Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Oct 04, 2025 1:50 pm
So evil means, "not ideal"? But whose "ideal" gets to count, in that? And why should something yet-unrealized, as all ideals are, be a grounds for any objective categorization of something as "evil"? How many purely imaginary things get to determine our value judgments, and why should any?
First, you as Evangelical Christian believer have already made up your mind. You know this, I know this. For this reason a conversation with you is futile. However, over the course of about a decade now I have been engaging with you off-and-on and, as I have indicated, you have had a negative influence on my own *theology* such as it is, and in relation to your fanatical beliefs, I have had to revise my own. I doubt you read with any interest or concern anything that I write simply because you are a fanatic Christian believer and your central function is to "hold your own" in the face e of the opposition which you come here to encounter and refute.
I said "At least on one level an answer is really quite easy: nature is intolerable to human idealism". The operative words were 'on one level'. And I explained, I believe coherently, why the human being, generally speaking, finds the world intolerable, confusing, depressing, difficult, overwhelming, and why it produces in man a type of craziness. Man reacts to the *cruelty* and absolute insensitivity of 'the world' to any of his suffering. And everything is totally mutable. There is nothing that man can build here that endures. It all crumbles away, and man faces mortality which, for everyone, is distressing. It all dissolves away. It all turns *to dust* as all philosophical religions note.
You disregarded, as you will always disregard because that is what you do! the carefully inserted word 'on one level'. It implies there is, or there may be, another level. But it is now difficult, and it will always be difficult, for man to determine on what 'other level' he can base his ethics and morality. The world
as Nature has none. It is simply a terrible world of processes (I say 'terrible' to indicate not so much something terrifying, though there is that, but rather overpowering and totally strange
when it is seen).
I say that when man becomes aware that
then idealism is born. An animal living tooth and claw and unconscious of the system it is in cannot, certainly, conceive of an ideal circumstance different from the one it is in. But man is conscious, and to the degree that consciousness and awareness is developed is the degree that man could even become aware of higher possibilities of visualization. Thus if a world such as our own exists, it becomes conceivable that other worlds might also exist: ones more terrible than this one, and ones much better, more suffering-free. Man meditates on *this world* and sees that everything in it is brutal and unconscious, but man is different, and thus he stands apart. It is in all that that man's idealism originates.
In the story you have invested in, you do exactly this: you conceive of a better world prior to the Fall. A mistake was made, or a bad, willful choice was made, and the entire cosmos was brought down into the terrible state that is seen in nature. This is your 'explanatory model'. It is precisely similar, though crude, to many of the models described in the far longer history of the religions of the Indian subcontinent. They all involve
explanatory models.
Because I am not a Christian, nor a Jew -- though I come out of this matrix -- I opt to build a metaphysics on other foundations. I have no choice. Part of that involves going back over more ancient, developed metaphysics, but then like any modern I must face a world that has been turned over by scientific awareness. For this reason (as all know) metaphysics is a problematic territory and has been done away with at least by many. Probably the closest approximation to a philosophical base in my case would be a qualified Platonism.
The idea of
a savior remains an interesting one but I cannot see *saving* except in a very broad sense. What does *salvation' mean in our world today and for man? I reject your definitions more or less across the board. (Hence my view of you as a negative influence). Our present is infused with a very contaminated Evangelical conceptualization of the figure of Jesus and of 'salvation'. You are contaminated. Your thinking is on one level quite good (you have a sharp mind and you bother to read, etc.) but in the end I find that you are third-rate. And you are a terrible apologist even for your brand of Christianity. You alienate everyone who comes into contact with you.
That can't be right. A lion pulls down a gazelle...and we call it "evil"?
Why should a moral attribution from another species, the human, be added to that?
You fool. How deliberate is your mis-conceptualization!
A lion who kills and eats
your entire family out on the savanna will never be seen benignly. The loss of your beloved family and children will be felt to be a terrible evil. The loss will do you great harm. You may even no longer want to live. In this sense 'the world' does things to man which he cannot live with. An animal has no capacity to think things through (as far as I know, though I have read that elephants have a striking awareness of death and 'remember' dead companions).
As I carefully explained it is *the world of nature* which is intolerable to man's sensibilities, and the 'evil' man experiences in that world drives him crazy. Especially when, by circumstance, he is forced to participate in those processes.
Then, like Belinda, all you're suggesting is that "evil" means, "AJ doesn't like..." But what one likes or dislikes is both variable and merely subjective. So there's no grounds in such an account for attributing any quality of objective "evil" to the event or situation. It's 100% about liking and disliking, then.
No, you insipid moron, that is not what I say. That is what you say. I simply point out that 'in certain senses' and on 'one level' what man determines is 'evil depends a great deal on what he feels.
The metaphysical dimension -- when man feels the need or develops a sense of a need to live in accord with higher, metaphysical principles -- all of that is another question. I do not negate that, I actually put emphasis on it. But I doubt you have ever read anything I have written because ...
"Obstinacy makes us unable to hear for all that we have ears".
IC wrote:Why is that order which you call "natural" deserving of also being characterized as "evil," then?
I carefully explained this. The closer man is to raw nature, the more terrible is the life lived. Man creates separation where a more protected experience can take place.
My view is that sociopathic evil, at least on one level and to some degree, rises in man out of his condition --
the condition of nature. But deliberate harm, psychopathic acts of harm, joy in inflicting pain -- these require a separate analysis.
That's a mere "et tu quoque" fallacy, of course -- were it true that I have no such theory, it would not mean you did. It would just mean that NEITHER of us had any justification for the word "evil," not that you would suddenly acquire one.
You rely on a theory, pre-formulated, that is entirely inadequate as a large explanatory model. To believe what you believe means that you have stopped reasoning in ways needful. That is
my view of you and what you have invested in.
My theory is more realistic, more communicable, and it
starts from a recognition of the terrible nature of Nature.
Even for that, you'll find you have to take some basic assumptions about hypocrisy and unfairness...assumptions you just can't get from your secularism.