We as humans put the labels on acts and people and brand certain people evil and certain acts evil. Now there is no doubt there are abhorrent individuals and acts however I would like to discuss whether evil actually exists as a natural force in the universe or if it is a human construct.

Are there actually evil forces that are part of this universe. On the other side good forces. Maybe in a spectrum that allows a certain degree of free will.
If there are 'evil forces' that use certain people to further there agenda would this mean there is no free will and everything is ultimately predetermined? But then that would need a planner something that has an end game.

Does this evil force look for weak candidates and use certain individuals to do the 'devils work' so to speak or is it merely a cultural thing ingrained through ancient religious practices that has been programmed into our dna and cognitions to allow us to make sense of the world?

A good way to judge this maybe to look for examples in nature. I struggle to think of an example of 'evil' in nature whereby an animal has either killed or harmed another just for the sake of it so Im inclined to say that I think Good and Evil are human constructs. However there are examples of animals having done good acts but were these merely self-serving..

What if the universe itself was just a human construct and didn't exist objectively?

Then the question would not be "does evil exist?"
But rather, "does anything exist at all?"

Evil exists because we say and know that it does. Just look at this place we live in.
It does not exist outside the realm of our own little freak show.

Perception = creation.

So you are saying that evil is a human construct? Because we construct our own reality? Then evil must be subjective, dependant on the individual rather than being a universal truth. What about other inhabitants of the universe? Adolf Hitler is seen as evil but do you think that his dog percieved him as evil?

evil exists at least in terms of language, a sound which has a meaning attached to it


But you want to know something else, if there are forces which are inherently evil.
(kind of) Objectively evil.

As house pointed out, perception is everything.



But just to add some logs into your fire (perhaps some clarity too) here are some aspects of good and evil clarify the general situation on this planet.

It would be quite long to elaborate but in terms of survival on this planet, being "evil" is a necessity. Take life to create life, transmute perhaps into something else.

Lets say im a fucking cockroack, cockroaching around all day and what not, a cat (a monster) comes around the corner and traps me down with their evil pawz. Then it proceeds to snack on my head, seconds of as much anguish as a cockroach can feel and its all over really quick.

While the cat has thus prolonged its lifespan by x minutes.


Same with vegetarians, they prey on plants (which cant fight back so its easy prey even for the dumbest of animals)

And the plants utilize minerals (stones/crystallized materials)


So in a way, there is no way to not be "evil" as a material being on this planet. Tking from others, often causing suffering, but gambling that suffering of others for a chance to be a greater being (whateverthefuckthatmeans)

Ever since the first amobea was like "fuck it" and ate their brother.


This is the nature of evil in our nature as it can be observed by everyone (even without deeper insight through psychedelics)


Are there beings praying on us? Certainly there are some humans which under certain conditions would like to get as much money as possible regardless of the suffering they cause with it.

So one has to stay awake, think, navigate through this world and overcome ones inertia tendencies. Which sounds good to me to be honest.

So do you want to fight them by becoming more evil or you want to peace out and let the world run its course (its often ruled by quite evil people btw )


In effect, "evil" is the power to submit someone else to ones own will.
Said like that it does not seem so evil anymore so i will stop talking about things which do and dont exist.
Kind of the opposite to surrender, which rationally speaking will leave you at the mercy of the evil ones


And the moral of the story is, dont think too much about it, the complexity is too much for words, its beyond what humans are supposed to comprehend with our brainmachines, mind your own business, make the best out of the life you have in the way you want to have it despite the challenges. Evil or not, do what works for making you happy at the best of your judgement.


Perception is the key to all forms of reality.

In the end we are all one, many, will all die and live forever.


Hope that makes sense to you and have a nice day

I am sorry but this quote just gives me more questions than answers. Does this mean that dogs percieve cross dressing and drug taking as evil? This further muddies the subjective analysis of what evil actually is for me and so i have to agree with bindu...the complexity is too much for words.

This is an interesting question; something I've pondered frequently.

I agree that 'good' and 'evil' are essentially human constructs; however I do believe that everything works together to form a cohesive whole. Whether you're looking at your own body, ecosystems, the planet, or potentially the universe; you can see that all of the apparently separate 'parts' are not separate at all, but work in balance with one other so that something greater may arise. In this regard I do think there's sort of a biological framework for behavior which is advantageous and leads to prosperity, growth, and new complex systems--which might be 'good'; while behavior in which separate parts do not act accordingly so that the whole can operate functionally might be considered 'evil'.

In this view, and in my opinion, I think it's important to point out that something like cancer isn't 'evil' because (so far as I know) cells do not operate on free will. IMHO cancer and disease are forms of population control, as they force species to adapt and grow--I don't think they're inherently bad or 'evil'.

