Agree or Disagree?

Xenophobic Sponge wrote:I like my baby blood freshly squeezed with a wedge of lemon.

Baby lemon.

However wrong that can be misinterpreted..

I prefer my baby blood shaken, not stirred with a single olive. Batini. Or a nice Baby on the rocks.

Society rewards good because good is beneficially toward society. Positive reinforcement is nothing more than manipulation, you want people to do things you like, so when people are nice to you, you reward them. It works with people and it works with monkeys.

Also, good for goodness sake is as false a pretense as evil for the sake of evil. Like I keep telling you all in relation to roleplays, motive is everything.

Thumbs-up to Snake's sum-up.

TDG, you do have a point. There is a motive for everything. Sometimes it's reputation: I started holding the door for a few kids at my old school after lunch and two months later I was excused from being late to that class indefinitely because the entire school, teachers included, expected me to stand there, holding that door.

There are loads of other reasons, politicians hoping to get elected, waitresses hoping to get a tip, people who like making others feel better, etc. But, again, the good is still there, regardless of why.

And yet all motives are ultimately selfish. You do good deeds because you want to get into heaven, or you want to be liked, or you want good to be done to you. Even the so called 'golden rule' is innately selfish 'do unto others as you would have done unto you.' The only reason to be nice to other people is because you want other people to be nice to you.

[quote]not everyone does look to the Bible for guidance, and there are a lot of good people who haven't touched it.[quote]

Even if they didn't touch it, they could have been raised with biblical principles. A lot of people teach their children not to cuss, and even the bible says not to curse.

PEOPLE ARE NOT PERFECTLY GOOD, NOR PERFECTLY EVIL. EVERY ONE OF US HAS DONE SOMETHING AWFUL THAT WE REGRET. WE REGRET IT BECAUSE WE KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG, AND WE PROBABLY KNEW THAT IT WAS WRONG AT THE TIME, BUT WENT AHEAD AND DID IT ANYWAY. DOES OUR REGRET CHANGE HISTORY? DOES THE MISDEED MAGICALLY DISAPPEAR BECAUSE WE FEEL BAD ABOUT IT? NO, OF COURSE NOT, AND NOBODY IS SAYING THAT. THE POINT THAT IS BEING MADE IS NOT THAT WE DON'T DO BAD THINGS, BUT THAT WE'RE CAPABLE OF REGRETTING THOSE BAD THINGS, AND ACTIVELY WORKING TO MAKE AMENDS, WHICH WE WOULD NOT DO IF WE WERE TRULY EVIL AT HEART. WE WOULD LET IT GO, GET ON WITH OUR LIVES AND PROBABLY LAUGH ABOUT IT OVER A PINT OF BABY BLOOD LATER.

I think Hitler was perfectly evil. Anyone who can put an end to millions of innocent lives and still sleep at night is rotten to the core.

I get tired of people using Hitler as a baseline for evil. Yeah sure his actions resulted in the deaths of a lot of people, but he had good intentions for it. By taking away those millions of people, his country which had previously been almost completely bankrupt, was able to pull itself up by its bootstraps.

He had a country that couldn't support itself as it was, so he changed it, and he happened to do that by the most expedient method genocide. Was it right? I won't say that. Did he have a lot of other options? real viable options. I won't say that either.

His intentions can't justify what he did. It was indisputably evil. People often find good in the evil things they do. I'm sure the KKK probably thought it was a good thing to lynch all those innocent black people. The terrorists who were responsible for 9/11 probably thought what they did was good, too.

Evil is as evil does. If you constantly do evil, then you are evil.

Evil is subjective. It doesn't dwell in the action it dwells in the judgment of that action. If murder is evil than they would have to always be evil, and murdering Hitler would be evil. There is no such thing as evil for the sake of evil.

You can't say that 'evil is as evil does' because 'evil' doesn't do anything itself. People are deemed evil because of what they do. If intention don't justify things then everything is evil. It was 'evil' for the united states to rebel against the British, it was 'evil' for the Christians to oppose the Romans. It doesn't that they were being treated poorly, their intentions don't justify it right.

