I wouldn’t say I’m an atheist. That is an extremely dumb thing to be, because it assumes certainty that there is nothing like a higher power or god.

When it comes to moral things like evil, I think that there is no such thing as objective evil. The ability to decide whether something is right or wrong is a part of the moral construct that shapes every individual’s perception of the world around them. These constructs are heavily influenced by the experiences that we have and the societies to which we belong.

There is no such thing as “objective right” or “objective wrong.” That is simply our perception at work. Now this doesn’t mean that some things aren’t so appalling to us that any sensible human would agree that they’re wrong. Things like murder, killing children, and so on.

What I mean by no objective right and wrong (and evil vs good) is that if a rock falls on someone and kills them, you do not call the rock evil. It exists outside of our human world of right and wrong.

Maybe a different way to say it is this. I think there are human instincts that we have from birth which guide our morality. Very simply things. We smile when we are happy, and we become happy when we see others smile, even when we are babies too young to have any idea of what we are doing. This means that regardless of our society’s structure, we are almost inevitably going to value a world where people seek happiness and where we try to benefit one another. Same goes for other things. We have empathy, and we can experience by proxy how are actions would affect someone else. This means we hesitate to take blanket opportunities to hurt others because we know how it feels to be hurt. We also have an urge to procreate and we become psychologically very tightly bound to our children, especially women. So it isn’t hard to understand why societies all over the planet have developed societies where there are family structures that ensure our kids are nurtured.

All this to say. I think our sense of good and evil is rooted in our deep instincts, and we add nuance to it by reacting to the world around to develop a value system that changes as we experience life. The reason why humans are so united by a widely shared core of morals, nuances aside, is because we share these instincts. What with being the same species and all.

Does this make sense?