If you’re not religious, do you have a problem with the term “evil?”

As an "orthodox" agnostic, the term “evil” has too much religious dogma attached to it for me (and perhaps you).

Nonetheless, whatever word anyone cares to use to describe "evil,” it's hard to deny that the concept the word represents exists. I don’t have a name for it, but I sure as hell know it when I see it.

Whatever your beliefs, you don’t have to go much further back in history than Hitler, and you don’t need to go much farther forward than the Bush Administration to find the existence of "evil." I believe that Cheney is an “evil” man. I believe Rumsfeld is an “evil” man. I believe that Karl Rove is an “evil” man. I believe that Limbaugh is an “evil” man, and ... well, you get the idea.

(And yeah, I left out George W. because I believe he was nothing more than a world-class mindless entity who was easily manipulated by ... virtually anyone.)

So let me get to the point. Does anyone have a suggestion as to a word that those of us who reject religious dogma can use to describe “evil?”

This isn't an idle question. I'd really appreciate some thoughtful suggestions.

For instance, Bobby J. is clearly evil.

Don't let the religious creeps keep you from using the word. It's just an English word.

Definition here:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evil

And I 2nd MineralMan's comment!

Cheney (Shooter) is an evil man. Period.

mightn't this have been better worded, "Don't let your aversion to religion keep you from using the word"? This puts the responsibility on the OP to use or not use the word, depending upon his attitude, etc.

It's non-religious creeps like you who get in the face of believers (based on prior posts of yours). A little tolerance would do you good under this "big umbrella".

James Dobson does. I have no problem with people who have religious beliefs, and I've said that many times. I am only referring to "religious creeps." If someone is religious, but not a creep, then they are not in the class to which I am referring. Thanks for listening.

Your reply was a gracious one.

But, when it comes to matters of faith, it is easy to mistake a brush stroke for a broad one.

I answered the OP's response first because it was a bit more strident.

Thanks for your well-chosen words to live by.
Now excuse me while I commit various sacrileges and blasphemies.
:evilgrin:

I insulted "religious creeps," a class of people. In return, I got a nice personal insult. Oh, well...

All squares are rectangles, of course, but the converse is not true. It's a difficult concept, I know, but you'd think most people here would understand it.

You misunderstand.

I was using you to address a "class of people" as well.

Cheers,

timtom

However, when you say "non-religious creeps like you," it rather takes it out of the general category and gets specific. That's why I didn't use a comparative reference and let the "religious creeps" stand alone as a class. It's a bit of a fine distinction, of course, but semantically, it makes a world of difference.

I try very hard to be careful with my use of language. Only by doing that can I explain what I meant when that meaning is misunderstood.

and if you would care to check back, you would find that I was replying to post #30.
Read my post again, please, and the previous post. I'm not following you at all.

"back at ya -- in spades?"

That was the intent of my post.

I find your post difficult to parse for ideas or coherence.

Ummm, I'd suggest that's really not the best way to state a position if you're trying to make a relevant point to me (or anyone else). (By the way, why don't you look up the definition of "agnostic?")

You're final statement addresses tolerance and a "big umbrella." For decades, "non-religious" people such as myself have been the target of haters such as "The Moral Majority," "Focus on the Family," and many, many more groups/fanatics of their ilk.

Living in Florida, I remember the incredibly disgusting/inhumane Terry Schiavo protest staged by fundamentalists who can best be described as ... well, I'll let that description go. If I ever got started, I'd never stop.

So I am assuming (perhaps wrongly) that you are one who was all for the Terry Schiavo "circus" staged by people whom I refuse to refer to as other than insane.

And your reply is ...?

religious creeps. It was back in his face with it.

He has acquitted himself grandly, as I suspected he would. I have always judged him to be a man of intellect and propriety.

As to you: I am certain that this place must be literally crawling with Moral Majority aficionados and Focus on Family types. (Need I invoke the sarcasm tag here?)

I live in Florida, too, and I had no part in the Terry Schiavo affair. I thought it a deplorable carnival of which I wanted no part. I had no horse in that race, whatsoever.

