd expect from perfect design, huh? ;)

Good and evil donot exist outside of God.


Does Thomas J call it wrong when some one steals from him.