Thread: What is Evil?

In the end everything is relative.

Imagine a society of people where many of the concepts that rule our society simple don't exist. It's just dog eat dog and that's the norm. You wrong me and I take retribution on you and yours and that's just the way it is. You're walking down the street and the guy next to you keels over and people just leave him there to die, no one cares that's just the way it is.

We define ourselves based on the norms of our society. That's one of our big problems because if there is a clash of our societies we need to reconcile what we might think is universally evil to what another society says is the norm and the law. I think you all know what I'm getting at here without having to say it.

We have people within our own society who we say are anti social or nonconformist who play by their own rules not ours. Many of these people we might say are evil.

I challenge you to come up with any single action or concept that any intelligent living being be he from this world or another, could universally agree on as being what we generally think of as evil.

Originally Posted by Tuxedo7

Hence ... one of my favorite sayings ... "We both can't be right, so you must be wrong!" Thought I'd drop a little humor in the midst of this heavy thread.

yeah, but you can both be wrong.

Originally Posted by thebigspendur

I challenge you to come up with any single action or concept that any intelligent living being be he from this world or another, could universally agree on as being what we generally think of as evil.

Well, your original thread challenged us to define evil. We all did that as we believe evil manifests itself.

People here almost universally defined evil as the difference between something that promotes life and something that does not - with lots of variations, but generally that was the essence.

And, I agree with you that you will never find universal agreement on an action or concept being good or evil.

But some body's opinion does not make an action good or evil, the act itself does. Then you might ask "as defined by whom?" As defined by itself. Man is very capable of wiping himself out not by good acts but by evil ones. I don't really care what you call it, we are using good and evil for the purposes of this discussion. But the acts themselves will either promote are deter life. At that point, any life form anywhere can give it's relative opinion on an act's goodness or evilness and it would not matter - life is wiped out.

Something about this thread reminds me of this skit

YouTube - Rowan Atkinson LIVE: 01 - A Warm Welcome