So, THAT assumption is wrong.

Now, then. I swear to you, I have not looked up the term "agnostic" in 40 years or more. But I DO remember it as coming from Greek "a" for "not" and "gnosis" for "knowing". Hence, an agnostic is one who just doesn't know (if there's a god or not). So what? I'm not sure I get your point here.

And, before today, I have not called you or MineralMan or anyone else here any pejorative name, whereas anti-religious people here do it all the time.

We get it. You hate Christians/Moslems/Jews/Hindus/Jains/Sikhs/Baha'i's because they posit a supreme being and you don't. So many of you state over and over and over again how stupid you think we are. (Although MineralMan was gracious enough to clarify what he meant.)

And, finally, I think my response was appropriate, if a bit overbearing, to an overbearing remark.

Have I left anything out? Pretty stupid of me, huh? I mean, being a whacko, and all.

And as for my Schiavo reference, sorry to include you if you were not part of it.

However, I (and most agnostics/atheists I know) do not hate the list of religions/believers you mentioned.

Perhaps it's time to call a truce and find some common ground.

Let me tell you what I do hate. I hate the past eight years in which BushCo raped America and Americans with the help of the MSM, big business and every greedy, corrupt entity imaginable.

Let me tell you what I don't hate. I don't hate religious people who really believe what they preach and live by. And you sound like someone who fits that definition.

We've both thrown accusations at each other. Perhaps neither of us are truly grasping the terms and points of reference we are accusing each other of in relationship to our own life experiences.

Truce?

Both of you are very intelligent and gracious human beings. I apologize for any assholery on my part and say that I like you both and respect you both.

I do not see any superficial difference of viewpoints as being any sort of problem at all.

I salute you as fellow DU'ers.

Cheers,

timtom

You posted this:

It's non-religious creeps like you who get in the face of believers (based on prior posts of yours). A little tolerance would do you good under this "big umbrella".

Is that correct?
OK. Now, what prior posts of mine are you referring to?
Seriously, I'm confused.

hierarchy of the thread. It's easy to do.

This is what popped up on my screen at the time.
It's non-religious creeps like you who get in the face of believers (based on prior posts of yours). A little tolerance would do you good under this "big umbrella".
Which I replied to in a jocular way. My bad... I guess.

then I would say the word "inhuman" works well as a substitute in many instances.

when the * used it ,I usually thought of it the way they intended( religiously.)Sometimes I squirm when people say it other times not.

I may not believe in Satan or hell but I believe in evil. I don't believe evil is limited to religious dogma

Maybe it's just me, but I think it plays to the whole "you have to be religious to have morals" theme that the fundies love to spew. I don't think you need any sort of religion to be able to define and apply the word evil.

I've always been an atheist and I've never thought of the word as religious.

Sorry sinkingfeeling, but if you want to convince people who don't share your beliefs, you need to make a better argument than "Just because God says so."

recognize that evil exists.

that makes some people uncomfortable. I think some people really are evil but by using that term I am making a moral judgement without an agreed upon scientific or societal standard.

It is basically the opposite of Good and there are many "Evils" in the world. War, Tobacco, Greed, Hatred, just to name a few.

I don't have problems with this term because of its religious background.
(I also don't have a problem with "confession", for that matter.)
It's just that I see it extremely ridiculous (religulous?) to divide the world into a binary of "good and "evil".
There's degrees. Nothing is inherently bad or virtuous. It's not black and white, people, it's GRAYSCALE!

It's like with sexuality. I don't view it as a hetero-/homosexual binary, or a tertiary with bisexuality in addition to it. It's always something in between.
This might seem as if it's not at all related, but it's exactly the same thing. Except with bisexuality, that's just confusing.

Woot. I just came out!

I rarely if ever use it. no, I don't have a substitute. It requires many words to replace "evil", but I strongly dislike that word. It's way overused and carries too much baggage.

It doesn't require the existence of Satan to promote it, or God to oppose it, so I don't see anything inherently "religious" about it.

