nature, good or evil?

[Athena]

Here is another way of looking at religious concepts and cultural world views. Is nature good or bad? Is the savage honorable or an abomination to God who must be saved by conversion to Christainity or Islam? Should we return to nature or should we understand nature as choatic, and therefore, evil, unless it is subdued by human effort?

[Starboy]

Good and evil are too overcharged with meaning and presumption to be useful concepts for understanding anything. A more fruitful way to approach it is benefit and harm. One then realizes that in many cases in life if one benefits from an event it is likely that something or someone else will be harmed by it. That benefit and harm are very much dependent on the point of view. This view gets more complicated when you realize that humans are social animals that operate within several levels of groupings, such as family, clan, village, nation, species, planet and so on. So the determinations of benefit and harm change. Such groupings allow the notion of self sacrifice to be considered a noble act. But if we were not so social then self sacrifice would be considered to be self destructive and maladaptive.

Starboy

[Boetie]

From pure Quality downwards to pure Quantity, Pure quality is goodness, pure quantity is evil. Christianity, Judaism and Islam worships evil because they see quantity as good, because their God saw quantity as good. This quantity is aka abortion

[Athena]

Interesting. I am getting exasperated. The question is, is nature good or bad? Should we become more natural or subdue nature? The question is not what are the qualities of good and evil. The question is the quality of nature. I am pointing at your world view.
Do you look out there and see nature as good or as dangerous, threatening, evil? Are you safe with nature, or do you need a God to protect you from nature? If you are being natural are you being evil or good? Is nature good or bad?

[Starboy]

Quote by: Athena Interesting. I am getting exasperated. The question is, is nature good or bad? Should we become more natural or subdue nature? The question is not what are the qualities of good and evil. The question is the quality of nature. I am pointing at your world view. Do you look out there and see nature as good or as dangerous, threatening, evil? Are you safe with nature, or do you need a God to protect you from nature? If you are being natural are you being evil or good? Is nature good or bad?

It all depends on whether you benefit or are harmed.

Starboy

[SteveA]

I think nature itself is neither good nor bad but the final impartial and unappealable judge on what is good or bad. You can judge whether something is good or bad depending upon what it results in, with life and happiness being good and death and misery being bad.

[Starboy]

Nature could care less about us or our supposed good and evil. Nature is what it is. If we destroy ourselves or make the earth a hell hole for ourselves matters not to nature. Whatever we leave behind will still exist and will go its course from there until the universe dies a death of complete uniformity.

Starboy

[Boetie]

Athena posts Do you look out there and see nature as good or as dangerous, threatening, evil?

I do not need to accept the Corpernican revolution for the sake of moral freedom. Evil = matter. Matter is nature, Nature is Matter. Nature is a degraded form of divinity. There are two manners of existence: as perfect and as fallen.

I am the honored / and the despised
I am the prostitute / and the respectable woman

Your question is posed as nature out there. Where do you draw the line between the inner and the outer?

Grief comes from the indeterminancy of knowing.