This said, as humans we have (arguably, but this is a whole different discussion) free will. Because we have free will (or the illusion of free will), we can choose to act in accordance with the systems we are an integral part of; eg society, the environment/planet...and in my own view, everything. Thinking of reality as a whole (God) which is made up of many, many parts--it exists as a massive interconnected complex system, or thing.

So I think that 'evil' is just a word, but I think it can be rationally applied to a generally accepted status-quo of right and wrong, and when applied to a more universal biological systems kind of model it seems 'evil' is popping up everywhere nowadays. So who's anyone to judge, really?

Anyways I'm rambling but those are my thoughts on the subject

Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.

You are good when you are one with yourself.
Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.
For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.
And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.

You are good when you strive to give of yourself.
Yet you are not evil when you seek gain for yourself.
For when you strive for gain you are but a root that clings to the earth and sucks at her breast.
Surely the fruit cannot say to the root, "Be like me, ripe and full and ever giving of your abundance."
For to the fruit giving is a need, as receiving is a need to the root.

You are good when you are fully awake in your speech,
Yet you are not evil when you sleep while your tongue staggers without purpose.
And even stumbling speech may strengthen a weak tongue.

You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.
Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping.
Even those who limp go not backward. But you who are strong and swift, see that you do not limp before the lame, deeming it kindness.

You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good,
You are only loitering and sluggard.
Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.

In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness: and that longing is in all of you.
But in some of you that longing is a torrent rushing with might to the sea, carrying the secrets of the hillsides and the songs of the forest.
And in others it is a flat stream that loses itself in angles and bends and lingers before it reaches the shore.
But let not him who longs much say to him who longs little, "Wherefore are you slow and halting?"
For the truly good ask not the naked, "Where is your garment?" nor the houseless, "What has befallen your house?"

--excerpt from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet

Animals kill each other for "no reason" all the time. If you have had enough cats in your life, then you will know that cats kill things for no apparent reason. Cats are stone cold murderers who kill and then mutilate their victims. Sometimes they torture their victims leaving them to suffer a slow agonizing death.

Many other predatory animals do the same thing. Sometimes predatory animals just kill something because they are annoyed. Sometimes male animals, such as bears and a wide variety of primates, kill the offspring sired by other males in order to get the female to go into heat again.

In these example, it's hard to deny that animals have the potential for evil unless you have a concrete definition of evil.

I'm not saying that these animals are evil though. In most of these cases, the killing occurs instinctively - which is technically a reason. Cats kill because they still have a predatory instinct. This predatory instinct is suppressed due to the surplus of food we supply them, but they cannot ignore their instinctual urges.

And other seemingly "evil" killings in animals are just as instinctual. These behaviors have arisen due to generations upon generations of natural selection. These behaviors have turned out to be favorable regarding the passage of genetic material to the next generation.

In life there can be cooperation, but in the end the name of the game is "survival of the fittest". Organisms evolve and adapt in order to survive and reproduce in their current environment. When adaptations give an organism an advantage over another, these adaptation will be passed on to the next generation. When it isn't advantageous, the adaptation will die.

The most important biological imperative is to survive in order to reproduce. Each individual is responsible for themselves in this goal. And behaviors that foster cooperation only arise when they will be advantageous to survival and ultimately reproduction.

Evolution is a passive phenomenon. There is no purpose behind it. It does not seek to create balance. Balance just naturally happens due to checks and balances that come about. But to be fair, this balance is always teetering. The evolution of one animal may kill out another animal due to predation or competition.

But is it evil when one organism or species shows such disregard to another? Not necessarily. Most animals have little control over their instincts and are not completely aware of their actions as far as science can tell. Most animals do not have the capacity for morality and empathy. And when they do, it is mostly rudimentary. How can a creature be evil when it has no concept of the idea of evil and is only doing what it is genetically programmed to do?

Humans on the other hand can control their instincts to an extent, they understand consequences, they can understand the emotions of other beings, and they have ideas of what is right and wrong.

Right and wrong are essentially determined by empathy. Any creature with even limited self awareness knows that it wants to avoid pain and death. When a creature can understand the feelings of others it can choose whether or not to inflict pain or death upon another(assuming free will exists). This choice will be informed by its understanding that it does not want pain or death either. It would not want another being to and cause it harm.

But sometimes it is necessary to harm another in order to live. Is this evil? Is it evil if you kill a leopard with a spear while it is attacking you? Is it evil if you kill a bison in order to feed your family? Is it evil is you kill a creature attacking one of your family members No. This is what we are programmed to do. We must eat the flesh of other creatures and defend ourselves if we are to live.

So killing is only evil when it is unnecessary. This brings me the definition I like to use for "evil":

Evil is when a being who is both aware of and in control of their actions purposefully causes undue harm to another living being.