Now, if you were to say all the evil people were taking orders from a guy in a red suit who lives in a year round warm climate (as opposed to the guy in the red suit who lives in a year around cold climate and distributes toys) that would be a religious statement. :evilgrin:

but I don't know if it has to do with religious connotation, or just how the word is used to promote a narrow view of a human mind, or a human life. "pure evil"..as if the behavior the phrase portrays happens by accident.

I'd rather use a different descriptive word

"malevolent"?

Sometimes it gets used in an "us against them" sort of way. Like, Axis Of Evil. Nothing good ever comes of that. Sometimes it also gets attached to some kind of Embodiment Of Evil, like Satan. Nothing good ever comes of that either.

If it gets used in a secular way, it seems OK to me, although I sometimes wonder how helpful the word is in any context. Calling somebody evil, or calling their behavior evil, sort of shuts down any discussion of what to do about it. Calling it "unhealthy" or "self destructive" suggests dealing with it somehow.

Once you start calling something evil, you have arrived at the point where there is nothing to do but fight it. I'll stop short of saying that's never the answer, but it's a situation worth avoiding.

Ditto for "soul." It can be used to describe a mind with self-awareness.

Too often used to make the actions of depraved individuals appear to be beyond their control.

I don't believe in the supernatural so I try to avoid using the term.

I think it's a sign of simplistic thinking, and is meant to short-circuit thought. It's too easy to label something as "evil" and think about it no more. It's also extremely culture-specific. One person's evil may very well be another's virtue.

I'd call Cheney "evil", for instance, but my uncle would call him a hero. It's a very powerful word that is also subjective, and I don't care for that.

pragmatics over transcendence.

it is all an illusion.

"Profiting off the expense, demise, or injury of another who has done no harm's expense, demise, or injury." or something to that's effect.

nothing more than the fulfillment of a need. Unmet needs drive human behavior and inspires us to behave in ways that are benificial to ourselves. Lack of conscience and the inability to empathize with our fellow man permits evil to exist and IMO does not necessarily live in religion. One does not have to be religious to live a moral ,.i.e. non-evil, life. Religion is not the issue.

I think human empathy is natural and is the foundation of real or natural morality as opposed to the mores of a particular society or religion.

and many of the the ways it is used. Both terms, "good" and "evil," are judgmental and bring out emotional and irrational thoughts when they are used.

To begin with, "evil" is necessary for "good" to have any meaning at all. Buddhists understand this and don't bother with such value judgments. It appears Jews understood this, too, and the early Judaic concepts of this duality were overwritten by Christian morality in the early church.

But, even many Christian theology and ethics teachings don't bother to talk about good and evil as absolutes, except perhaps allegorically. Judas wasn't evil for fingering Jesus-- he was tragically necessary to fulfill a prophecy. Satan isn't an extrinsically evil entity-- he represents the darker side of our humanity.

What about that dark side of our humanity? Hitler usually comes up as an "evil" character, and he's a good choice, but there were tiny aspects of humanity about him. Other Nazis seem to be better choices as the they appear to have none at all, like Goering and Ilse Koch. Better examples would be Ivan the Terrible, Papa Doc Duvalier, some ultra-violent gangs, and a serial killer or two. Truth is, history is full of these dreadful sorts, but rather than labelling them as "evil," the more scientific "sociopath" might work.

These "evil" people are not acting much different than creatures in the wild, destroying the weaker for food, or who just might be in their way. Is the tomcat or the lion "evil" for killing the kittens of another so he can breed? No, so there doesn't seem to be a universal law against it, but a human acting in such a way is certainly doing things no human should be allowed to do. It would be easy to call it "evil" but it is really sociopathic, and wrong only in human terms.

Sometimes there is no other suitable word to describe bad people and things.

n/t

There are some pretty sick, greedy and callous MoFo's out there, but I don't believe in the concept of "pure evil" to attribute their actions.

It's used (I believe) to simply dismiss societal and mental problems with a handy one-word explanation.

That said, Dick Cheney is still evil.

I am agnostic and I associate evil with evolutionary psychology. In general anything that threatens our social and biological survival is evil. I have no problem calling it evil.

