You all raise so many good points.

I tend to think and this is just me, that concepts like good and evil, and true and false are things that in one form or another cannot be gotten rid of without involving us in self-contradiction.

For example, if someone were to make the statement: "truth does not exist" I think one would only make such a statement if he or she believed that this statement was true and something important.

But if the statement "truth does not exist" is true then it seems that one has ended up with truth again. Otherwise it is like saying "truth does not exist" but this isn't true or important.

So it seems self-contradictory to me like saying "truth does not exist" and this statement is both important and true and yet it is simultaneously false and unimportant.

Someone once said to me: Nothing in reality, no law of reality is permanent. Everything is temporary and changeable.

So I asked that person: "If nothing is permanent, what about the law that nothing is permanent? Is that law permanent? If it is, then something is permanent, namely that law. If that law is not permanent then there could be permanent things since the law of impermanence is not itself permanent.

This line of thought seems to me to go with concepts of good and evil.

If say, an evolutionary biologist were to say to me that there is no good and evil and that these are social constructs produced through evolution, then I would ask the evolutionary biologist: "Is your theory of evolution true? Is your theory of evolution something good?

If he or she says it isn't true and isn't something good then I feel I could ignore him or her. If he or she says that this theory of evolution is something definitely true and of value then I say: "well, then it seems there is something like good and bad, true and false.

I had a professor of philosophy in graduate school who taught that everything is relative including morality and law.

So one day I decided to do something a little bit naughty. When I went to his class, I sat in his seat at the big desk in front of the class. When he arrived, he said to me, "you can't sit there, that is my seat." So I said, if all morality and law is relative, from my point of view that seat is mine. And he argued and argued with me and eventually said: Well, something things are just right and some things are just wrong.

I have found that most people seem to discover the non-relativity of morality when they are wronged in some way, even professors of ethics in university graduate schools.

Now there have been philosophers who tried to get rid of the concepts of good and evil, but so far at least, I have found that they usually find a way to smuggle the concepts back into their thinking, often under disguise.

Someone might say I don't believe in good and evil but I believe certain things are useful, say or certain things are helpful. But then I can ask, do you think that being useful is a good thing or a bad thing?

This is a bit different I think than speaking about the objective and subjective poles of morality. If a much stronger person forces me to do something bad by overpowering my strength, objectively I am a cause of what results from this. But subjectively I am not guilty because I was coerced beyond my strength to resist. I was forced. This was what I was trying to get at in my original post.

Sorry if I caused any needless misunderstanding and strife here.