"Evil is a make-believe concept" - Jay Austin

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You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place ... People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own ... By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this.

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Hmmm? I guess we should forget that Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mao, etc. and all their followers ever existed,

From the comments:

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A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan. Do you really believe that people willing to lay down their lives for an ideal - as ISIS suicide bombers are - are selfish psychopaths? Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values. Some countries are inherently dangerous not because they have too many sociopaths roaming around but because their cultures are violent, narrow-minded, or filled with bad ideas. I hate radical Islam because I believe it is totally wrong, not because I think its adherents are bad people. I don’t actually care whether they are or are not. The American cyclists embraced ideals I can identify with - individualism, self-fulfillment, adventure - and so I grieve for them. “Nothing is good or bad/ But thinking makes it so” (Shakespeare, Hamlet).

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The people who ran over these cyclists are evil sociopaths, but out come the moral relativists.

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I hate radical Islam because I believe it is totally wrong

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Why do they think its wrong?

If everything is relative then why can't I just go around murdering people and taking their stuff?

C.S. Lewis....

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they've got to be free.

Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.”

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By the way, he was killed by ISIS Tajikistan

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LMFAO

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Quoting a DEAD DO-GOODER....nice touch

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Thanks.

I'd argue he wasn't a do-gooder. He quit his job and started biking God-knows-where, spending God-knows-whose-money, going into virtual tiger cages to prove to himself and anyone who would listen that he was some worldly force for peace or goodwill or hell, maybe just to prove how incredibly not-bigoted he was. Better to be dead than thought a racist, right?

Too bad this guy wasn’t familiar with Jordan Peterson.

Not only is evil objectively real, every human has free will. We all have the power to choose evil, the power to act malevolently, dishonestly, viciously.

It is part of the process of self-actualization to recognize your own power to do both good and evil.

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The problem is the left is putting us all on that bike ride with their immigration policies.

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Yes, but rest assured their homes will be gated and their children won't be dating any of these vibrant immigrants.

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"nihilism "

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frick, man.

I mean, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.

I regret their deaths, but he strikes me as profoundly naive.