First Principles

Quote: FrGamble

Why can't you have the good without the bad?

These are intellectual concepts and
don't really exist outside the
subjective reality of the person
interpreting them. What is
evil or good to one person
might be different for someone
else. There are an infinite number
of examples of this, which we
have beaten to death with a
hammer over the years.

Yes we did discuss it and yet you still maintain that there is not objectively evil acts? I thought you surely realized by now that morality is not subjective? I mean kids get the fact that certain things are wrong.

Quote: FrGamble

Correction, the devil cannot exist without God. There is no yin or yang here.

Simplistically speaking, and, if we are to take God per se, simplistically, then God comes from Devil, as from negative-sign times/divide negative, which becomes a plus-sign. You can't make negative from plus - barring all manner of overly exotic imaginary (quaternion number) math, or other contrived thinking.

On a more fundamental level, nothing (non-existence) does exists to us, eg, as do our mistakes. We make real mistakes with actual consequences. 2 + 2 = 5 doesn't really exist in simple arithmetic as defined, but it does to us because its consequences may be actually very bad. How can non-existence exist? It can't, but nor can it sit side-by-side with existence in the manner that everything in our universe is "connected". We get just a dummy form of it.

The old question about where is all the anti-matter/time. If you have some anti-matter, then why not all of it? It's simply not connected to our universe because of what would happen, or, conversely, of what couldn't happen. The tiny bits of anti-matter we create - the most expensive stuff of all to make - is from the stuff in our universe, so, it's not actual anti-matter. Again, the actual stuff would cancel out all of the matter in our universe, along with the anti-matter produced by our universe naturally, or by us in a lab.

Given whole such actual anti-universes (or worlds, if you prefer, to make one universe, on the end), there we can expect to find the Devil as divine "king". Where they experience as pain what we feel as pleasure, there you have God to blame. Where God is the negative-sign. Something like that.

Quote: FrGamble

I thought you surely realized by now that morality is not subjective?

By now? What's changed. Good
and evil is determined from
where you're standing at the
time. Even a 4 year old kid has
that figured out. What's evil
for one person is often a blessing
for another. You live in a black
and white subjective universe
that doesn't exist in the objective
world.

What is evil is evil, what is good is good, what is true is true, what is false is false. This is another first principle I believe. Do you think evil can be good based on opinion or that true can be false depending on the person?

Quote: FrGamble

Do you think evil can be good based on opinion

Evil is ALWAYS based on opinion, it
doesn't exist outside opinion. If
it did, one persons evil would never
be another persons windfall. Which
it obviously often is.

Quote: Evenbob

Evil is ALWAYS based on opinion, it
doesn't exist outside opinion. If
it did, one person's evil would never
be another person's windfall. Which
it obviously often is.

I imagine that some things are universally evil, such as anything that causes, or condones unnecessary harm to something living, or not.

As for windfalls, who is to say what is an actual windfall? Many things appear this way, but, sooner or later, come back to even "haunt" the other person. Who's to say which pictures we are really drawing of ourselves in the greater scheme, from life to life? Which are the best paths in life? The ones that start out good? Aside from some seemingly consistent principles as we go along, all we can do is guess.

Quote: toomuch

I imagine that some things are universally evil,

The Holocaust was 'evil' to pretty
much everybody. That's the overall
opinion. But it wasn't evil to the
universe, objective reality has no
opinion on it. It's only our subjective
reality that labels things good and
evil.

Quote: Evenbob

But it wasn't evil to the
universe, objective reality has no
opinion on it.

I imagine also that continuous (physical) reality has nothing hanging on it as an unimaginably small (everything) versus big (nothing) singularity of matter or purity. Loosely speaking, matter may be black, and white, or, clear, and unclear, but it isn't a matter of anything in specific or general - only of itself.

(The full type of matter must be contained within a point; the empty type, in the finity that lies beyond infinity, a different type of point. Otherwise, everything would be wall-to-wall matter without any nothing to stop or balance it. Were nothing in a point, there would be no way to coax it out.)

Aaron Rodgers speaks of his experience with religion similar to how we have talked about it here. I think he says it well. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/aaron-rodgers-family-dismayed-quarterbacks-011503545.html

"“Religion can be a crutch, it can be something that people have to have to make themselves feel better,” Rodgers continued. “Because it’s set up binary, it’s us and them, saved and unsaved, heaven and hell, it’s enlightened and heathen, it’s holy and righteous … that makes a lot of people feel better about themselves.”