Reyginus:
Ray, I hope you are not in any way suggesting that what benefits the stronger is good while what befalls the weak is bad? But actually the only thing wrong with this suggestion is if you don't show us effectively how. I also hope the defense you will present for them will move a step higher, not influenced by what they think is good or bad, but by how and why might is right and good.

I believe in these two sayings:

-"There is no white. There is no black. There are only different shades of grey."
-"The world is what you believe it to be."

Hitler slaughtered thousands of Jews. So many people were killed, families destroyed, people were marked as unfit to live not for what they've done, but just because they were born in a certain family. So can we call him evil. Maybe to Hitler, the killing of Jews was a way of cleaning up the Earth. He might have considered Jews to be the black filth that made the wonderful white world a dirtier place to live in. So he might have considered himself to be a God and went ahead to clean up the Earth.

Why he would think in this way is of course another question. Religion has caused more death throughout the ages than anything else. Yet we all consider religion to be sacred because we associate it with God and everything pure, so its supposed to be Good. My point is that any action can be called good from a certain perspective, and bad from another. So its basically grey.

Reyginus:
Let's try to forget about what the Nazis thought they were doing and focus on explaining why their actions is wrong or right. To do this, we must first have sufficient evidence on why they did what they did. And then we break them into parts and see why it is the best option at that point. Just give me a nod and I will look into it.

Alrighty, go ahead.

RayMcBlue:


I believe in these two sayings:

-"There is no white. There is no black. There are only different shades of grey."
-"The world is what you believe it to be."

Hitler slaughtered thousands of Jews. So many people were killed, families destroyed, people were marked as unfit to live not for what they've done, but just because they were born in a certain family. So can we call him evil. Maybe to Hitler, the killing of Jews was a way of cleaning up the Earth. He might have considered Jews to be the black filth that made the wonderful white world a dirtier place to live in. So he might have considered himself to be a God and went ahead to clean up the Earth.

Why he would think in this way is of course another question. Religion has caused more death throughout the ages than anything else. Yet we all consider religion to be sacred because we associate it with God and everything pure, so its supposed to be Good. My point is that any action can be called good from a certain perspective, and bad from another. So its basically grey.

Frankly speaking, I don't think you answered my question. What I only asked for was not his justification for doing what he did but if this 'justification' can really be justified. The question is, is might truly right?

I can only deduce from your statement that we are right in calling him and he is also right if he thinks he doing good. This is where philosophy comes to help us as I have been trying to explain since. A thing cannot truly be the opposite of that which it truly is.

But that is not even the point to rebut your statement. The point will be made when we are satisfied that might is right as that is the only left for us now. If two parties hold contrary opinion about a particular thing, the truth pertaining to the thing must not contradict itself else it is not true, the best thing would then be to look into that aspect of the thing where their opinion originates from.

Let's look at why might can ever be right. Lead the way.

RayMcBlue:

Even if they are choices, who ultimately decides what is good and what is evil? If God Himself is real, which I can't believe while I am awake, then we have the Good Book to tell us what is right and what is wrong. Otherwise we have our intuition, reason, and record.

How good are our instruments, though? Let us say that Good and Evil are ectoplasmic forces in the universe. We would be able to experience them, though not seemingly directly, through our senses (touch, smell, sight, hearing, taste). So when a man drives by a woman on the street, it is the Good ectoplasm that, like the smell of cookies, draws him to the side of the road to help her. The Evilectoplasm, on the other hand, would be the cause of/reason for a man raping that same woman.

There are in reality self-evident truth about anything which are most often arrived at by following it logically.

Assuming there is a case of life sentence. A group of people were sentenced on the authority of a single person after been caught for planning on a city. On further investigation it was learnt that the sentenced men were on the verge on detonating a nuclear bomb with a chain reaction capable of destroying more than a million lives. Their reason, to pay back the assassinations of prominent men and loss of place in their little country.

Look at what we will do if we must understand whether the sentence and arrest is right or if their intentions were good.

