Evil Is Good And God Doesn't Exist???

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by infinidream

If God Exists, then Evil and Good exist and Evil is not Good

Why must evil and good exist just because God does (in this proposition)? Even if there is a god who cares about good and evil, that makes them judgements, not existing things.

Evil is a necessary component of good. ---if there were no evil, the concept 'good' would have no meaning. such a word wouln't even exist.

That's oft cited nonsense. If you live your childhood loved, nurtured, cared for, you would know good even if you'd never witnessed abuse and murder and suffering. You don't need to live through a death camp to know love.

Therefore

Evil is Good

God does not exist

Your argument doesn't prove synonymity and your premise doesn't necessitate the existence or nonexistence of God.

[Didymos Thomas]

You need to read more carefully, not wholly, was the operative term.

Right, and yet I was under the impression that good and evil are defined in terms of one another, and not in some other manner.

So what's your point Thomas, surely your not saying this silly bible story is where good and evil come from. Good and evil/ good and bad, are biological determined, biological evaluations. If all meaning is subjective, and only bestowed upon the physical world, how could it be anything else.

First, only your bias against anything religious condones calling Genesis silly. Second, I never claimed the story was the source of good and evil as the concepts certainly predate these Jewish stories. The story is about, among other things, good and evil and the mistake of duality.

I gave my point clearly, Boagie - dualistic thinking is flawed. If you disagree, that's fine. In such an event you could certainly expect me to provide some further support.

As for good and evil being biologically determined, care to elaborate? You talk about subjectivity and the physical world, but meaning is not limited to the physical world. People 'bestow' meaning on all sorts of things, physical and otherwise. Even then, the physical world is not limited to biology.

That's nonsense. If you live your childhood loved, nurtured, cared for, you would know good even if you'd never witnessed abuse and murder and suffering.

You would have experienced what we call good (a good childhood). But this child of a good upbringing would not understand his childhood to be good without some understanding that other people have worse childhoods.

One implies two, good implies evil.

[boagie]

[quote=Didymos Thomas;15624]Right, and yet I was under the impression that good and evil are defined in terms of one another, and not in some other manner." quote

Are you saying that if you left good and evil in a room alone they would workout what they meant to each other---I really thought not. Meaning is biological determined, it is the subject that holds meaning, not the object.


"As for good and evil being biologically determined, care to elaborate? You talk about subjectivity and the physical world, but meaning is not limited to the physical world. People 'bestow' meaning on all sorts of things, physical and otherwise. Even then, the physical world is not limited to biology. " quote

Yes, meaning is limited to a subject/consciousness, or ones biology, reality is that which is experienced as the relation between subject and object. The physical world is deviod of all meaning, it only acquires meaning in its relation to a subject/biology. As Schopenhauer put it, "Subject and object, stand or fall together." The physical world is limited, it is limited to biology for any meaning whatsoever.

[Didymos Thomas]

Are you saying that if you left good and evil in a room alone they would workout what they meant to each other---I really thought not. Meaning is biological determined, it is the subject that holds meaning, not the object.

Personifying good and evil only increases the problem. Doing so sets them as two separate 'things', when they are inextricably tied together (as far as I can tell).

But, hey, if you like the personification thing, I can run with it. I would say that they are conjoined twins, and that to separate them would be the death of them. They need not fight, as they depend upon one another.

If I say of an object that said object is evil, I have implied that some other object must be good. Though, even this is misleading as I do not see how anything can be necessarily good or evil - only relatively good or relatively evil under some certain set of circumstances.

Yes, meaning is limited to a subject/consciousness, or ones biology, reality is that which is experienced as the relation between subject and object. The physical world is deviod of all meaning, it only acquires meaning in its relation to a subject/biology. As Schopenhauer put it, "Subject and object, stand or fall together." The physical world is limited, it is limited to biology for any meaning whatsoever.

I can buy this. The only thing is that your position here implies my position on good and evil - we apply meaning to the world, and to have a meaning 'good' to apply to something requires that we have a meaning 'evil' to also apply to something.

Again, one implies two, good implies evil.

