Where does evil come from?

[Slimebeast]

highwaystar101 said:

Slimebeast said:

highwaystar101 said:

My real answer, events happen naturally , we are the ones that label them good and evil.

We also label these events in a spectrum. There is no such thing as good and evil per se, but good on one side of the spectrum and evil on the other, and everything exists as points in between.

The atheist view. Because everything that happens is predetermined (minus some randomness on the quantum level or whatever) there is no free will. And therefore no one is accountable for his actions. Thus there is no such thing as right or wrong, no good or evil.

How exactly did you extract that from my post? I mentioned nothing of the sort. Of course I acknowledge right or wrong and good or evil.

Man kills another man: evil.

Man donates a kidney to another man: good.

It's not hard. By your assertion us atheists are without morals, seeing murder as "just another aspect of nature". We may believe that nature is the be all and end all, but that doesn't mean we can't decide when to recognise something as evil and something as good.

I extracted it from the green sentence.

Atheist morals aren't absolute morals, correct. As in not universal. They are only 'light' morals, morals in a context. As a set of rules that work here right now. Along the lines of "it's not beneficial for the survival of humans as a collective to have too many individuals who kill others randomly, so humans have developed genes that trigger feelings of repulsion towards such acts. And over the years, as the intellectual and cultural beings we are, those feelings have been projected into ethical rules."

But from an aliens' point of view that has no relevance. You couldn't use that as an argument to stop them from destroying all humans. For them our planet could be just like a stack of ants.

 And yes, from an atheists point of view murder is exactly that, "just another aspect of nature".