The problem of evil is only a “problem” because Western thought insists on dualism — that good and evil are separate, opposing forces, one divine, the other demonic. But this split is artificial. It assumes a clean cosmos: God is pure good, evil is the intruder. Yet this framework immediately collapses. If God is all-powerful and good, why does evil exist? Either He allows it (so He’s not good), or He can’t stop it (so He’s not God). The contradictions multiply because the premise is broken — dualism doesn’t describe reality, it imposes a false binary onto it.

In reality, what we call “evil” isn’t some independent force — it’s part of the same field as good. Suffering, death, destruction, chaos — they’re not glitches in creation, they are creation, inseparable from beauty, birth, growth, and love. Eastern and non-dual traditions don’t suffer from this contradiction because they don’t try to exile one half of existence. They see darkness and light as interdependent, like waves and troughs. The Western mind, stuck in its dualist delusion, demands a universe that makes moral sense — and can’t accept the one it lives in. So the problem of evil remains “unsolvable” not because it's profound, but because it's built on a lie.

>>24538224 (OP)
Read Plotinus

>>24538252
Plotinus is exactly the kind of band-aid Western dualists reach for when the cracks start to show. He tries to patch the holes in the problem of evil by abstracting everything into emanations — evil isn't real, it's just absence, a lack of good, a shadow cast by the One. But this is just metaphysical gymnastics to protect the illusion that ultimate reality is purely good and everything else is a degraded echo. It doesn’t resolve the tension — it just rephrases it in mystical terms.

The core problem remains: dualism assumes a moral hierarchy where light is pure and darkness is a mistake. Plotinus is elegant, sure, but he’s still trapped in that same neurotic framework. He tries to spiritualize away the dirt, the decay, the animal, the shadow — the very things that Eastern and non-dual traditions integrate. Evil isn’t a lack. It’s part of the whole. Trying to reframe it as ontological absence is just another way of refusing to look it in the eye.

>>24538224 (OP)
Evil is a privation of the good.
There is only good, and its absence in degrees.

>>24538224 (OP)
Correct, how can anyone still take Platonism and all it's derivatives seriously is total stupidity.

>—
the mark of the beast

>>24538224 (OP)
>"Good and evil are like, all part of the same thing, man."
So I guess you'll be okay with me showing up to kill and eat you and your entire family?

>>24538224 (OP)
the sheer irony of this post is hilarious

>>24538347
retard alert

>>24538224 (OP)
>>24538264
Explaining to people that the rape-murder-cannibalism of children is the yin to sunshine's yang doesn't solve the problem of evil. It's merely the laziest attempt.

>>24538316
"Evil is a privation of good" is just metaphysical cope. It’s a neat trick to avoid confronting the fact that violence, destruction, and suffering aren’t accidents in the system — they are the system. Nature births and kills. The same fire that gives warmth burns the village. The same instincts that create life also create cruelty. Good and evil are not two substances — they’re perspectives arising from the same process. Saying that evil is “just the absence of good” is a Platonic holdover that dodges reality because it can’t bear the full picture. It wants a clean God and a dirty world, and it tries to frame that as wisdom.

>>24538347
>>24538425
And no, acknowledging that dualism is false doesn’t mean nihilism or moral collapse. That’s a false dichotomy. It means moving past magical thinking and facing the horror and beauty of existence as one intertwined flow. If your entire ethical framework collapses because someone pointed out that “evil” might not be an ontological gremlin hiding in the bushes, then maybe your framework wasn’t built to handle reality in the first place.

>>24538460
Strawman. You didn't address any of this >>24538425

>>24538486
You're assuming that rejecting moral dualism means endorsing horror, but that only makes sense within a dualist framework. No one said those acts are good — we’re saying they exist as part of the same reality as joy, love, and beauty. The universe doesn’t sort itself into moral categories; we do, because we need to make sense of chaos. But when you demand that evil be an “ontological mistake,” something that shouldn’t exist, you’re not describing reality — you’re describing your discomfort with it.

You bring up the worst possible examples — rape, murder, cannibalism — not as arguments, but as emotional weapons, as if their existence automatically proves a metaphysical split between good and evil. But this doesn’t solve the problem of evil — it buries it under moral outrage. The real challenge is to confront the fact that these horrors don’t come from a separate, evil realm — they come from us, from nature, from the same world that gives us compassion, creativity, and ecstasy. That’s not lazy — it’s honest. And it’s a far more difficult position to hold than clinging to a system that tells you “evil” is just an absence, a shadow, something Other.