Evil is not subjective.

You can tell what is evil by knowing what is good. How can a man know what is crooked if he hasn't seen something straight before?

How can you decide what's crooked or straight if you don't know what it's supposed to look like in the first place?

My point is that both Good & Evil are just judgments, that's why you can't have 'evil for evil's sake' or 'good for goodness's sake.'

If evil was objective then you could definitively state that ____ is evil, and no matter the context ____ would always be evil. Murdering Hitler would be just as evil as murdering Gandhi, and despite the fact that we might like to say that such would be so, we all know that it wouldn't be.

The movie ''Good Intentions'' is about a woman who became a robber to ensure her children had a college fund. Was she wrong to steal? Yes. Were her intentions good? Yes. She did a bad thing for a good reason. But it doesn't make it any less bad.

If Good and Evil are only just judgements, and were subjective, then so is Stupidity. So is Wisdom. So is Insight. So is Foolishness. And if that was so, then everything would be relative and there would be no such thing as Truth, because Truth isn't relative. If it was, we wouldn't have the right to tell the crazy man he's crazy because he talks to invisble half-monkey spiders.

There is a line between whats good and whats evil. For some that line is relatively thick and for others its relatively thin. But that doesn't mean Evil in its entirety is subjective; some just don't know the difference between good and evil. .

Truth is subjective. Remember my big whole long chat with Laughing_Man? That was what we were discussing!

A rock isn't hard because it's a rock, if you compare it to something else it's not hard at all. It's not the nature of something to be anything. Just like it's not an innate property of a rock to be hard, it's not an innate property of an act to be evil. Things have to be judged as such. Rocks are harder than ____. Murder is eviler than _____.

And who says you have the right to call the crazy man crazy? Who says he just doesn't know something you don't? Who says you have the right to make any judgment calls about anything? Why should your judgment be taken as any 'truer' than mine? Or the talking spider monkey's? What give you the right to decide anything for anyone other than yourself?

And since you don't have that right, because there is no 'divine mandate that Fred is better than Jeff' you can't be sure that anything is anyway. You can't judge something unless you judge it against something else, if there were no bent rod you wouldn't know what straight was. And because one assumes the existence of the other, neither can be 'true.' In a void nothing would be anyway because there wouldn't be anything else.

You can have your line all you want, but if there's no other side, it doesn't make much difference now does it? That is why Evil is subjective, because people decide what's evil. No one innately knows whether what they did was right or wrong, if they did we'd have no problems what so ever, it's not like. "This is a rock" it's not a state of being, it's a judgment. "This is hard." If you say that I can point out that it's something else, soft compared to X, and obscenely hard in reference to Y.

I'm going to say something you've probably heard a million times:

I can believe it is true that the sky is purple, but it'll still be blue. I can say its true that i'll live forever, and i'll still die.

If I said I was alive, what is subjective about that?

Also, you've just stated that Truth is subjective. You've stated that as truth. If truth is subjective, which is what you've just stated to be true, then what you've said is also subjective, which would defeat your argument.

And since you don't have that right

But who's to state it as true that I don't have the right, if truth is subjective? Who's to say I'm wrong for deciding what is true and what isn't?

Or the talking spider monkey's?

Half-monkey, half-spider.


I see what you're saying for the most part. But I do not think that Truth is subjective. If that was so, then evertything is subjective, my existence would be subjective, your existence would be subjective, and that just isn't true. I am breathing. So are you. There is nothing subjective about that.

My point was that to Fred the crazy man, the spider monkeys 'are breathing' so as far as he's concerned they 'exist' by your qualification, and we're the crazy people for not believing him.

If you say you're alive, who's to say you're not really? After all would you know if you didn't exist?

There's an old scientific wicked problem that regards the 'proof of thought' the only way you can prove definitively that something/one thinks is to experience them thinking, otherwise it could just be a series of reactions like a computer set to respond to a specific stimulus in a specific way. Insert coin get token. Without being able to experience the thought process of 'get token' we have no way to prove that it wasn't the 'insert coin' that cause the reaction, and that it was independent thought.

Thus, I can prove that I think, but I can't prove that you think.

