“Mother-nature wise, the purpose of life is to survive and create offspring.”

– this carries the implication that it’s also to thrive, and to do this, we need to put the right conditions in place, do the right things, have the right attitudes etc.

@tomsarbeck – I think the terms can be manipulated for political purposes, but surely the “others” only go from “weird” to “bad” when they become a threat to “us”.

Maybe he’s depressed.  The first time I got depressed, I spent the whole time asking, “what’s the point?”, presumably because my then-goals didn’t seem worthwhile (or rather, I didn’t have any).  What’s more, I felt it was impossible to get any or have any.

The words good and evil have a political use, which is the first purpose of government: to control large numbers of people.

They have synonyms, which are I like and  I don’t like respectively, and they are masks for the rulers’ motives.

I don’t at all appreciate a necessary implication or association between evil and supernatural.  The word evil does not bar the supernatural but neither is it required.

In a philosophical perspective evil is perhaps a silly human construct and we and everything else in the universe is simply matter in motion or reducible to physics.  Evil is a…[Read more]

For example, many moms must believe that providing for their child and trying to make them happy and successful is their purpose in life. If he had a pet he loved, taking good care of it could be a purpose.

Mother-nature wise, the purpose of life is to survive and create offspring. (I’m sure that’s not a fun or useful explanation for most kids.)…[Read more]

The thing about the word evil is, it strongly implies some kind of consistently malevolent agency as its sponsor, in fact, consistently malevolent enough to define the agency’s over-riding character. Think Satan, for instance. Like Strega says, there’s the implication (if not certainty) that what’s behind the evil is supernatural agency.

It is…[Read more]

So, I think that evil is not so much a human invention, as an emergent property of: 1) all being competitive individuals 2) in a world where we have to cooperate to survive.

Natural selection is relative to those around us, so it’s not enough to be doing well, there is a tension between doing better than others and helping others.

Competition…[Read more]

This is excellent too