Yes it is true that prominent men on their side were assassinated. On further investigation, it was evident that these men had a hand in the entire saga and were killed to scatter the sheep. Our next point would then be why? Does the city house a decaying people in dire need of sanitation? Is killing to scatter justified?

It is like isolating a host with a virus that kills the mind. Their is no cure and the only way to prevent further infestation is to isolate the host and the virus. In this case, you can ever get close enough to the host to isolate both, the best way is to do what is necessary for the greater good.

On further investigation again, we found out that our city is pure and needed no sterilization and the terrorists just needed to use terror to inflict fear on the mind of the authority. Then we ask again, is fear by killing millions, the best way to tell somebody that you need peace? It is no.

At this point it becomes apparent that they are contaminated and need help and isolation is the best option. This is how we arrive at what is good or bad. And once we are at it, it is self-evident.

RayMcBlue:
Essentially (and I choose that word ever-so-carefully) we are programmed with a tendency one way or another: our brains have been trained, in a number of ways, for a number of d reasons, to be more open to the Good ectoplasm, so we are more Good than Evil. The ectoplasm is like air: we breathe in something related to what we breathe out. People in Good ectoplasm release Good ectoplasm, but not always. People are born with bad lungs, wicked minds, and black hearts, after all.

Or

Or, if choice is involved, however shallowly, we are the ones who generate more ectoplasm. Like a bacteria, the ectoplasm somehow grew in places it seemed quite unlikely. As humans grew, their brains reproduced the ectoplasm in a multitude of ways through their actions, reproduced so quickly that we could not keep track of it. Then we wrote myths about it. We tried to find out which actions produced which ectoplasm. Now, it seems, there are more ectoplasmic forces than we can keep track of, even if we can keep track of a few.

All that I've said seems quite unlikely, yet anyone who says that Good and Evil exist in the world must mean this or they mean otherwise that they are involved in a system of signification, a fundamentally arbitrary one. By arbitrary I come to say that it barely exists at all, except the way pots of gold exist beneath rainbows.

Seriously, I have not heard of anything like this. Do you mean to say that the ectoplasm can be inherently good or bad? Having a sense of morality?

RayMcBlue:


Good and Evil are human perceptions. You will notice that definitions of what is good and what is evil will vary form culture to culture; sometimes the gap is so deep, that what one culture sees as a virtue will be deemed deadly immoral by another. You can answer the question yourself by observing the world outside human culture/society -- is it evil for a lioness to kill in order to feed her brood? When a female black widow spider kills her mate after sex, it's not evil...she just do it. It is necessary, no more, no less.

How would a human perceive the same situation if they absolutely had to kill another in order to survive, the deed would no longer appear evil to them, they would have to rationalize it so that they can go on surviving, however, as a writer, you must adhere to the mores and morals of your audience. Your audience does not care for perceptions of good and evil that do not conform to its own expectations, hence, you ought not ask whether something is either good or evil, but whether your audience will perceive it as either good or evil.

Ray, you seem to be forgetting that it is that perception, their understanding of truth, that we are questioning. Is it right because they think so or is anybody right because he or she thinks he or she is? Of course, no.

So, what is it that makes what we think is right right and vice versa? Surely, it is not in mere thinking so.

If you consider killing in cold blood evil and I consider it good, are the both of right and how and if one is wrong, who and why?

IbrahimMav:

I am concern for ur welfare, that's all. Embrace Islam, the only true path and be saved. In Islam there is only good and no evil.

Open a new thread and tell me why I should follow your path.

Reyginus: Open a new thread and tell me why I should follow your path.

https://www.nairaland.com/1831067/christianity-inferior-islam-proof

May the light of Allah shine upon you.

RayMcBlue:
I believe in these two sayings:

-"There is no white. There is no black. There are only different shades of grey."
-"The world is what you believe it to be."

I believe in these two sayings

- "If there is no white and there is no black then it is impossible to have any shades of grey at all. As all shades of grey must necessarily contain a bit of white and black and nothing else"

- "I believe that you are a fool and since you believe that the world is what I believe it to be, then it only follows that you are indeed a fool."

