Dude. Good & evil is such a central concept in Christianity it is practically ingrained in your society if you live in a christian country even if you are secular.
The English words for good and evil are pre-Christian in origin. So are their cognates in other European languages. Greek philosophers were debating “good and evil” centuries before Jesus of Nazareth was born. So there is nothing inherently Christian about those words, or the concepts they describe.
> You are correct, but you are also ignoring the fact that we are no longer living in ancient greek time.
Even today, people still read and are influenced by Plato and Aristotle.
> I did not claim that Christianity invented good & evil. I claimed that it is a central concept in Christianity.
You claimed you don’t believe in evil because you are not a Christian. Not being a Christian and not believing in evil have little connection with each other, given billions of non-Christians believe in evil.
> Your way of reasoning here is often referred to as a straw mans argument.
In my part of the world, christianity has dominated for 1000+ years. There are no influences from eastern religion or Plato or whatever. I suspect the same is true in your part of the world.
Hinduism it's pretty much alive, and Christianity it's just a fork of Judaism.
When Cristianity didn't even exist, the Chinese already had a good chunk of philosophy perfectly set and written, and even modernish rules for war and diplomacy: Tao Te King, and The Art of War.
Heck, America from Canada to the Patagonia didn't even know about Jesus until the Europeans arrived 1500 years later. 1500s damn years.
For a huge continent mass spread over from almost the North Pole to the South pole.
So much for an 'Universal' God. So universal that Aquinas had to rip a good chunk of Greek philosophy to adapt (more like smash it down with nails and duct tape) ancient Middle East fairy tales into the less-desert bound Europe as the modern Christian canonical sources.
If any, the Western world is shaped by the Roman architecture and law, and the Greek worldview, mindset and math.
I am not neither a hindu or jew. Christianism in Europe is larguely cultural, our values shifted a lot
since the Enlightenment times. The US, not much, they have a large sense of prudeness which affected even policitically left leaned people.
I mean, here people it's Christian by name only. Technically, even the Southern Spain with infamous street parades with large walks carrying a big structure with a Virgin, most of that it's just a showoff and a way to say "look how loaded we are, so much that we can build great golden clothes for our Virgin".
If any, lots of lore in Europe it's just paganism with a Christian disguise.
Even Christianism itself it's so-so Christian-wannabe unlike the original one which came from the Middle East; it was largely repurposed with Greek values so people here could assimilate better these alien customs such as not being able to eat pork or nonsense about alcohol when the risk of dehidrating in Europe was near nil.
Kinda like North Korea with Communism. Marxist? Today, in name, maybe. Because Juche it's almost a copycat of right wing fascism with Asian features. Kinda like the Japanese one, but with Koreans.
Evil as a moral judgement isn't. Acts can be good or evil. In more secular terms we prefer to say "harmful" or "unjust" but the meaning is arguably the same.
But the idea that "evil" is an attribute a person can possess is 100% a religious one. If you're not religious, there can be no evil person unless you think there is an "evil" gene or an "evil" psychosis - "sociopath" and "psychopath" are often used this way but usually in ways that have very little to do with diagnostic criteria and more with trying to sound more profound than just calling someone a bad person; in pseudoscience this also sometimes manifests as the idea that some people are more predisposed to crime, though usually nowadays this more often manifests as vague notions of "racial culture" than measuring skull shapes, but this too is just a more elaborate way to call groups of people inherently bad.
As a religious concept, "evil" can be somewhat nebulous where people just take some wrong turns and "evilness" seeps into them making them irredeemable: many Christians (especially certain sects of American protestantism) believe "sins" (i.e. disobeying God's rules, not necessarily causing measurable harm to others in secular terms) work kind of like this where habitual sinning in one way can lead to sinning in other ways as sinfulness takes over the person's life (like an addiction spiraling out of control). It can also be a much more literal idea of outright demonic possession (e.g. the kind of thing you need an exorcist to help with) or demonic presence (e.g. evil people actually being lizard people masking themselves as fellow humans to hide among us). And yes, I'm labelling certain fringe conspiracy movements as religious as they operate on a similar framework and often have direct ties to religious traditions and concepts.
Conversely, not only are "evil people" a religious concept but so are "good people". If good is something you do that means you need to continously demonstrate your "goodness" by doing good things. But if good is something you can be then any accusations of wrongdoing are highly suspect because a good person would do no such things. This is why most people don't take kindly to being told even in the most polite terms that something they did was kinda racist (or sexist, or misogynist, or...) because "I'm not a racist" (i.e. thinking of it as an innate attribute of their character rather than one of their actions and hence something they can and need to actively control) - mind you, liberals did not do a good job with this distinction either over the past decade because as it turns out even self-professed non-religious people often have religious upbringings that stick with them (i.e. self-applied labels like "feminist", "anti-racist", etc should only ever be read as statements of intent and dismissed if they do not manifest in their actions which they rarely do).
