Are good and evil points-of-view? What is good to you can be evil to me. Are god and devil absurds?

Question

That which is good to me can be a lot of evil to some people and vice-versa.

That which was good in the past can be evil today. For example, the bloody God of the past may not want us to kill today.

A muslim kills himself and some innocents (children) and his people see it as good You do not have to be clever to know it is pure evil.

Can anybody explain to me who is God and who is the Devil?

Answer 1

There is an old Hindu saying "there is no evil, there is only ignorance." What a Hindu means when they say this is that good and evil are subjective percespectives. Just as you point out, what I may consider good you may very well consider to be evil. I may judge something evil that you judge to be very good, etc. Thus Hindus say there is no absolute, universal aspects of good and evil. They aren't real except in the mind of the person making the judgements (only real to the person's point of view). The next line "there is only ignorance" comes from the Hindu teaching that the greatest problem with why most people suffer in this world is because they fail to see Reality. Their points-of-view are clouded by their own judgements, biases, etc. To end suffering one just has to start looking at reality as it is. In the words of Sri Nithyananda "We suffer when there is a gap between our imaginations and reality." By imaginations he goes on to say that he means our expectations or judgements. He gives many examples such as going into a store and expecting to find the item and then go and pay and get out quickly. However when we have trouble finding the item and/or we go to pay and there is a line and we have to wait, since this is not what we expected we allow ourselves to fall out of the reality of what is happening and into our imaginations of what we want to be happening and because we have opened this gap, we suffer. Another explaination for "there is only ignorance" is also the belief by Hindus that many of us, from the time we are born, our raised with our ego's interest in mind and we develop our individuality....but as we grow, so does our ego and the Self (the real Self that is One with the Divine and One with all things) diminishes in our awareness. Thus we forget that we are all interconnected and that what I do to you effects me, too. Thus the saying "There is no evil, there is only ignorance" is a statement of Hindu realization that good and evil are subjective perspectives and that the reason why people often mistreat each other is because they forget that their interconnected and One with each other and that the Self in all of us is also one with the Divine and that we fail to see Reality. There is a saying amongst Hindus "See God in everyone and everything and treat everyone and everything the same way you treat God because the way you treat what is manifested as the universe says a lot about how you treat what is unmanifested beyond the universe because both the manifested universe and the unmanifested beyond the universe are both God."

Answer 2

You're right about people points of view; good or evil depends on the person's view. Only truth based on God's word is absolute true. Only good based on God's word is good. Anything else is just that - people's point of view.

Answer 3

Yes this is right, and this is why the Bible even says that a man may kill you and imagine he is doing a service to God(John16:3)

Answer 4

That is true to some extent.
Obviously, you and I don't have the same notions of evil that the Amish do.
However, I think we can all agree on some of the basics: murder, rape, theft, etc...