RayMcBlue:

Alrighty, go ahead.

The reason for doing is to show that because we think a thing to be true does not make it so using Nazis Germany as point of contact. I will try to be brief.

Their Actions:

1. Jews and others deemed undesirable were
persecuted or murdered, and opposition to
Hitler's rule was ruthlessly suppressed.

2. Members of the liberal, socialist, and
communist opposition were killed,
imprisoned, or forced into exile.

3. The Christian churches were also oppressed, with many leaders imprisoned.

4. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed.

5. A nationalreferendum held 19 August 1934 confirmed Hitler as sole Führer (leader) of Germany. All power was centralised in Hitler's hands, and his word was above all laws.

Reason:The Germanic peoples—also referred to as the Nordic race—were considered to be the purest representation of Aryanism , and therefore the master.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany race.

In the first example, we can see that they crime was the opposition of the Nazi Government. The Nazis considered themselves superior beings in all ramifications. Now you wonder what is wrong with opposing the notion that a being is superior to you. Why is it wrong? Is it wrong because the so-called superior race thinks sn?

They were not able to show that they were the superior race in the first place. Superior might doesn't make you a superior race because a similar strength can be acquired by another race. But their is a kind of superiority, intellectual superiority, that is inherent in the being. We are not born with the same degree of Intelligence Quotient, IQ. The Nazis even in that era were scared of this intelligence by the Jewish. You see, with respect to the actual definition of the word, the Jewish were superior to them. In the purest form also, it is a contradiction to claim that you are a superior race and still go ahead to chase out and destroy a race because you think they are more intelligent. At this point, the Nazis do not even understand their argument as their premise is wrong.

Secondly, having to make an opposition go extinct because they do not agree with you is no really intelligent. We ask our usual question, what is wrong with opposing? When you don't agree you either you ignore the person or try to see reason to agree. This attempt to silence the opposition is a way to establish a particular thinking pattern, that avoids the obvious and looks only in the direction of the authoriy. Once we are no longer responsible for our actions, we become robots in the hands of the one using us, and this shows he doesn't respect our right to freedom. The greatest right. To promote the treatment of humans as ordinary prisoner is really not propagating human life.

This is evident in 3,4 and 5. A very disgusting thing happens in 5. Actually there is nothing in wrong in every word made by a single person to be law except that the person here is not all-knowing. If he was all-knowing, he would have seen that true superiority is in intelligence and not on my might because the latter comes from the former. He would would have known that tyranny and despotism are two deadly negative means of governance. He is evil in this respect because he is not all-knowing in the very essence of the word.

Do you have any objection as to why the Nazis are right?

IbrahimMav:

https://www.nairaland.com/1831067/christianity-inferior-islam-proof

May the light of Allah shine upon you.

Lol. Thread is hidden already.

MrAnony1:
I believe in these two sayings

- "If there is no white and there is no black then it is impossible to have any shades of grey at all. As all shades of grey must necessarily contain a bit of white and black and nothing else"

- "I believe that you are a fool and since you believe that the world is what I believe it to be, then it only follows that you are indeed a fool."

I would like to see how Ray responds to especially the second part.

Reyginus: Lol. Thread is hidden already.

Too bad the mods couldn't handle the truth. they can hide my threads all they want but they can neva suppress the fastest growing religion in the world Islam. May the light of Allah shine upon you.

IbrahimMav:

Too bad the mods couldn't handle the truth. they can hide my threads all they want but they can neva suppress the fastest growing religion in the world Islam. May the light of Allah shine upon you.

Lolol. Please keep the light of Allah for yourself. I don't need it.

Reyginus: Lolol. Please keep the light of Allah for yourself. I don't need it.

You have no say in the matter. Allah gaze is always on us. Allah knows best.

IbrahimMav:

You have no say in the matter. Allah gaze is always on us. Allah knows best.

Okay.

