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No Unseen.

God is a construct?  Of course.  So is Superman,  unicorns and centaurs.  Gods , cartoon characters, mythological creatures are all  conjured from imagination.

Evil on other hand describes deliberate harm and intentional cruelty to a shocking degree.  Evil is a concept that describes actual behavior.  So the god construct/evil constr…[Read more]

Unseen – I totally agree.  I am just relaxing and having a very unevil day today.

I think it’s a healthy reality check for anybody.

My takeaway messages are: 1) make the most of life while we have it; 2) be grateful that we have it at all.

It depends how you define evil.

We could call it, causing harm for pleasure, or causing harm for some unworthy reason to do with self-preservation, such as might involve lies.

Baboons are a very spiteful species, and they also have a very strong dominance heirarchy.  Other species may well have been observed to be spiteful (causing harm for no…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:

Humans are primates. An animal. Religion pretends that we are a special animal, endowed by our creator as a soul and the gift or curse of knowing good and evil and having to male the right choices. However, animals don’t judge each other creatures as good or evil as species OR individuals. Are we somehow qualitatively different f…

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Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

What would you call or label the absence of evil?

Heaven? Which further defines “evil” as a human invention and not a “thing.”

Strega wrote:

The proper antonym of ‘good’ is ‘bad’. The term ‘evil’ is a giving up of the possibility to make the ‘bad’ become less so, or even good. It’s populism can most probably be linked to religion or group thinking. There is no real antonym to ‘evil’ I don’t believe in ‘evil’, I think it’s a perjurative term.

You need t…[Read more]

What I mean is, people from other groups are seen as weird, but if that group becomes a threat to “our” group, then those people are also seen as bad.

@Simon, it’s the people who are being manipulated for political purposes, not the terms.

I don’t know what your “but surely” clause means.

“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