I do have a problem with religious people who associate evil with resistance to oppression though. Alot of fundamentalists claim womens rights, gay rights, civil rights, or left wing economic policies are evil when they are really just attempts to resist oppression and create a more egalitarian world.

Cheney is evil.

Limbaugh is evil.

Wall Street is evil.

The New York Yankees are evil.

There are evil people in this world. One needn't be a religious sort to believe that. Sure, a lot of church ladies will try to tell you that the existence of evil is evidence of the devil. But just because they say it with an air of assumed authority doesn't make it so. There needn't be a "devil" or "demon" or whatever pulling the strings - some folks can be plenty evil under their own steam.

and have evil mean someone who has a mental disorder or a poor upbringing with susceptible genetics to poor behavior then I'm going to say that it doesn't exist. Evil asks for no explanation but there is an explanation for everything and it is not divine. Evil presupposes that free will exists and we can choose right from wrong, whatever those may be culturally, without any influence whatsoever. So we have the "choice" to be evil or good. But just read any psychology book and it will disprove that pretty well.

Many people ascribe "evil" motives to other people who do evil things but who, themselves, aren't really evil by virtue of the fact that their minds aren't functioning like they should.

I have a friend who has had custody of her two grandchildren since they were babies because her daughter was a crackhead druggie. Both kids are severely screwed up because their mom took drugs while she was pregnant. They are now pre-teenagers who have been in and out of various treatment programs since childhood...also on every medication imaginable.

When they grow up, who knows what will happen...they may or may not do some evil things (the boy had already tried, at the age of 7 or 8, to kill one of his little cousins). Is he "evil"? This poor kid has severe mental and emotional problems he never asked for. He'll probably never be "normal" Yet some would call him Evil.

I know I use the term myself sometimes and I do have to remember that there may be valid reasons besides someone's being Evil for them to do the things they do...

is a metaphor for until Bush/Cheney performed their coup on our country and not only started talking about evil but brought it to our country in abundance.

church or no church

"Unconscionable" and "unscrupulous".

I saw the movie "In Cold Blood" a million years ago. No religion necessary to know that there is evil on this earth. Sentient, opposable-thumb wielding humans are also guided by a social conscious. The unconscionable evildoers that have no socially learned restraint switch, like the kids in "Lord of the Flies", the thrill-killers of B-movies....

Evil (the word) may have been usurped for religious purposes, but its meaning transcends any religious applications for me.

I'm an atheist and have no problem using it.

...they don't own morality. They only own the irrational non-explanations.

meaning but most are used as people choose to use them. As a religious person if I refer to something as "evil," I may or may not be attaching a theological concept to it.

...and that belief has nothing to do with religion. Although I do note the interesting correspondence between the words "good" and "God", and "evil" and "Devil". Coincidence? I think not. My considered belief on that score is that God and the Devil were created as embodiments of those concepts, but the concepts definitely precede them.

I find it a perfectly adequate word, and really don't ascribe any religious connotations to it. Those have been added by religious folk, and have little to do with the origins of the word, itself.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O27-evil.html

The word's origins predate Christianity, extending back to an indo-european root word.

Of course, it has attained a certain religious association. That does not mean that it cannot be used by non-religious people, though. There is no universal definition of the word, other than some generic sort of "bad."

I don't have a problem with other people using it really, but if I find myself labeling something or someone as evil I tend to stop and think, and ask whether it's my Catholic background kicking in. I give a lot of weight to psychological determinism and think that as humans we're less free moral actors than we would always like to believe. That said, I'll often conclude that yes, someone is being wilfully cruel or dishonest or whatever. But the word 'evil' is so loaded for me that when I find myself using it's usually an emotional rather than a rational assessment.

None the less true for that, but not necessarily the most insightful. It doesn't answer the question of what motivates the person and how is that manifested, which I believe is important for finding a constructive way to oppose them.Being against something or someone is all very well, but without seeking to understand it you're limiting your capacity for responding effectively.

Germans have the same word: "übel"

I have no problem using it. To me a person is "evil" if they consistently do harm for others and never give a fuck and refuse to change their ways.