Evil?

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Good and evil, right or wrong are often subjective.

The terrorist that flew into the towers on 9-11 believed they were serving their God.
Hitler took a country deep in poverty and turned it into a major world power.
Charles Manson.. ok a drugged out physo, yet his "family" would do anything for him.

Genocide in Africa, who is more evil.. the ones carrying it out or the ones not stopping them?

Look at all the things that happen where people 'just don't want to get involved', they just look the other way and let bad things happen.

Evil is hatred in any form.

I guess it would depend on where a person lives that would define "evil." In some cultures they love their neighbors; in others they eat them. And each culture thinking that the other one is the evil one.

The 9\11 terrorists were evil because they are fudementalist and thus use religion to justify their hateful ignorance.World War two would have never happend if it wasnt for the pettyness of the european allies at the end of world war one and the republican and isolationist american preventing american involvement with the league of nations and the fact serbia was never punished for instigating the war in the first place because that was conviently swept under the rug.Serbia wanted a serbian dominated slavic state so they could push around all the other slavic peoples that lead to the genocide in the 80's and nintetys.About africa both halves are wrong but those that commit the acts are more evil because american cant enter every conflict because the it would have the detrimental side effect of more world terrorims and the reputation of amercia being the worlds police.Or conquering nations like iraq. Which clearly fits in the morally grey area I mentioned earlier.

Every time the words "good" and "evil" pop up, I always picture some dumb f**k health teacher lecturing us on why smoking a joint is as selfish as murder and rape. That and tons of other corny motherf***ers who flex their superiority under the disguise of doing it for your own benefit.

So yeah, what I'm trying to say is, I associate those words with fairy tales. I'd rather use "pleasure and pain" than "good and evil". It's not just semantics, pleasure and pain has a more concrete meaning. It's more like it's no strings attached you know? No underlying BS, it's straight to the point.

I think terms like good and evil are concrete. The fact that those words strike chords in us suggest that we all experience them. Perhaps we hate those abilities such as evil that is innate in human nature that we make up ideas that negate them. By delving into our own emotions and being honest, we can't deny that we all harbour feelings which are evil. Placing judgment on these emotions which arises feelings of hatred is in itself hatred. Whether these judgments come from ourselves about ourselves, or worse judgments which come from others (which oftentimes are not perceptive on the grander scale but only are projections of other's beliefs) these judgments piss us off.

Jesus said that anyone who doesn't hate himself cannot follow me. Nobody can understand love if they don't understand hate. If you just ignore it all together then it stands to reason that you are ignoring yourself. If you ignore yourself then how can you choose anything? I mean, if you ignore the deepest aspects of your animal nature, how can you ever forgive it? And forgiveness is the bridge, right? How can anyone truly be good if he/she can't forgive and grow? Should we just deny and pretend that bad things don't occur? Apathy is for the ignorant. They are not bad, just dumb. Dumb is not evil. I'd rather be evil than apathetic but that is not to say that dumb people have no merit. Birds may have no sense of good or evil so whatever they do is not evil or good. We humans, or some of us at least, we have a choice.

Hatred is a projection of fear. So if hatred 'is' evil... fear is 'evil' in it's many forms; anger, destruction, murder. Love is 'good' in all íts forms: protection, bonding, friendship, proud. We all experience both; love and fear, good and evil.

All people are born with the insticts towards 'good' and away from 'evil'. We all want to be loved, understood, accepted.

But sometimes this leads to a paradox.

For example: if Magnus of this forum were a scientist in the 1930's and had a family with a pretty blond husband and three cute blond babies and she found out in the 40's her new chemical invention got used for gassing jews ... what choice would she make? Quitting her job, saving the anonymous jews but condemning her cute blond bunch to death for betrayal... or saving her bunch and so condemning hunderds of jews to death? Which choice is the 'good' choice there?

It is always easy to say that people have a choice. They do... of course; but it's hardly ever a choice between an obvious good vs an obvious evil.

Dr Zimbardo (who facilitated the stanford prison experiment) had written a book on this. If you believe his research the years after the experiment; it is pretty much always the situation that leads some people into evil deeds and some into good. Title: the lucifer effect.

My parents, probably both of them aspies, who got traumatized by World War II and the Hitler atrocities, used simulated Nazi terrorist tactics against me. When I think about wha tit must have been like as an aspie living in a military barracks (both of them) or on the front lines of a world war and even inside a concentration camp, I can understand why their minds would twist. I wouldn't call them evil now though at one point in time I would have had no problem with that - before I understood anything about Aspergers and sensitivity to overwhelm and the environment.

Given my childhood, I certainly wouldn't condone Hitler or Nazi tactics or the killing of six million Jews. But I read somewhere that Hitler's grandmother was a Jew and his classmates beat him up every day, called him names as though he were Jewish, and ostracized him to the nth degree. And that was partly how he came to outlaw being Jewish and was willing to send anyone to death who questioned him, which was a pretty effective way to retain people in your life when you're too odd to be accepted. I admit, he was more like a psychopath than Aspergers odd, and the story might not even be true, for all I know.

But if it were true, would his classmates be considred evil? Perhaps if you save one child, you can save six million. If it's evil to hate anything, is it evil to hate pedophilia and kiddie porn? What if a victim of kiddie porn and pedophilia grows up and ends up on death row for killing her pimp?

Can good and evil be judged by anyone who has not walked in the shoes of the person being judged? Can anything be that black and white that we can ever know for sure?

What if mankind is racing toward its own self-fulfilling Armageddon and it all ends when every voice on earth desperately calls out in prayer to God instead of Satan and we all end up in heaven? Should we judge Cain evil for bringing murder into the world or do we start with Adam and Eve who brought evil into the world and taught Cain his value system?

How many people with autism have been judged violent and institutionalized for meltdowns after repeated frustrations over not being heard and given a voice in the running of their own llives? Does that make us evil because we've been judged so? Does that guarantee we're good if it's unjust? Does it make our captives evil? Or are they simply captives themselves of social prejudice, following faulty assumptions and protocol, to avoid getting ostracized by the society that ostracizes us - because they've seen the same hell we have just as close up and they don't want to end up there by defending us?

Where did evil begin? More relevant to today, how do we end the judgment? With less judgment in the world, maybe desperate people wouldn't feel forced to make such desperate irrevocable choices that destroy the lives of other human beings and their belief in themselves as good and self-forgiveness?

Doesn't it all start with us? For today I choose not to judge at least one person. If I normally judge six people per day, I will stop at five.

angelicgoddess said that fear is a biproduct of hate. I agree. Fear is an offspring of evil. These are abstract terms of course so labeling emotions as concrete things may sound silly as it often does in parables, but it also helps us to understand them.

Nothing in nature is constant and even evil can transform. To say that Hitler is evil sounds harsh but I'm sure he was evil in some senses at some points in his life just like we all were/are. I'm sure he was also good in some senses too. After all, he was a vegetarian who loved animals and was kind to (non-Jewish) children. Sure we can judge him but maybe he just didn't know any better. Just like in experiments where people chose evil/bad, we don't always choose from our ideals. In hindsight those people in those "evil" psychological experiments may have felt shameful and dumb and given another chance would choose a different outcome. So rather than pinpoint things to some moment in life and judge it, why not try to understand or at acknowledge it. I think evil exists just as hatred does exist. Evil is revelling in hatred. But, everything is subject to change.