The only hole in this definition that I can see is if someone is convinced that their evil actions are not evil, and therefore the harm is not undue. It could be argued that this person has some psychological pathology and is therefore not in control of their actions. But then they wouldn't be evil. They would just be sick. This opens another debate as to the possible deterministic nature of neurophysiology and the possibility that everything is predetermined. I won't get into that though.

So all of this post is just meant to support the idea that evil is essentially a construct of the human mind. It is a consequence of our complex brains ability to empathize and understand consequences.

But it is arguable that other animals understand some concept of evil. Empathy is not restricted to humans. Elephants, dogs, cetaceans, and other animals show some signs of empathy. The question then becomes whether these animals are aware and in control of their actions when committing acts of so called evil.

That is a beautiful poem VTSeeker. It almost say the same things I said, but in a poetic way.

I guess I tend to think of things as being primarily positive or primarily negative, constructive or destructive, rather than good and evil. But I agree that these notions are purely subjective. I think that nearly everything is simultaneously positive and negative (constructive and destructive), and that the side of the spectrum onto which something falls is determined entirely by the perception of the observer.

From the perspective of the gazelle, the attacking lioness is pure "evil". The lioness is attempting to end the life of the observer, for reasons which the gazelle is likely unable to comprehend. But from the perspective of the lion cub, the lioness attacking it's prey is providing sustenance and allowing the cub to live. It can be hard to see the positive side of a being or event when that being or event seems to be a threat to the observer's current state- their life, liberty, happiness, or comfort. I think this is what creates this notion of "evil": an inability to comprehend the possible positive aspects of something, which seems to be a threat to the observer's current state.

But this is thinking in anthropocentric terms. The gazelle has no idea of what evil is and neither does the lion. The lion just knows that it wants to eat and the gazelle just knows that it doesn't want to be eaten. The gazelle passes no judgment on the lion other than that it is a danger to its existence and should be avoided. It sees no good or evil, only survival and forces opposing survival. The situation just is what it is.

This is a good example of the checks and balances that occur in nature. If the lion were to stop killing, the overall health of the gazelle population would decrease due to spread of disease and over grazing. And if the lion was too good at killing, it's prey would run out. This can be seen in the cyclical rise and fall of populations in perdator-prey relationships.

The lion killing the gazelle is just a fact of nature. Would you call a tornado or volcanic eruption "evil". I wouldn't. They may be unfortunate events, but they are just a fact of nature and must be accepted for what they are.

If one were to consider in this argument the fact that life feeds on life, which is an unavoidable consequence of this three-dimensional reality, then the entire creation is "evil". Causing pain or causing the destruction of another life without using that life and flesh as nourishment is not just the provence of humanity, have you ever watched the gruesome spectacle of a cat torturing and finally rending a mouse into pieces, only to sniff and poke the carcass, and walk away? What makes it (the cat) do this? Is it evil? Or.just playing with no idea of the consequential pain to the mouse? It could be a part of practice hunting, it could just be a bored.cat, who knows.

To discuss whether evil exists, as in judaism, with a 'satan', or adversary working at the side of an intelligent creator to test humanity's devotion to that creator, or as the Christian satan, who exists separate from and outside of God, as a force of destruction, hell-bent on extinguishing all light and life, which it's enemy, God created is a question that requires discussion of the existence of such a creator. Does God exist?

Laws were enacted nearly universally within the global human species of various cultures, as a way to try to create a matrix in which we can live with each other, and be reasonably assured our neighbor won't kill us and eat our food. We are (usually) stopped from doing such a thing by these laws. Transgression against these laws of humanity exists, despite the threat of retribution, and sometimes as a consequence of some neuropathology. Is psychosis evil?

The 'evil' question has perplexed every theologian and thinker since the dawn of human consciousness (before that, there was no evil, obviously, since we weren't here to think about it.). If one has to ask this question, conversely, one must ask-is there good? There is light and dark, male and female, but is there good and evil? Are these concepts ours to own as a way to make laws? The universe is a cruel place, actually, the ubiquitousness of life and it's pervasiveness is the only reason it exists at all. If life was not tenacious in nature, it would never get a foothold in the more often than not hostile than hospitable environments in which it flourishes.

Man, you're opening Pandora's box...

When im 'there', behind the curtain, everything just dissolves in the face of it.

Good, bad, evil, good, light, dark, up, down, left, right, all is one thing. I believe, the ground of all being - this side we frequent, shows just that. When it comes down to it, sure there's polarity in the phenomenal world, a sea-saw act. All is relative, everything being contingent upon everything else. Vantage points in this world says alot.

Beauty, horror, death, life..all is that 'one flow'. When it comes down to it, this impartial aspect of dmt that seems to make itself apparent over and over lends me to believe there's beauty, even in the most horrid of acts. I know many may disagree with this last statement, but when your dissolved away, continually unfolding/enfolding through the other side...this 'hyperspace'..there is no judgement...only your perspective, which is not the say-all-end-all of any one idea of what is 'this' or 'that', 'right' or 'wrong'.

