I'm sorry to tell you that in the Dane Law, the law of the Vikings as well as in Genghis Code, killing a member of your own community outside of a context of self defense or defense of others is completely illegal and punishable by death. You are pedling a myth that some societies accepted the idea of killing members of their own community outside of such a context. All human societies and moral code prohibited that idea. It's universal.
Sorry, I guess I missed the "within your own community" part.
Even so it's still just a man-made law, and still not universal, human sacrifice being an exception.
And even if it were 100% universal across all societies, everywhere, at all times, it's still subjective.
Universiiality doesn't equal objectivity.
That's correct and since ''good'' is the exact same principle for all sentient creatures with only a change in perspective, you just pointed out one of the major ''evil'' of our universe: scarcity and competing exclusive interests. That makes flourishment of all sentient creature impossible. It's an excellent demonstration of the problem of evil in effect. Why can't everybody have its cake and eat it to?
No idea. But I don't see any reason to assume that that would be any kind of an ultimate good.
If there is an omnipotent being, and he has a plan, it could very well exclude the idea of everybody having their cake and eating it too and still amount to an ultimate good.
If there is such a plan it would be beyond our ability as finite beings to grasp, and therefore any judgments that we make would be pointless.
Who cares. The nature of evil isn't important. Only that it's felt. Why do would a ''good deity'' allow suffering?
Why should we consider suffering evil? (Other than the fact that it hurts).
That it's subjective doesn't mean a thing isn't real. Your emotions are subjective, but you have them and they are real, but they aren't universally felt.,
I never said the experience of suffering isn't real. I'm just saying that just because something is difficult, or painful, or ugly, or destructive, it doesn't automatically follow that it's objectively "evil"
All it means is that it's unpleasant. For all we know all the unpleasantness in the world is all part of some huge cosmic plan that resolves itself in some sort of ultimate universal good.
I'm not saying that that's what's actually going on, I'm saying "for all we know".
And since we don't know, we can't just point to individual events or occurrences and say "it shouldn't be like that".
Ultimately we don't know what should or shouldn't be, we just know our own likes and dislikes.
Again, that's completely non sequitur. Of course morality is a human concept subject to human interests. It's not a feature of the universe like electromagnetism or causality. It's a social construct derived from our evolutionnary history, but also our political, social and cultural history. The goal of morality and all moral codes was always to live together and maximise our prosperity, happiness and flourishment. The variety of codes and differing moral systems is because, while there are universal rules that are self evident, others are much more complex and require experimentation and are debatable. Material circumstances and historical vaguaries also explain that.
And since, if there is an omnipotent being, he isnt actually a member of our human community, why would we expect our morality (which as you pointed out is a human construct, not a universal principle) to be applicable to him?
Well of course. If you consider good/evil to be subjective to the human experience then the qualification of God as a good being is subject to a subjective standard established and judged by humans. You can't have a God that is both good and all powerful in our universe because bad things happen to us, thus God is not good or not all powerful or non-existent. Pick your poison. The same is true for all creatures. There is bad stuff happening to everything living and conscious in our universe.
There is no objectively "bad'' stuff, that's my point. There is only subjectively unpleasant stuff.
The problem with the whole concept of evil is that it's usually used as It's mostly being used here in this thread: as a designation for something that's a deviation from the way that things "should be" .
This line of thinking assumes that we have any idea about what should or shouldn't be.
What it comes down to is we humans saying, "I don't like this. therefore it shouldn't be. therefore it is evil".
Again: in order for us to make a judgment call like that and apply it to an omnipotent being we would have to know what his intentions are, what his plans are, and what role the things that we don't like play in those plans.
Since we don't know any of that, any judgments that we make about it aren't really judgments in that they arent conclusions that we came to by any sort of reason or logic (although we'll all bend over backwards to make it look like they are). It's really all just whining.