If that truth feels unbearable, it says more about the fragility of your framework than the validity of the argument.

>>24538457
barring the GPTslop, we didn't say good and evil are two "distinct substances". There is only the good, and degrees of good by degree of absence. There is only order and the absence of order. Order which counteracts entropy is good. Life, as it exists counter to the entropic forces of the universe tending towards oblivion, is good.

>it assumes a clean cosmos: God is pure good, evil is the intruder
I don't assume there even is a God
I don't assume that evil is an intruder/invader/external force

There is good and there is evil, make your choice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJGDmGZjXxk

>>24538573
That’s a clean restatement of the classic privation theory — but it still avoids the core tension. Calling evil “just the absence of good” is metaphysical accounting. It tidies up language without actually engaging with the lived reality of cruelty, malice, and conscious harm. If evil is merely “less order,” then what do you call the moments when beings deliberately destroy, violate, torture — not out of ignorance, but with full awareness? That’s not entropy — that’s intentional inversion. And your framework has no place to put it except to call it “lack,” which feels like an evasion, not an explanation.

You can rename evil as “disorder” or “absence,” but the psychic and existential impact of it remains. The distinction between “two substances” and “degrees of good” might be precise in theory, but in practice, it ends up doing the same thing: casting the dark half of reality into a category that doesn’t belong, that doesn’t really exist. That’s what this argument protects — not truth, but the need to believe the cosmos is fundamentally clean. A belief that falls apart the moment you stop viewing suffering as a statistical flaw and start seeing it as a constitutive part of the whole.

>>24538524
The issue your line of argument misses isn't good or evil, but the right to judgment, which classical western dualism wrestles with quite well. If you're not going to enter the arena and willing call certain actions 'evil', you're engaging in sophistry and your argument is that of a hypocritical Pharisee whose only moral dilemma has ever been which anime girl he should jerk off to. Go accidentally kill a few innocent civilians in a war and come back to the table with some gnosis.

>>24538625
This is a classic pivot — when the metaphysics get shaky, shift the debate to moral authority. But that doesn’t save the dualist position; it just reveals how dependent it is on performance and posture.
You're not wrestling with truth — you're clinging to the right to moral grandstanding, because without cosmic evil to condemn, you don’t know who you are. The second someone refuses to play along with your theological melodrama, you fall back on moral theater: war crimes, tragedy, trauma — as if shouting atrocity gives weight to your framework. But horror doesn’t prove dualism. It just proves that reality is brutal, and sometimes you are the one doing the brutalizing.

You want evil to be real so you can stand against it, so you can be good by contrast.
Without that, your identity collapses. That’s why your response isn't argument, it's a tantrum. “Go kill some civilians and then you’ll understand”? No — you just proved the point. When you're face to face with that kind of horror, good and evil don’t come marching out of the sky in neat little robes. What comes is silence, sickness, collapse — and the realization that your categories are paper-thin. You're not defending the moral order. You're defending your coping mechanism.

>>24538224 (OP)
>Epicuckurus
lol

>>24538224 (OP)
>the problem of evil is only a problem because I heckin love bein evil!

>>24538575
>I don't assume there even is a God
then good nor evil is real, idiot.

>>24538575
Good album

>>24538224 (OP)
The problem of evil is only a "problem" because westerners (this includes process philosophers) desperately want the world to be this ultimately good and fine place that justifies existence and their constant hounding after pleasure, being, and becoming.

>>24538663
Nah. They could be natural laws embedded into reality

>>24538657
Lol

>>24538680
there is no instance where naturalism (brute physical laws of reality) is able to support idealism, period.

>>24538524
>You're assuming that rejecting moral dualism means endorsing horror,
No, I'm not.
I'm unsure how to move the discussion forward usefully when you make such a big, false assumption and then effortpost about it.

You're essentially saying that evil isn't a "problem" because it's inevitable. I'm saying that's a reframing of the question without a purpose. It's not a consolation, and it doesn't change or answer anything. It's not even philosophy really.

I honestly do not give a fuck about dualism. I don't see how it pertains.

>if I burn my hand it's not "bad" bro
yeah I guess if you want to play semantics game getting raped to death is also a very beautiful thing.

>>24538486

>>24538224 (OP)
It all makes a lot more sense when you see that it is god that is doing it all to god, there is nothing that is not god. Like an author lost in imagination at the wrongdoings his characters inflict upon eachother.

