Evil is blind and unintelligent...? I would hesitate to call the likes of Hitler either of those. If anything, evil is often cunning, calculating, and spoken with a honey-dripped tongue.
Atheist world
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Evil is blind and unintelligent...? I would hesitate to call the likes of Hitler either of those. If anything, evil is often cunning, calculating, and spoken with a honey-dripped tongue.
Intelligence and IQ appear linear. While what you say is true, evil clearly lacks the wisdom necessary to be loving and of course compassionate. I personally believe that true intellects know how to separate real from false and unless one is evil, the decision to conform to truth and reality will be made. God is real, and unless one is wise one may decide to rebel against humanity and the greater good. As Immanuel Kant and Langan noted, the choice to use one's gifts of nature for the benefit of the whole is a moral choice. Hitler knew right from wrong but made the choice to go wrong and used his gifts to murder and lie and programmed using as much propaganda as possible to commit as much evil to humanity and devastate the universe's benevolent self-designing tendency using his mouth to speak evils and blind the unintelligent and ignorant folks who knew no better. Folks like atheists.
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Which one? There are so many to choose from, and intelligent people believe (or have believed) in all of them.
And yet Hitler believed quite strongly in religion. Let's look at some atheists:
Clarence Darrow, lawyer and famous early supporter of the ACLU
John Stuart Mill, philosopher whose book "On Liberty" set a new standard in describing freedom from tyranny
Bertrand Russell, well-known mathemetician and author. Won a Nobel Prize in literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."
Would you rather live with one of them or with Hitler?
Which made him all the more evil. The worst elements of humanity are not the ones who are in danger of losing their souls because they know not what they do, but the ones who possess the most knowledge yet use it to suppress truth from humanity's eyes and ears causing division and death.
I'd rather live with the atheists.
Agreed. The atheists above had far more wisdom and humanity than the God-believing dictator who killed millions.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
I know you don't mean that buddy.
kx000
Valued Senior Member
Nil is naught.
Kittamaru said:
You might be taking the point a tad too literally. There is some anthropomorphization, there. I tend to recall Nyarlathotep (a.k.a., The Crawling Chaos) on such occasions. Most people who commit evil are dissociated from the idea that they are committing evil. And, you know, in truth, I think you already know this, at least intuitively. How else do people convince themselves that discrimination and hatred are righteous and noble? We don't need Hitler, but he does make a good example; perhaps at some level he perceived the wrongness of what he was doing, but even as such he would have had ego defenses to justify himself to the mirror's eye. And plenty of people along his way made really bad decisions, and probably knew it, but they had some excuse. Like not wanting to die. And we can say what we want about various assertions of such fear throughout history, and even during Hitler's accursed reign. That is to say, it's a lot harder to call Cardinal Ratzinger paranoid in those days than, say, your average American tinfoiler. Even as such, there is a reason they convince themselves they are doing the right thing; they cannot countenance the coincidence of themselves with such wrongness, whether it be genocide, rape, or even your average daily hatemongering.
Even the dude who decides to stick up a liquor store just to stick up a liquor store, or build some street cred, or whatever stupid reason he might come up with. In truth, I'm fascinated at a certain range of apparent idolatry focused on antisocial behavior. It is certainly a phenomenon worth attending.
Evil is blind, but only metaphorically, because evil is a concept, not a real thing. Functionally speaking, evil is a result interpreted through a comparative lens. That is to say, it is a judgment after the fact, according to specific if unenumerated criteria established to warrant judgment.
If it occurs according to nature, it is simply what it is. But if it occurs according to will, we purport to judge it. And, to be certain, there seems to be functional value in doing so. But it is also worth reminding within such context that the measure of evil is inherently unstable.
The problem is that the people who taught generations to "Question Everything" erroneously presumeed future generations would be intelligent enough to understand the maxim.
Remember also that our neighbor is responding to one so cynically self-invested that he would wish a denigration of the entire human condition in exchange for his idyll.
We must first comprehend the context of the question. Constricted, individualist literalism is not exactly helpful in that endeavor.
In other words, I think there's probably a lot more going on in that paragraph than your response acknowledges.
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The All Loving Flying Spaghetti Monster/Deity.
Are you a fundamentalist pastafarian?
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Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Naught is not a negative.
Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
A quite loaded choice. What about, say, using Stalin or Mother Theresa instead?
Not that I would like to live with Mother Theresa, but I think it would be a little bit less dangerous.
kx000
Valued Senior Member
But it is nil. Imagine no hope or doom. It doesn't have to be negative to be bad.
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I guess that means there are good people and bad people and simply looking at if they are theists or atheists is not going to help you identify the good from the bad. I can live with that...
Indeed it is - and naught is not negative. It's just a point on a continuum. Positive can be bad too.
Good point! It can go both ways. Looks like believing in God doesn't make someone moral, any more than not believing in God makes someone ignorant, or blind, or immoral.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Speaking subjectively, I agree. Good and Evil are human terms.
But in reality there is neither good nor bad, only change.
Again, subjectively I agree. Many psychopaths are highly intelligent and have high selfesteem.
But the concepts of Good and Evil as spiritual entities are human biblical concepts and are meaningless terms in respect to cosmology.
The death of a star was responsible for the birth of man.