You forgot religious fruit loops who kill because they believe it is god's will. That would include such mass murderers as George (god told me to do it) Dubbya.
Sure I believe in 'evil'. pedafiles, torcherers, homocide bombers, rapists, child/wife abusers, murdurers, and
anyone else including women, who fits that profile.
If you want to get screwed up read a bit of Scripture then confirm it in 'many' history books before moving on. Aren't you living proof that it stalls any development? LOL
I'd argue that we don't,though we'd have to be careful how we define the terms. Some things, like the Holocaust, we can claim are absolutely wrong in terms of contemporary morality, but the Old Testament records tales of mass murder and genocide and what we'd now call ethnic cleansing, some of them done directly by the deity himself, and all of them done with at least his approval and connivance. There's no hint in Scripture that any of them were in any sense a bad thing. Modern ethics would also say that slavery is absolutely wrong, but neither the Bible nor the Quran suggest any such thing, they offer nothing but acceptance of the institution of slavery. Not even Jesus himself, who had plenty of opportunities to speak out against it, is reported as disapproving of it.
Morality is relative to the societies that define it, and things can be defined as unreservedly bad in those terms, but in truly absolute terms, it doesn't work. I've been thinking about this question since this thread, and some related ones, started, and I've been asking myself, is there something that every culture in history that we know about has defined as absolutely wrong. It may be just a function of my lack of historical knowledge--I'm an engineer, not a historian--but I couldn't come up with anything. Not even murder. Even our own supposedly ethically advanced culture recognizes self-defense as a legitimate justification for it. Is there something in the category of absolute wrong in all societies in all times and places? I haven't been able to think of anything.
And when you recognize such evil, what standard are you comparing it to?
Native American societies had the same standards as did many other non-christian societies. I think basic standards of social behaviour were universal and not reliant on the bible as most of them developed long before the bible was invented..
you're the one whose development is stalled, and it'll be permanent as long as you believe the Bible is the work of some fictitious deity and not the work of men.
Your position is logically and factually indefensible, but you're so deeply sunk in mediaeval superstition you can't see it, and you go to elaborate lengths to justify and rationalize it, committing multiple errors of fact and logic along the way.
Nothing! Not even murder? Notice how the taking of life must be justified? If morality really was relative, we wouldn't need the excuse/explanation of self defense for taking one's life.
I don't believe the Bible is the work of some fictitious deity.
As hunting is an instinctual necessity that throws back to the caves, the wrongness of murder goes back to when it was necessary to preserve the species in its infancy.
The heart of man, as a compassionate motivator, is a recent development in human behaviour. We are barely out of the caves emotionally and intellectually. God was an invention of early man to explain what he could not understand. Now that we have developed science, gods have outlived their purpose.
Go to any event and pick out ten witnesses and ask each of them what happened. You will get ten different stories. That is how reliable an eye witness account the bible is. Like history, it is just his-story.
Since the old testament was written in captivity in Babylon and the bible only put together around 300 AD, I think it was written in a lot less that three thousand years. (I don't know the exact dates of their stay in Babylon).
man is a duality - good and bad, Yin and Yang. One moment capable of great acts of kindness and mass murder in another, This is particularly evident in the armed forces.
Your memoirs about a year in your life would probably be somewhat different than the same time covered by 5 close friends and 5 who just had no use for you.
And all would be biased and inaccurate.
But if murder were really absolutely wrong under all circumstances, there'd be *no* conceivable justification for it. But there are justifications for it under certain circumstances, therefore it's not absolutely wrong. You're still arguing on the side that you think you're not.
And what source do you use to determine when any of these books was written besides the bible.
They might have a clue but they wouldn't know the truth.