My ultimate point with LM was that since we're restricted by our perceptions of things, and have no way of definitively saying that our perceptions of things are correct, since we can't perceive things that we can't perceive to compare to our perceptions, we can't assume that our perceptions are correct. The sky's not blue, to something that doesn't see the color blue, it might be purple, the sky is only blue as long as we look at it through the basic human set of senses.

Similarly, something would only be 'evil' if we looked at it through the basic human code of morality.

PS: the most logical determination for 'truth' since we can't prove that it's one way or the other would to do what they do in science and say it's both. Schrodinger's Cat. Just because two states are opposite, doesn't mean they can't co-exist.

Stop using television and film to support your arguments.

Watching someone use Teen Titans as evidence to prove the innate goodness in the heart of all men and women made me want to punt babies just to disprove her.

You make valid points, TDG. I agree that some things are subjective. But if all things were just subjective, then there would be no such thing as right or wrong, true and false, and I believe they all exist.

Stop using television and film to support your arguments.

Fine then. I'll use you. =P

I'll give a kind of exaggerated example. Bear with me.

Lets say that Naked Snake was being mugged. His assailant took his wallet, stabbed him 3 times, and then ran off. A woman is standing nearby and she dials 911. Later on when the ambulance and police arrive, she tells them that Snake was robbed and stabbed. But then a Man walks up, who was standing a farther distance away than the Woman was when the incident occured, and says that Naked Snake was shot and robbed.

The two witness' perspectives of the incident differ. But just because from the Man's point of view it look liked Snake was shot doesn't mean the Woman's P.O.V is questionable or that Snake wasn't stabbed, which he was. It means that Man is as blind as a bat. There is nothing subjective about Snake being robbed and stabbed.


Getting back to the statement, I do believe some people are all bad. Some people have no conscience at all, and feel no remorse for all the bad things they do. Everyone is capable to do good, but some just choose not to.

The point isn't that the man's perception of things isn't factual, it's that it's as true to him as the woman's perception is to her, and more so, that because such could be said of any human perception, as humans, we must doubt all of our perceptions, yet because we could not function as such, we must also assume that all of our perceptions are correct.

Thus our perceptions are simultaneously correct, and incorrect.

Yes, there is such thing as false perception. A false truth is a lie. When people believe in a lie, they believe it to be true. But that doesn't mean it is true. That doesn't always mean it can discredit or challenge another's perspective pertaining to the same matter. Just because that man accepted a lie as truth doesn't mean that the Woman's perspective is any less factual or true. That woman doesn't have to doubt or question her perception, because her perception is based on the naked, indisputable truth. Some things are subjective, and some just aren't.

I really, really think that the debate over whether people are innately good or evil ended some time ago, and it's now just an incidental part of whatever argument's going on right now (something about whether ketchup is a vegetable).

Why don't we just move on to a new question?

Sure.

This weeks statement:

Week 8: Respect can ONLY be earned.

Agree or Disagree? Why?

Thecrazykid3649 wrote:Sure.

This weeks statement:

Week 8: Respect can ONLY be earned.

Agree or Disagree? Why?

False, people can respect people even if they're massive douches, because the media tells them to.

Laughing_Man wrote:

Thecrazykid3649 wrote:Sure.

This weeks statement:

Week 8: Respect can ONLY be earned.

Agree or Disagree? Why?

False, people can respect people even if they're massive douches, because the media tells them to.

I agree that it's false, but for different reasons. Respect should be granted to someone as a courtesy, until they do something to screw it up. Then all bets are off.

I disagree, for essentialy the same reason as snake- normally, someone has an initial amount of respect when you meet them, and they gain/loose more of that repect over time.

redhood321 wrote:I disagree, for essentialy the same reason as snake- normally, someone has an initial amount of respect when you meet them, and they gain/loose more of that repect over time.

Have you ever met Albert Einstein?

If he walked in the room, would you not give him more respect than the other people in the room because it's ingrained in history that he's a genius?

Good point, but I didn't say you would show the same amout of respect for everyone. I'd probably respect Einstein a bit more than just some random guy.