[boagie]

Yes, Thomas, but, they do not do it on their own. I really do not think we are in disagreement here, yes, we have two mutually dependent terms, but, both terms are of course depend upon a subject. The said evaluation of good or evil is biologically determined as the relation of subject to object, it is a judgement, a relational statement, thus, relative to my understanding, relative to me, this is evil.

[Didymos Thomas]

Yes, Thomas, but, they do not do it on their own. I really do not think we are in disagreement here, yes, we have two mutually dependent terms, but, both terms are of course depend upon a subject. The said evaluation of good or evil is biologically determined as the relation of subject to object, it is a judgement, a relational statement, thus, relative to me, this is evil.

Yeah, we have to apply the terms for the terms to exist. How does this not make their meanings entirely mutually dependent?

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Didymos Thomas

we apply meaning to the world, and to have a meaning 'good' to apply to something requires that we have a meaning 'evil' to also apply to something.

I just can't see any logic in this argument. Good and evil are not opposites on the same spectrum. They are entirely independent ideas, they are defined separately, they are conceived separately, and they are experienced separately.

For something to be "less evil" does NOT mean that it's "more good." For instance, fewer people died in the Rwandan genocide than died in the Holocaust. That doesn't make the Rwandan genocide better than the Holocaust! That would be absurd. Neither was good, both were evil, one was worse.

Similarly, if I save a person from a burning car, that's not more evil than saving 2 people from a burning car. It's just less good.

The opposite of good is neutrality. The opposite of evil is neutrality.

[boagie]

Originally Posted by Didymos Thomas

Yeah, we have to apply the terms for the terms to exist. How does this not make their meanings entirely mutually dependent?

Thomas

Thomas, the terms have meaning, all meaning is the property of a subject, it is the subject that gives the terms their meaning. The protest that they are not mutually dependent, as the latest post by Aedes indicates, is unfounded, one would not know what is good, if one did not know what was bad. The important thing to remember is that it is the subject doing all the work. Apparent reality is a biological readout, good and evil is a biological readout. There is only good and bad -------evil has Christian conotations, not really appropriate to reality.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by boagie

The protest that they are not mutually dependent, as the latest post by Aedes indicates, is unfounded, one would not know what is good, if one did not know what was bad.

This rationalization you (and others, including Thomas) make here is unfounded because there is no absolute standard for good, for bad, or for evil. There is cultural convention and personal convention, but they are all relativistic judgements. So even if I were to stipulate that one MUST know 'bad' to understand 'good', it would be meaningless -- because an individual in seeing something he held as good would judge it against his own conception of 'bad' -- not some ACTUAL bad standard.

While I do agree with you that good and bad are a better conceptual dichotomy than good vs evil, I still cannot agree that they can only be understood in relation to one another. Our default judgement for ANY situation is neutral. Why? Because I don't assign some adjective or quality to a situation unless I see it. So if I watch a baseball game, I don't qualify any aspect of it as "evil" because it's just not a quality that is relevant to the situation. It's neutral. The extremes of judgement (i.e. superlatively good, superlatively evil, superlatively bad) are counterposed to the default neutral judgement.

And because it's abundantly clear that we make snap visceral judgements about things and then back-rationalize them, I think it's fair to generalize that GOOD and EVIL and BAD are emotionally-derived judgements that consist in what is witnessed and in one's application of the idea -- they do NOT incorporate the contraposition of an opposing idea.

[iconoclast]

infinidream,

'evil is necessary to good and thereofre evil is good???'

Great question. loti. Of course, good and evil are superlative conceptual opposites - a dichotomy forged by religious ideation in view of an absolute God. Such ideas are not really useful to an informed ethical/moral outlook, but so imbedded in the language it's difficult to see beyond them.

Nietzsche gave it a go in - 'Beyond Good and Evil' but arrived at the conclusion that ethics and morality are a herd mentality propogated by the weak to subdue the strong. I believe there was some such transvaluation of values in the transition from hunter-gatherer to social life - and that this is the source of this superlative dichotomy, where evil was defined as 'that which is against society' - and good as it's opposite.

Thus, the source of the conceptual paradox is in the supression of the individual good for the social good. This tension remains with us, but i think is more correctly addressed by employing the language of justice - brilliantly explicated by Rawls in 'A Theory of Justice.'