Does Good & Evil Exist

[The Comedian]

yes, of course. but in case we ever meet, the universe will collapse, duh.

Nice!

[subterranean]

What I know is this. Buddhists, when they take their meals, sit down to eat, and they meditate and say a prayer before taking their meal. Then they visualize their food as taking medicine - just like they are always assaying to practice healing thoughts, words, and actions, they are also meditating that their food is medicine. Now I am taking this picture from a monastery I visited. I'm not an authority to say whether someone who would eat fish would or could be considered practicing or not. Actually there is a precedent for it. There was a great yogi, Tilopa, who lived in extreme conditions and actually for a number of years he subsisted only on fish from the river by which he lived. However the general rule is to not eat meals where animals, even fish, even poultry, were killed to make it.

In this monastery the Buddhists also only ate food which was offered. This was part of making it medicine, although I am not greatly knolwedged about that aspect of it. In Vedic religion, brahmanas offer all their food to Visnu before eating it, and they eat the remains of the food. After suitable food has been offered, it becomes prasadam, or the Lord's mercy. Prasadam is very similar to Buddhist's food, when Buddhists eat what has been offered to the Medicine Buddha, and when they visualize it as medicine. Prasadam is also medicine, and these brahmanas do not eat anything not offered to Visnu. In fact in Bhagavad-Gita Krishna says anything which is not offered to Him is considered to be sinful. The reason for this is since everything is given by the Lord, it should all be offered back. Also, everything belongs to the Lord, and to say that it doesn't is considered theft, thus sinful. In Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna says that if one offers with devotion a leaf, flower, fruit or water it will be accepted, so we understand by this that these things are suitable to offer. Krishna doesn't say, slaughter an animal and then offer it.

In fact, in the Bible in Christianity animal sacrifice is also condemned. I've read the verses but I do not remember exactly what they are. You'd have to ask a scholarly Christian to find out.

Thanks for the explanation. I have a good friend back in college, who is a Hindu. She eats chicken, fish, pork, but not cow as it is considered as holy. I was just thinking whether the Buddhist/Hindu teaching about not eating animal at all, in your case, is something that is taken literally.

[NikolaiI]

Thanks for the explanation. I have a good friend back in college, who is a Hindu. She eats chicken, fish, pork, but not cow as it is considered as holy. I was just thinking whether the Buddhist/Hindu teaching about not eating animal at all, in your case, is something that is taken literally.

Yes the cow is very sacred. The Vedic explanation that she is our mother because she provides us with milk.

The cow is sacred but all life is sacred.

[Eugenie]

Well, unless one has lived in a coma since birth, I think we all know or at least sense by our senses that evil certainly exists, as well as good.

[blazeofglory]

All that I feel is God rises over and above all these attributes. For, he is something like the sun that shines over all equally. And of course good and evil are social attributes or our social ethics, and God remains untouched by our social ethics, and he sees all, whether they are evil persons or good persons by worldly standards are equal thru God’s lens.

Circumstances circumscribe your movements in society. Our social systems are not necessarily apposite or suitable. In point of fact most of our social customs, manners and codes were framed by our rulers and modeling and molding them to their interests. The very lack of good distribution caused many to take to pilferage. When a dog refuses to drink milk at your house, man’ children die of hunger. This dilemma has led to thievery. There are some lands that are virgin and unused while some people have no piece of farm to toil on. This disparity has led to variety of social ills.

[Redzeppelin]

In my opinion, with all due respect, yes, yes, and yes, but perhaps not with such examples of intensity. So-called 'good' and 'evil' do not, however, always have to attribute to Hedonism. I suppose I believe in more of a continuum, a dimensional rather than categorical approach; in other words, something can feel better than good, or worse than bad - I could not say that stepping on a rusty nail has the same intense 'badness' than the death of a loved one, nor does the taste of well-made tiramisu have the same 'goodness' as reading a good novel.
A lot of human thinking, I believe, functions by comparisons. What judges if you slept well last night bases itself on previous experiences - you slept better than you did while the neighbors threw a loud party, but not as well as you did in infancy.