>>24538663
By not assuming if God exists or not, I don't mean to say either that he does or does not exist. Whatever the answer is, I don't care. The existence or non-existence of God changes nothing of the past, present, or future.

Europeans exist, that's what proves the existence of good
Kikes and niggers exist, that's what proves the existence of evil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTQCeZ5GK84

>>24538814
>Whatever the answer is, I don't care.
cope

>>24538689
>where naturalism supports idealism
They exist objectively of our understandings and desires of them

>>24538823
So where is the physical law that demands good and evil exist, exactly?

>>24538822
cope on my nuts, kike

>>24538833
up ur bum, faggit
Heaven is all around you, in the rainbows and the thunder

>>24538835
>the objective existence of god doesn't reground my metaphysical assumptions because.... it just doesn't, okay?!

>>24538847
>reground my metaphysical assumptions
what assumptions?
I don't know if God is real or not, it doesn't matter which God or Gods, and it doesn't matter either way
I don't need to understand the concept or understand the physics of gravity in order for gravity to exist.
Existence, especially of concepts or entities greater than my scope and scale, and beyond my meager mortal capacity, is not dependent on my ability to observe and identify it.
Good and evil, God or Gods or demigods or devils or whatever, would exist regardless of IF I want them to or not, and regardless of HOW I want them to or not

>>24538866
if god is real, then that would necessarily mean the universe plays an entirely different role than what's revealed to us by soulless secular physics. you can pretend it doesn't, but god's will is ultimately what correctly defines good and evil. you can't pretend you're being a good person if what you do is deliberately tugging people away from holiness, for example.

>>24538224 (OP)
Why do westoids act like they've discovered the secret of the universe when they hear about non-dualism for the first time? It's like a teenager who discovers Nietzsche and becomes the most obnoxious atheist at the family dinner table

Stop coping. Everyone knows what evil is. Is opening your window and shooting a random passerby on the street evil, good, or neutral? Every sane adult understands that is evil. The purpose of philosophy should be to figure out WHY we think this way, not to invent copes about why we think something to be evil is ackchually wrong. Once we have an idea about WHY we think evil things are evil, we can delve into philosophical analysis of the underpinning support structure on why we think in this manner to begin with.

>>24538904
>if god is real, then that would necessarily mean the universe plays an entirely different role than what's revealed to us by soulless secular physics
ok
>you can pretend it doesn't
when did I?
>but god's will is ultimately what correctly defines good and evil
ok
> you can't pretend you're being a good person if what you do is deliberately tugging people away from holiness, for example.
ok

Our posts aren't contradictory or in opposition.
>God exists?
Cool, that's great for Him
>God determines Good and Evil?
Cool, I hope I meet their standard

All I'm saying is that I don't wonder if there is a God or not, I don't care because that knowledge would change nothing. The Earth would continue on its charted course as it has since the beginning, either by careless physics or divine inspiration, with or without my understanding or approval.
Until I am able to perceive God or not-God or whatever, I wouldn't deign to assume their motivations and intentions.
Even if I lack whatever religious faith is required for eternal salvation, hopefully my earthly deeds are at least aligned and beneficial to someone

>>24538970
>All I'm saying is that I don't wonder if there is a God or not, I don't care because that knowledge would change nothing.
saying (you), specifically), define what's good and evil and not god is just satanist shit.

>>24538974
At the end of the day it's always you and me. The degree to which we attribute that to God...also you and me. The Bible? Written by men like you and me. Might as well have been us.

Is it fair to consider evil akin to a disease?

>>24538974
>saying (you), specifically), define what's good and evil and not god is just satanist shit.
>>24538981
This is partially my answer as well.
You have your own motivations and intentions that aren't found in the holy ink. Did these lead you to the Bible by of good-and-earnest faith or by opportunism?
We're on /lit/, tell me which holy book is the correct one, which edition, which publisher, which translation, which sect, etc etc etc
Should I listen to the Pope? The last one was a puppet to Moloch and Mammon.
There is an objective existence of Good and Evil, of that I have no doubt.
Within the limitations of my slight existence and my subjective principles and tempers, I strive to do what I BELIEVE is Logical, Ethical, and Moral, even if it is not convenient or rewarding to myself.
If this meets to the criteria of whichever God you think is true, I don't know. If this meets to the criteria of whatever God IS true, I don't know.
If this meets to the criteria of Objective Good, I don't know.
But I hope it does

>>24539004
Yes, id say so