This is my firs thread here so bear with me if im not familiar with proper text structure.
To start off, i am a 19 year old kid living in Chile.
All my life i was told that god exists, that jesus loves me and all that stuff. I always believed it, until one day i saw my older brother mock my mother for asking him to pray. he said "praying has never worked and it never will". That made me question everything, and it snowballed. Now i am 100% atheistic, and dismiss any and every religion. But this has brought me many questions, to some i yet dont know the anwser, and some thoughts that i have yet to organize so they make sense. For me, human behaviour was always classified as "good" and "evil". It was the way of the world, and it made sense to me. People were either "good" or "bad". Now, that i no longer believe in an objective morality, and that i understand human behaviour as something so much more complex than simply "good" or "bad", i find that i am struggling on being able to say what is actually evil, or condemnable behaviour.
Now, i want to establish some differences. I know the law, and i mostly agree with it, but simply out of convenience. If we want to thrive as a society, we need to punish those that act in a way which harms the greater good. Killing does not help us move forward, therefor we punish it. So does stealing, rape, and so on. But then i see on the news some guy that, for example, raped and killed a girl. Everyone says he is evil and should never see the light of day again.
Is he really?
is someone who commits murder a "bad" person?
I mean, we dont choose the way we are. People are born attractive, they dont choose it. People are born smart, tall, funny, shy. Sure nurture has an inmense impact on the development of our personality, but then again, we dont choose when, where and with who we are born, so our environment is just as much incontrolable as our birth itself. So can i really consider someone bad or evil for simply acting the way they are? sure a murderer may premediate the act, and he may be aware that killing is wrong, but he does it anyway. can we blame HIM? can we really say its HIS fault?
A normal person would simply not commit murder ( we can argue that circumstance makes the criminal, and that with the right variables any normal person could be a killer, but for the sake of the argument, lets not) so someone that commits murder must have something wrong with them. Be it genetic, messed up childhood, they have something "off" in them. So how can we say that ANYONE is bad, under any circumstance? anyone that would commit a crime, is commiting it because of whatever has brought them to it. so who am i to say thats wrong?
can you guys tell me your thoughts on this? i would love to hear more about it
To start off, i am a 19 year old kid living in Chile.
All my life i was told that god exists, that jesus loves me and all that stuff. I always believed it, until one day i saw my older brother mock my mother for asking him to pray. he said "praying has never worked and it never will". That made me question everything, and it snowballed. Now i am 100% atheistic, and dismiss any and every religion. But this has brought me many questions, to some i yet dont know the anwser, and some thoughts that i have yet to organize so they make sense. For me, human behaviour was always classified as "good" and "evil". It was the way of the world, and it made sense to me. People were either "good" or "bad". Now, that i no longer believe in an objective morality, and that i understand human behaviour as something so much more complex than simply "good" or "bad", i find that i am struggling on being able to say what is actually evil, or condemnable behaviour.
Now, i want to establish some differences. I know the law, and i mostly agree with it, but simply out of convenience. If we want to thrive as a society, we need to punish those that act in a way which harms the greater good. Killing does not help us move forward, therefor we punish it. So does stealing, rape, and so on. But then i see on the news some guy that, for example, raped and killed a girl. Everyone says he is evil and should never see the light of day again.
Is he really?
is someone who commits murder a "bad" person?
I mean, we dont choose the way we are. People are born attractive, they dont choose it. People are born smart, tall, funny, shy. Sure nurture has an inmense impact on the development of our personality, but then again, we dont choose when, where and with who we are born, so our environment is just as much incontrolable as our birth itself. So can i really consider someone bad or evil for simply acting the way they are? sure a murderer may premediate the act, and he may be aware that killing is wrong, but he does it anyway. can we blame HIM? can we really say its HIS fault?
A normal person would simply not commit murder ( we can argue that circumstance makes the criminal, and that with the right variables any normal person could be a killer, but for the sake of the argument, lets not) so someone that commits murder must have something wrong with them. Be it genetic, messed up childhood, they have something "off" in them. So how can we say that ANYONE is bad, under any circumstance? anyone that would commit a crime, is commiting it because of whatever has brought them to it. so who am i to say thats wrong?
can you guys tell me your thoughts on this? i would love to hear more about it