Where does evil come from?

[Slimebeast]

highwaystar101 said:

Slimebeast said:

highwaystar101 said:

Slimebeast said:

I wish you had been sober when you wrote your reply.

These kinds of debates are exhausting for me cos I'm not very good with words, especially as there's a language barrier. So I'll give you a chance to edit before I reply.

Oh, ok. Usually when I'm drunk I suffer from 'perfectionism', where I will try very hard to try and be coherent. It annoys a lot of people lol. But I can see that I did ramble on a bit. Perhaps I can list my arguments and you can draw from the other post...

Green:

1. Instinctive morals work. We have evolved to feel repulsed by committing certain acts, but it unfortunately has a certain degree of error where people will commit hideous acts. I challenge you to prove that this degree of error doesn't also exist within unified sets of morals.

2. Yes, I don't think aliens have a unified set of morals. If aliens came, unless they felt compassionate due to some social or biological evolution, I think we would be wiped out.

 

Blue:

1. If God is all knowing and omnipotent, then why did he feel the need to change his morals from the old testament to the new testament? Shouldn't God be able to determine everlasting Universal rules in the first instance.

2. Why are his old morals now defunct? What was the catalyst causing God to condone murdering blasphemers but then change his stance?

3. Christians, Jews and Muslims have all adapted/evolved their morals past Gods decree. I see this as reason to believe there is no divine backing to morals.

 

Orange:

1. There is no evidence for a divine origin of morals, however there is a lot of evidence for the evolution of morals.

2. There are plenty of morals in the bible that have no bearing on the modern world.

3. All people have instinctive morals, it's just that some mask their instinctive morals with religion.

 

Extra question:

Why is one unified set of morals the one true representation? There are many unified sets of morals that claim to be divine and infallible. Many of these conflict, why are the unified set of morals of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Judaism, etc... incorrect, when many of them claim to have a divine and infallible backing the same as Christianity's?

 

You know what. You are arguing that morals are completely subjective. I want you to be aware of that.

So I want to ask you, why do you even start to argue with me if I say "Go BNP!" or whatever?

1. So instinct is good. I can partly agree with that. But what if somebody doesnt have that same insticnt? There are a lot of people who instinctively get pleasure from torturing animals. You wouldnt even try to argue with them. It's like you deny the whole world or moral argument that is out there in 1000's of philosofy books??

I'd say instinctive morals work only to a degree.

2. Of course you can assume the aliens would be compassionate. They could be or they could not. Morals still play a part in their decision. The question is, would they kill us or spare us and on what grounds? Morals arent the same as feelings of sympathy. They're tied to feelings, but not the same. You are dodging the question by avoiding the aliens part. By calling it a strawman or whatever. You wouldnt even argue with the aliens. But I know our leaders would.

Blue

Im skipping this part, for many reasons.

Orange.

1. Your replies are all over the place, you're changing the topic. So I repeat:

But the three guys with a hammer, their genes maybe don't produce such a feeling. So how could I (or you) then condemn them?

Nearly every atheist will in fact, just like you, argue that it's wrong to torment the baby no matter if it was in pre-historic times, today or by an alien on an alien planet and yet in these discussions he will drop comments like we already seen in this thread "it's all relative" - that is, the atheist will attribute himself to absolute morals (damn, I dont think attribute is the proper word) and contradicts himself without knowing it.

Extra question:
Of course everyone claims to have the truth. What is your point?

Green:

"So what if somebody doesn't have that same instinct?", seriously?

We all have the instinct, it's just that some people get pleasure out of torturing animals and that's sad. As I said, there is a "nut case factor" to it, you will get those few people who torture animals, and I've never hidden this fact. It's a sad flaw in evolution, which by definition can never be perfect.

What gets me is that you make this point whilst conveniently skipping what I said about the "nut case factor" of people who have unified sets of morals, as though you think Christians and other people who accept unified sets of religious morals are incapable of such acts. Are you seriously going to say that no Christian in the history of mankind has ever tortured an animals and got pleasure from it, regardless of their "unified morals" they accept?

Oh, and I would argue the people torturing the animal. You seem to think that atheists have no morals that we would try and form a consensus on. 99% of us would agree that torturing an animal is wrong and we would determine that no individual should do this. Don't believe it happens? Then take that up with every secular society on the planet. Social morals do exist without the influence of religion.

 

Blue:

Why are you skipping it? I have a perfectly valid point. Why do your Unified set of morals that you believe have been given from an omnipotent, infallible, divine creator change? What was the catalyst for this change? Why does an infallible all knowing eternal God change so rapidly?

 

Orange:

My points are not all over the place, I'm not changing the topic, you just don't want to take up the way I'm going with this.

To your question about the three guys and a hammer, are you seriously saying that because it is not part of their instinct we can't condemn them? It's really not down to what the individual feels, it's down to how the society instinctively feels about certain actions as a group. A secular court of law would judge them and punish them with no influence from a divine set of morals.

And are we using absolute morals? Yes, we are not arguing that we aren't. We just get our absolute morals come from instinct. Morals don't particularly exist within the individual, they exist on a wider basis. We are social creatures and our morals come from us, not what we believe to be the correct God.

Now back to my orange arguments...

1. Are you going to reject the evidence for the evolution of morals, and claim that your divine morals are the primary source of moral behaviour?

2. Do all of the morals in the bible have bearing on the modern world, and all morals that exist outside the Bible in the modern world are false? Because if you don't accept this, then you accept that morals have evolved past your unified set of morals.

3. I assert that all morals are instinctive and that religious morals are just the instinctive morals masked with religion. It's just that I think you've labelled them and claimed they are from a divine source, when really they are made by man.

 

Extra question:

What I'm getting at is that how can you be certain that your unified set of morals is the correct one. Why are you right and everyone else is wrong? For example, why is the Hindu set of morals wrong? Can you prove that they're wrong and that yours is right?

If you can't, then how can you be so certain that your set of morals is right?

... 

Also, if your morals are unified from an infallible divine source then they are inflexible. Instinctive morals are adaptable to a changing environment. Given this point, whose morals are going to be more effective in the modern world?

And if your morals are open to interpretation, then they are only as good as the weakest link (man) and brought instantly to the level of instinctive morals.

So now you have absolute morals?

You contradict yourself. 

highwaystar101 said:

You are correct that atheists don't have a set of absolute Universal morals. But I counter that with why do we need a set of absolute morals? Our morals come from nature as you say (whether it is from adaptation or a changing society), but that's good. Our morals are constantly adapting to the environment. We don't have a fixed set of morals that can become outdated.

A few hundred years ago I would have been able to morally keep slaves, I would find that to be a disgusting act now. As humans we've adapted to the new environment. 

Decide if you (or atheists in general) have absolute morals or not. Because that's key to the discussion.