Again, sorry it took so long for me to respond to this. I haven't had much of
any free time lately.
FinalEnigma wrote:
I'm not precisely sure why(not that I shouldn't), but I like you. You're' interesting.
(if you haven't noticed I'm really weird. And rather blatant about things at times.)
Hopefully my irrational affection for you(and I don't mean that in any way that could be negative or weird. I know how people jump to negative/weird conclusions.) doesn't cloud my debating skills.
I don't see how it could be taken as negative.
Hopefully my irrational affection for you(and I don't mean that in any way that could be negative or weird. I know how people jump to negative/weird conclusions.) doesn't cloud my debating skills.
I see you've already found an excuse to use when you lose.
I take this to mean that you accept that creating happiness for the purpose of increasing overall suffering is incorrect? I'll grant for the sake of continuance that there are exceptions(though I'm not convinced there are, I don't need to prove it if you agree to the above), but since there are only a few exceptions, overall the tactic of creating happiness to increase overall suffering would be a failure.
Yes, I concede that such a tactic would not work and that my original idea was generally offbase.
That actually depends on your definition of severe mental illness. Love won't cure schizophrenia, of course, but depression I'm convinced it can, if not cure, play a large part in helping to cure. Case in point here being myself.
I was depressed for years, I don't recall if I've said in this thread how many, but it doesn't really matter. I went to psychologists and therapists and such, but that didn't help. I tried many medications, but they didn't help.
Now, medications are used in the treatment of depression - note I don't say they cure it, because they don't.
The very vast majority of depression is caused by something circumstantial (by this I mean an external circumstance[abuse spouse or school bullies or something] or internal circumstance[self abuse, lack of self worth, lack of confidence]), rather than a chemical imbalance. The vast majority has a root cause other than chemical imbalance, and this root cause CAUSES a chemical imbalance, by overproducing sadness hormones, and under producing happiness ones.
What medication does, when it works, is to fix the chemical imbalance temporarily, but it won't fix the root cause - that's up to you. We are never going to invent a pill that stops an abusive husband(well, except maybe poison). They way they tell it to you is the circumstance makes you depressed, the depression saps your will, and the medication lifts the sadness enough for you to fix the circumstance that's causing the depression.
In anybody who was depressed and then got better, this is why. an actual chemical imbalance in the brain that causes and maintains depression by itself is very rare(and usually genetic), and if such people stop taking pills, they just become depressed again.
I refer specifically to chemical imbalances that can not be easily fixed. When this is the case, as I said before, love is simply not enough. There are just some situations that are so bleak that no amount of love and kindness can change them. In some cases, treating the symptoms and hoping that the person can function even semi-regularly is all that can be done.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by speaking of dragging relative morality into this, but I do believe the prospect of an A-moral God is eminently relevant(since this is sort of where I've been slowly going the whole time).
In a book I once read, they discussed the possibility of finding an alien which was some sort of bacteria, yet sentient, and, being a bacteria, couldn't really die and was immortal(it just replaced parts of itself). Since it couldn't die, it had no concept of death or killing, so it could go about killing people without understanding what it was doing, yet be an intelligent, sentient creature.
Couldn't you, in the same vein, have a creature that has no concept of evil? or of harming another being? If a being were all powerful, invincible, unkillable, and unharmable...could it not easily have no sense of what harm even is?
And lacking a sense of what harm or injury, or killing is - how could it have a sense of right and wrong? Nothing we view as evil could cause it harm, so it would not likely view any of these actions as harmful. Steal from it? does it even have posessions? if it does, it can just make a new one. Cause it pain? you can't. Kill it? nope. emotionally abuse it? irrelevant.
How could it have a concept of good and evil if good and evil simply don't apply to it?
In the same way, every person, group, or species' situation is different, and they therefore maintain a different perspective on good and evil. When looked at from this angle, good and evil are completely irrelevant to anything and everything, as it is all relative. It's just a matter of perspective and experience. Society in general, however (myself aside, as I believe that morality is relative), does not judge a person based upon that person's circumstances or perspective. The person is judged upon the standards and views of whoever is judging them, not their own standards. In the same capacity, we could judge God as evil from our perspective for any harm he may have inflicted upon us (depending upon what he is actually responsible for of course (if anything).