@Reyginus, you're really a smart fella, I'll give you that. Got nothing's else to offer here, mate. I was hoping you'd give up first but man, you're relentless... Geez!

Time to observe a tactical retreat. Thanks for your inputs, it's quite educational. Cheers.

MrAnony1:
I believe in these two sayings

- "If there is no white and there is no black then it is impossible to have any shades of grey at all. As all shades of grey must necessarily contain a bit of white and black and nothing else"

- "I believe that you are a fool and since you believe that the world is what I believe it to be, then it only follows that you are indeed a fool."

Last words:

-If you believe that I'm a fool for believing that the world is what I believe it to be, then you are a bigger fool for calling me a fool for absolutely no reason at all, since the world is indeed what I believe it to be.

Reyginus: Okay.

May the light of Allah shine upon you.

RayMcBlue: @Reyginus, you're really a smart fella, I'll give you that. Got nothing's else to offer here, mate. I was hoping you'd give you first but man, you're relentless... Geez!

Time to observe a tactical retreat. Thanks for your inputs, it's quite educational. Cheers.

Lol@tactical retreat. Thank you too for making me think and fire epistles after a long time.

Reyginus: Lol@tactical retreat. Thank you too for making me think and fire epistles after a long time.

True! U really fired epistle.

You are right @ Raymcblue. He is truly smart and intelligent. I read part of the exchanges.

Tgirl4real:

True! U really fired epistle.

You are right @ Raymcblue. He is truly smart and intelligent. I read part of the exchanges.

Lol. Stop it please. I'm blushing. How was you day? Any Eid el present?

Reyginus: Lol. Stop it please. I'm blushing. How was you day? Any Eid el present?

Do people still give presents these days?!

Day went well. @ a retreat @ the moment.

Hope u had a great day too.

Tgirl4real:

Do people still give presents these days?!

Day went well. @ a retreat @ the moment.

Hope u had a great day too.

I mean salah food. If you live in the north you'd know what I am talking about. My day went well and don't forget to pray for us.

Reyginus: I mean salah food. If you live in the north you'd know what I am talking about. My day went well and don't forget to pray for us.

Oh! I get u now. The people around me re celebrating 2mrw and I have left home already.

Yep. Take care.

Hope RayMcBlue wont start a thread tomorrow telling us God is evil?

FOLYKAZE: Hope RayMcBlue wont start a thread tomorrow telling us God is evil?

Lolz. But can something be FORCED to wear such garment when IT doesn't even exist? Basically, theists are systematically offing each other to see who's got the better IMAGINARY friend. Now, can such actions be termed "evil" or "good?" Nothing is that simple, my friend.

RayMcBlue:

Lolz. But can something be FORCED to wear such garment when IT doesn't even exist? Basically, theists are systematically offing each other to see who's got the better IMAGINARY friend. Now, can such actions be termed "evil" or "good?" Nothing is that simple, my friend.

You are right base from the perspective you view it from.

But I can say you are wrong friend. . . .just like every other atheist. Though it is good to find you evolving.

God exist. . .even you are a worshipper of God.

Dont let me derail your thread with this. . . . .

Here is a thread on the existence and worship of God https://www.nairaland.com/1815402/all-aborisha

anothere here is thread on Moral judgment and Brain chemistry https://www.nairaland.com/1825723/moral-judgement-brain-chemistry


let see how you play it out on those thread.

FOLYKAZE:

You are right base from the perspective you view it from.

But I can say you are wrong friend. . . .just like every other atheist. Though it is good to find you evolving.

God exist. . .even you are a worshipper of God.

Dont let me derail your thread with this. . . . .

Here is a thread on the existence and worship of God https://www.nairaland.com/1815402/all-aborisha

anothere here is thread on Moral judgment and Brain chemistry https://www.nairaland.com/1825723/moral-judgement-brain-chemistry


let see how you play it out on those thread.

Interesting theory. Don't worry, my eyes is already fixated on the first link. I'll be dropping in later today. Cheers.