| > This strikes me as extremely flawed reasoning, creating a false dichotomy between ${religion} and nihilism. Possibly, sorry about that. I guess I've expressed it a bit extreme there - but even toned down, I still feel (yeah, feel. goodbye reason...) that there's some truth to the concept... Defining "goodness" is difficult. There's a whole bunch of different attempts - logical positivism, utilitarianism, etc, but to me all of them eventually boiled down to some kind of "do whatever makes the happy-chemicals in your brain do their thing...". At some point you have to decide which other non-you-beings you want to compromise with, and which physical/chemical urges you want to cultivate, and which balance between longer-term-goals and instant gratification you want to achieve. Keeping humanity alive, wiping ourselves out to allow other species to survive better for a few more thousand years until something cosmic wipes us all out... It doesn't really make any difference in the end. > You don't need absolutes to exist in order for a concept to be meaningful. <snip> The same way as you don't need "absolute wet" to exist in order to judge whether something is wet or dry. Absolutely. But some kind of definition of wetness, or dryness is probably helpful. :-) >It's also a common parlor trick to talk about "evil" instead of "bad" as the antithesis of "good". Evil implies intent. Ah, yes. I guess I'm not really using the right terminology at the moment. Terminology is complicated. I guess so there should be a scale of "good occurances" and "bad occurances", with evil being intention of bad occurances? But to whom? Is a prison guard commanded to hurt his prisoners intending bad occurances to his prisoners, but intending good for his family being provided for? Is there any way to define whether hurting someone is good or bad? You could argue surgery or chemotherapy is very specifically hurting people with the intention of good for them later... But genocide has been justified under the same argument - but on a societal level. Is there any way to define which things are good, or bad? I believe there is Good, and anti-good. And I believe that there is a being beyond of our limited perspective, God, who cares about that, and wants us to aim for Good, and if we're willing, will help us in that direction. > Religious morals generally don't care about good and bad, they care about adherence to a set of strict but arbitrary rules. Sad, but true. However, from how I've read the bible, I don't think that's how God (if there is a God) really wants it to be. And if there is a God, and if that's all they care about, they're really not worth caring about. |