While bad/evil may function to underscore the goodness of good, I do not think it functions to define it. I cannot believe that you would actually suggest that my appreciation of pleasure requires the existence of pain. I fully disagree - a kiss is clearly pleasurable - I need not feel a slap to appreciate it.

In my opinion, the same goes between 'good' and 'evil.' For Believers, nothing beats the ultimate goodness of God, and nothing has more evil than Satan - polar opposites. Would we consider fire and brimstone unpleasurable if we could imagine heaven? It would probably feel relatively uncomfortable, but even if I burned amid fire and brimstone, getting burned on my bare feet and legs would probably not feel as bad as my face getting burned - a simple comparison of bad and worse even where all believers dread, hell.

But we're not talking about degrees of goodness and badness here (so far as I can tell); we're talking about the idea that both NEED to exist. I suggest that evil/bad is parasitic and need not exist at all. That it does exist and that it does (via contrast) heighten our awareness of good does not suggest to me that I should believe its existence is equal to (and therefore valid in and of itself) to good.

[blazeofglory]

Good and bad. If our capacity for thinking deepens we will arrive at a stage where there is no good and bad. All will thaw and submerges. This stage is very subtle in point of fact.

Good and bad is a relative idea. When you make comparisons it is bad or good.

All are relatively good and relatively bad and no one under the sun is absolutely good or absolutely bad. This is simply our sense perception but there is no element in this.

[mono]

While bad/evil may function to underscore the goodness of good, I do not think it functions to define it. I cannot believe that you would actually suggest that my appreciation of pleasure requires the existence of pain. I fully disagree - a kiss is clearly pleasurable - I need not feel a slap to appreciate it.
. . .
But we're not talking about degrees of goodness and badness here (so far as I can tell); we're talking about the idea that both NEED to exist. I suggest that evil/bad is parasitic and need not exist at all. That it does exist and that it does (via contrast) heighten our awareness of good does not suggest to me that I should believe its existence is equal to (and therefore valid in and of itself) to good.

I do, actually. You may think David Hume and I insane, but I think the mind functions greatly upon comparisons and previous experiences. We have two "matters" of our brains - white and gray matter, made up of microscopic neurons; newborns have white, but gray builds over time. Steven Pinker demonstrates that babies, when first born, have an insignificant amount of gray matter, and this contributes to the reason why we often have little to no memory of infancy; a lot of things occur during infancy, what Erik Erikson calls the life stage of developing trust. Trust ends up from a series of experiences in which we learn to either trust or mistrust; certainly more happens in infancy other than what we deem Hedonistically comfortable and uncomfortable, but we learn to trust what we feel comfortable with (one's mother, for example), and vice versa, yet we create this continuum of good vs. bad solely by comparisons, and more gray matter grows from other things, besides affirming what feels good vs. bad, and everything in between. We commit these sensations to memory.
In my medical field of practice, I have sadly encountered many elderly individuals with chronic dementia in both its early and late stages. Besides, as in Alzheimer's disease where sections of the brain can develop plaque, dementia will cause generalized atrophy and a dilapidation of the gray matter. Among other things, they lose their memory, and, with that, forget what feels good and bad; I have had more than a few inflict injury upon themselves, then wonder why they hurt so terribly. They have lost the basis of both memory and sound judgment to discern good and bad, but can relearn, in a way, similar to children, the comparisons of good and bad, and what feels better than good and worse than bad.
Again, we need not take things to such extremes as kisses and slaps, but certainly a kiss often feels better than a slap, with the exception of masochists; we have that comparison. Personally, I like the taste of milk, but I would prefer a kiss over a glass of milk anyday; before encountering my first intimate kiss as a teenager, I did not know the pleasure of it, nor of my preference of it over, as a simple example, milk, which I have drank all my life, even as a newborn - hence, the gray matter of my brain from infancy formed a greater affinity for a kiss (as a teenager) than milk (something I tasted early on, as a newborn) - a continuum, comparisons.
Babies soil themselves on a regular basis, and, personally, I dislike the smell of fecal matter; for as long as I remember, I have disliked the smell, and this probably started in infancy, when the olfactory sense strengthens. I would strongly prefer a moment of smelling the odor, however, than, as you said in your analogy, receiving a slap to the face. I have not gotten slapped many times, but the first serious time in my memory occurred also as a teenager; the growing gray matter in my brain, from infancy, deemed the smell of fecal matter revolting, but it deemed it not as badly as a slap to my face over a decade later - another continuum, comparison.
While we have good and bad, we have different degrees of good and bad; not only do we require a source of comparisons, which begins from birth, to judge what feels good and bad, we also highly require it to what feels better than good and worse than bad. In my opinion, in an extreme case, a slap in the face will make one appreciate a kiss even more, because it heightens our senses; we can build a tolerance to good and bad, but there will always exist a better and worse.