As in a sig of a long standing member here.. "Nothing is true, everything is permitted"....couldn't be firther from the truth..

<3 tat

Perhaps it was a poor choice of metaphor. But it was exactly that, merely a metaphor. It was not intended to be a concrete example.

A person who commits a hate crime and the victim of said hate crime could be placed in the same model, to the same effect. The person committing the hate crime and that persons peers may believe that the action is justified, and that what they are doing is "good", because they are trying to stop a force which they perceive as "evil". But from the perspective of the victim, as well as those who do not hold the same beliefs as the person committing the offense, the offender may be considered "evil". Personally I do not believe that either person is "good" or "evil". But many people believe in the concepts of good and evil, and they may likely apply these concepts to this particular example.

Indeed I can think back to the cats in my life now however I always saw it as some sort of play that serves the purpose to keep thier hunting skills sharp. She did however stop hunting when she got older.

One particular example of killing merely for the sake of it is the wild donkeys that get killed by lions even when the lions arent hungry and I cant see this as any sort of play training as they dont give any challenge like a mouse or bird would.

Going by the first definition of evil in the dictionary (adjective) as something immoral, bad, wicked.
then yes these things do exist but society has labelled such acts according to pre-existing customs and values.

In terms of 'evil forces' competing with 'good' forces in the universe too then I suppose it is again something that has been developed in our language to explain unexplainable disturbing acts uncommon in society.
However when you look into a politicians eyes or child killer etc then sometimes I think I can see something other than human but maybe thats simply the face of a socio/psychopath who may have a different brain chemistry and again I relate back to the means of labelling the 'unexplainable' .
We dont know how they can commit such hideous acts so 'evil' or 'bad' is an apt label to revert to that we have learnt to use over many centuries.

http://one-heaven.org/content/about_evil.html

Interesting to read the Buddhist view..
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil

We are trapped in linguistic concepts. All that "is" is metaphor.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?? Why, it's the spank of my hand acrosst her arse, son.

A frightfully simple answer to that age-old question . . . . . . .

I don't think that your hate crime example is the same as the lion-gazelle metaphor. I can agree that the victim is analogous to the gazelle. They are both passive bystanders. And I can agree that they are neither good or evil. They are just neutral in both examples.

But the lion is not the same as the person perpetrating the hate crime. The lion is destroying in order to create. From a human standpoint, it is noble for the lion to provide for its cubs and killing is the only way to do this for the lion.

Even if the lion were totally conscious of its actions, an outside observer could not call the lion "evil". And if the gazelle were conscious enough to understand morality and the forces of nature, it too would not see the lion as evil. It's individual death is unfortunate to itself, but helps the greater good for the lions, gazelles, plants, scavengers, etc. But neither party is conscious enough to understand these ideas.

The hate crime perpetrator is conscious of their actions and the consequences of their actions. They may have chose an action that they believe is right. From their frame of reference they are not evil. But does this mean that perpetrators of genocide are not evil? They tend to believe that are doing what is good. And if the entire world suddenly decided that one innocent person must die for no reason, is that not evil?

I believe in moral relativism, but only to a point and only for some issues. Ultimately, I believe there is an objective morality that can be understood through reason. The only way for the hate crime perpetrator to not be evil is for the perpetrator to not qualify under a coherent definition of evil.

So if you don't think that the perpetrator is evil, how would you define evil? It doesn't really matter whether you believe in evil or not. An object or concept needs a definition if you want to claim that it doesn't exist.

But metaphor is a linguistic device that compares two seemingly unrelated subjects in order to demonstrate some similarity. If that is all that is, then language is all there is.

I understand that you mean that language is limiting, but we would be far more limited without language. How could we make quasi-metaphysical statements without language?

Does not the perpetrator of the hate crime believe that he is making the world a better place by committing the crime? In effect, believing that he is making progress towards a better environment for himself, his children, and his peers?


Objectively, yes. It does mean that the perpetrators of genocide are not "evil", unless they are perceived that way. I would imagine that most people do see them as "evil", or as negative forces, but there are some who believe that said perpetrators of genocide are nobel heros.


Well this is where we will just have to agree to disagree for the time being. As I feel I have expressed in my previous posts, I tend to agree more with the idea that "evil" is merely a concept created by the human mind, and that it would not exist in objective reality.


I never claimed that "evil" does not exist, and I am sorry that you understood my opinion in that way. I simply claimed that I don't believe it exists outside of human perception. I would define "evil" as something that goes against the moral code of the beholder, but what is morality? I would define morality as: a "code of conduct" that a person is expected to or expects his or her self to live by, which is based on a person's beliefs, experiences, and environmental influences.

How would you define "evil"? And on that note, how would you define "morality" and what does an "objective morality" entail?