Evil is an attribute that people may come to possess through various means (ideology is a big one), which becomes manifest through their actions when they demonstrate severe selfish disregard for the lives of others.
The above does not rest on religion. Christians/etc having their own theories about evil is irrelevant. When most people say Pol Pot was evil, they're not talking about demonic possession or some silly nonsense like that; they mean he was a mass murderer, which is evil.
> When most people say Pol Pot was evil, they're not talking about demonic possession or some silly nonsense like that; they mean he was a mass murderer, which is evil.
Well, no. Most people I've heard say something like that would mean that he was innately evil as a person. They wouldn't spell it out like that but the underlying assumption is that a "normal human being" couldn't do what he did and therefore he was a freak mutation in some way. Most people even struggle with the idea that there was a time in such a person's life where they weren't "evil" yet. Even when talking about Antisocial Personality Disorder ("psychopathy") they rarely know that this is often in part caused by severe early childhood trauma, e.g. sexual abuse or parental abuse and emotional neglect - most seem to believe these people are "just born evil" and any prior period where they didn't do anything sufficiently evil were just a mask.
This is easiest to see when talking about the Nazis. Instead of trying to gain a systemic understanding of how the Nazis came to power or how "ordinary citizens" could be made to commit massacres and genocides we single out the big names as uniquely evil and make up excuses for the rest. For the longest time I had been told that soldiers who participated in massacres were implicitly threatened with death or at least physical punishment but we know that this was not the case and the mere threat of social ostracization by the other members of their unit was enough. The majority of those involved in the massacres saw themselves as victims for having to carry out those commands and deal with the trauma because denying their own agency helped them cope with what they had done.
So no, they don't mean "a person who has done something evil" when they say a person is evil. They usually mean something more transcendental than that. When most people say Pol Pot or Hitler or Milosevic was evil they mean he wasn't human the same way "normal humans" are human. They may not think he was literally possessed by a demon or the physical manifestation of a demon but they will think there was some essence of evilness inside him that would inevitably manifest. He wasn't evil as a result of doing evil things, he did evil things because he was an evil person. This is called essentialism and it's extremely widespread and antithetical to a systems theory based understanding of social dynamics and behaviors.
Pol Pot wasn't "innately" evil and I doubt many people would say such a thing. Pol Pot is evil because he did evil things, not the other way around. For that matter, most Christians believe that all people are prone to sin and the difference between people is whether they seek forgiveness after giving into sin. The innate sense of evil exists in all people which is why Christ had to sacrifice himself to atone for that sin. Personally I am not a christian and blood sacrifice (of anybody or anything) to atone for sins doesn't make logical sense to me, but that's what their bible says and that's what most of them preach. A few, like Calvinists, are notable exceptions.
> Pol Pot wasn't "innately" evil and I doubt many people would say such a thing.
> Personally I am not a christian
You really shouldn't extrapolate from yourself then.
I've seen this discourse repeatedly in Germany when it comes to Hitler and the Nazis:
1. Hitler did unspeakably evil things.
2. Therefore Hitler was evil.
3. However the evil he did was so uniquely evil he can not be compared to others.
4. Therefore Hitler was uniquely capable of committing such evil.
5. This implies Hitler was already innately evil prior to committing those acts.
This usually extends to falsely distinguish the evil SS from the "patriotic" Wehrmacht (who were "ordinary soldiers just following orders" and only "incidentally" ended up participating in mass murders). It's directly tied to the Great Man narrative of history: only Hitler could have been Hitler because he was innately different. The idea in the Great Man narrative usually being that a great leader emerges and changes history, rather than history changing through the conflict of material conditions (or ideas, if you're a Hegelian) and the actual figureheads being largely incidental (i.e. what Marxists call dialectical materialism).
According to demographic data, over 40% of Germans identify as non-religious whereas in the US it's a bit over 20%, so I would expect Americans to actually be more likely to think this way (if not outright going with the "demon person" idea of evil).
Also, according to most Christian faiths Jesus specifically atoned for the Original Sin (Adam and Eve disobeying God by eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil). The entire "redemption" thing is also a bit more complicated: in practice even Protestant and Catholic Christians generally behave as if they were following the Eastern Orthodox view of mortal sins where mortal sins are irredeemable and the separation from God they inflict on the sinner is permanent.
But this is a digression. The point is, most people view evil when it comes to person not as a mere descriptor of having done something but
- either: having a pre-existing innate essence of evil-ness that allowed them to do it
- or: having been so corrupted by the act itself that they now possess a permanent essence of evil-ness
or a combination of the two. In other words: an Evil Person™ is not just a person who has done an evil thing but a person uniquely capable of and predisposed towards doing evil things to a greater extent than a Normal Person™ would be. Pol Pot wasn't just evil because he did evil things, he did those evil things because he was Pol Pot, an evil person.
I'll shut up now before I get started on how different ideas of free will play into this.