[kingoflombards]

I think that good and evil exist. There will always be a sort of conflict in which a side will be labeled as 'evil' and a side as 'good'. However, in a lot of cases, the 'good' and 'evil' are as seen by a third party outside of the argument.


Look at it this way. Without evil, there wouldn't be good, and vice versa. They are a sort of ideological motivators of each other; the 'good' will work to be stronger than the 'evil' and the 'evil' will work to be stronger than the 'good'.

[BienvenuJDC]

Good and bad. If our capacity for thinking deepens we will arrive at a stage where there is no good and bad. All will thaw and submerges. This stage is very subtle in point of fact.

Good and bad is a relative idea. When you make comparisons it is bad or good.

All are relatively good and relatively bad and no one under the sun is absolutely good or absolutely bad. This is simply our sense perception but there is no element in this.

Excellent points...
They are different degrees of the same... If there is no Good, then that is Bad. If there is no Bad, then that is Good. By definition, the absence of Good is Evil. You have heard the question, "If God made everything, then did He make Evil?" The answer is no, but He made the possibility of Evil by being Good.

If God made Light, did He also make Darkness? No...because before Light existed, all was Dark. If God made Heat, did He make Coldness? No. Without the element of Heat, things are automatically Cold...by definition.

I believe that God is all Good (the word even comes from the word 'god') and that He is eternal...meaning that He has always been...and He has always been Good. As soon as God made something that had the ability to make a choice, and when that choice that was made was opposed to God's nature, then Evil came about.

[kingoflombards]

I think that everyone is inherently good but as people learn and grow how to do things differently, a line is crossed while trying to achieve what the 'evil' person perceives to be the just and good thing to do. It becomes a situation where they can justify anything that they do by saying that the ends justify the means. No evil ever started out purely evil, or no one would follow them. Like if I said,"hey, me and a bunch of buddies of mine are going to go cut some people up, wanna join even if we're going to Hell for this?" no, a person would give a mission statement first, even one that sounds pure and peaceful. The road to Hell is paved in good intentions they say. How far could one go to achieve those intentions before going too far and paying too much for too little?

[WizzFizz]

(I feel absolutely rotten for cutting in on argument and not reading the last...6 pages, so if anything has been covered tell me.)

I don't believe there is inherent good nor evil, the key tool if there is evil is justification, as even though somebody did murder a handful of people they did it for just cause (in somebody's eyes) and so if something is just, can it also be evil. What it all comes down to is where you draw the lines of what is 'righteous' and what isn't.

[Drkshadow03]

Of course there is evil. Mwahahahaha!

[The Uncertain]

What we call good and bad do not exist, and as a matter of fact, it is a matter of perception, and our perception of things make good or bad in point fact and at a deeper level all converge into the same state.

I agree, Evil is unexistent. It is a little more complex, it is all about perception. No one who doesn't suffer from madness does evil deeds because they are evil. (Now this is a harsh and controversial example but ill use it) Can we really say Hitler was an evil man? Mad or insane yes, but evil? He truly believed he was doing the right thing by killing millions of people. Evil? No. Insane? Yes.

[Neo_Sephiroth]

Everything must have its opposite. Good and Evil exists, I believe.