Is Anything Evil? Does Evil Exist?

I did not read that self-hate and the resultant hatred of others was a requirement.Which god do you worship anyway, Rob? I am unfamiliar with the hate others as you would hate yourself type god except as a counterexample.

Your bolded section in the quote doesn't even relate to your stupid charge against Phat - it is just stupid and inane.

In fact, since we can not fathom any "reasonable" motivation for his actions, our observations become less objective.

Good lord, Rob when you are going to quit comparing yourself to Jesus.

Rob writes:Actually the less reasonable his actions, the more subjective his motivations.

Rob writes:Never! The day I do, is the day I forget who I am in relation to Him.

Rob writes:Jesus said the same thing

Rob:You're projecting.All I see is a guy who thinks Percy is God. EVC is not primarily for me a place to evangelize any longer. I do that face to face every day. This is a place for me to study my opponents and learn their arguments.Their is no-one here that threatens me or my god.

So in ytour opinion, and depending upon one's worldview, it could be reasonable for some people to ravage an 18 month old baby girl after consuming a mind altering beverage all the while planning and deciding to do so while sober?

It is the intentional laying down of one's reason and thinking process (conscious) so as to indulge and plunder physical pleasure at the expense of another persons (or society's) well being.

Subjective as the definition is, I think you will find that, in practice, my criteria are universally valid.Every person recognizes as 'evil' that which threatens what he or she most cherishes.Every person recognizes as 'absolute evil' that which threatens what the individual cherishes absolutely.

Actually the less reasonable his actions, the more subjective his motivations.

If you cannot perceive the connections between my comments and those of Jesus, then you are blind.

Iceage: Good lord, Rob when you are going to quit comparing yourself to Jesus?

Rob: Never! The day I do, is the day I forget who I am in relation to Him.

And it was Jesus who made the comparison.[. . .] "If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household!"

STR writes: The first step in answering the problem of evil is this: We've got to get clear on what this thing "evil" actually is. It does seem to follow that if God created all things, and evil is a thing, then God created evil. This is a valid syllogism. If the premises are true, then the conclusion would be true as well.The problem with that line of reasoning is that the second premise is not true. Evil is not a thing. The person who probably explained it best was St. Augustine, and then Thomas Aquinas picked up on his solution. Others since them have argued that evil has no ontological status in itself.Let me give you an illustration to make this more clear. We talk about things being cold or warm. But coldness is not a thing that exists in itself; it has no ontological status. Coldness is the absence of heat. When we remove heat energy from a system, we say it gets colder."Cold" isn't a thing. It's a way of describing the reduction of molecular activity resulting in the sensation of heat. So the more heat we pull out of a system, the colder it gets. Cold itself isn't being "created." Cold is a description of a circumstance in which heat is missing. Heat is energy which can be measured. When you remove heat, the temperature goes down. We call that condition "cold," but there is no cold "stuff" that causes that condition.Same thing with a shadow. Shadows don't exist as things in themselves; they're just the absence of light.Evil is like that. Evil isn't like some black, gooey stuff floating around the universe that gloms onto people and causes them to do awful things. Evil is the absence of good, a privation of good, not a thing in itself.So donut holes don't exist; they're just the absence of donut. Shadows don't exist; they're just the absence of light. And evil doesn't exist; it's just the absence of good.