In a lot of religions, humans are spiritual beings with mortal accouterments. In other words, the essence of the human is spiritual, whereas the body is just dust. This can be found in Plato, in ancient Asian religions, and in Christianity and probably many more religions. My question then is, is it really wrong to harm another person, and why?

I think the most poetic expression of the spirit-body dualism is in ancient Hinduism. Where life is just a play of forms, and the essence of life is something much deeper than that, so Nirvana is when you come out of the play of forms and find something eternal. Like a Stoic, you are not bothered by any pain and live in a state of bliss.

I do believe that bliss is for the most part possible in this life. And if it is, then one person cannot really hurt another person (Marcus Aurelius) because the person who is hurt is LETTING them hurt him. If all of this is true, then can we really say something is moral or immoral? I don't think we can.

"Tis nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so" - Some wise old fool.

That's the stoic way of thinking... I guess I went off topic a little talking about the stoics. What I'm really getting at is that I don't think anything is immoral. I can torture and kill a person and I'm not doing anything wrong, and I think that logically follows from the Christian worldview. I feel like this notion is slightly radical

That's not really stoicism, which is not a dualistic philosophy, nor is stoicism focused on achieving bliss.

"There is no good or bad (news), there is just news"

- Master Oogway, Kung Fu Panda I

You're right, I kind of melded stoicism and eastern philosophy. I don't know stoicism well except for some reading of aurelius. But, we're getting off topic again

Moral evil is subjective. Supernatural evil is a plaything of the Creator. So, no.. There is no actual evil in the universe. But there is infinite good.

Still.. it seems that a very important part of the play is about learning to discern right from wrong.

So if you're asking if there is right and wrong.. then at least as notions, yes.

I believe that God wants to prepare us for a higher level of reality and those who devote their life to learning right from wrong get there fast (Christianity promises one life and that is the purpose of the Bible after all.) while others will be around in the human (or similar) world (3D I guess - as opposed to 4D, which is stable) much longer if they don't feel like rushing it.

It's so strange to link Christian moral with lack of right and wrong. Christianity is all about learning right from wrong. If you remove that part, there would be hardly anything left. After all - that's what the Bible says it is - a tool for learning right from wrong. It's no coincidence that the Israelis introduced most of the humane social policies in history. They are obsessed with learning right from wrong. If there's one reason they might look down on Christians is that Christians take a slightly more child-like approach in comparison to the somber attitude of the former.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

“Man is the cruelest animal.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Animals don't behave like men,' he said. 'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.”

And i can go on and on, and to answer your question YES! and it is committed by the most intelligent lifeform ever existed MANKIND!
And for what evil is, well it depends in most cases of what religion the man or men that commit it is, or what religion he is hiding behind in most cases, or it is committed out of hunger for power, possession and money or insanity and mental illness, and you can place these examples in any particular order, before people are going to fall over that i named religion first.

And for those that think that evil does not exist, and going on the philosophical tour, well denial is what comes to mind, evil exists it is in many/maybe all humans, and it is not an invention of religion it is in the dna of the **** sapien, but it is gladly abused/used in sermons by religions, you know that good old devil.

And you can see it in many forms and for or because many reasons like: Hitler was he a evil because of some bizarre conviction or was he a mentally ill person?

Osama bin laden was he a committed muslim or a mentally ill muslim?
Idi amin, pol pot, stalin, manson,ted bundy pure evil, for whatever reason, but evil for sure.

Well i bet there are many ideas/theory's about people like that, but i for one are convinced they where evil for sure and the reasons why?, i do not know or want to know, because it goes beyond my comprehension to find out if at all possible.

But one thing stands out imo and that is that evil is almost always connected with some form of conviction/mental illness, or is that just a way of explaining/justifying it?, evil has many layers/degradations but i am convinced it exists, i have no other word for it, or know of one.

Well, if you do believe in God, you'd have to assume supernatural evil to be a plaything of God. The Devil is also an angel, people tend to forget that.

On the topic of human evil - that's very subjective, because things are not good or bad in themselves - they are good or bad in relation to everything else, and 'everything' is the domain of God and his Infinite Supernatural Universe. Learning right from wrong is simply an exercise of getting closer and closer to God until we are finally together for good.

I do, however, understand very well where you're coming from. It is a world in crisis. But it might get better and sooner than we expect.

Well i have said these kind of philosophical/religious talk would come.

If you believe it or cope with it this way all respect too you, but aldo i see religion not as evil[aldo it must have been some evil genius that thought it up lol] but it is a poison imo.

And for me evil in all his forms and degradations is nothing subjective, it is a very real and very clear form of behavior, in some way the same as religion there are many different ones, but basicly just another form of wanting to belong and coping with live a sort of rule book how to or along what pad./ways to live your live, and has been in many forms as long as humanity is around.

You kill a man just because you like it or to get what you want and you enjoy or think nothing more of it it is evil in my eyes, if you kill a man because he was about to kill your family it is a righteous act and evil has no part in it, but the outcome is the same, a man is dead.

And god[s] are/is for me in the same league as santa claus both a invention of mankind, with powers that are just not possible, only nature, mother earth if you wish is a force with for me some unbelievable powers, and for people to believe the earth and all nature is created by some deity is incomprehensible and plain delusional to me.

But hey it is a free world you can believe what you want, it is not something that prevents me from being a happy and satisfied person not at all, it just blows my mind that a further normal ordinary person can belief what is written in those religious books[koran, torah, bible and so on] witch is mostly nonsense and can't possibly be true, and clearly made up by some people in the past, but hey it is that human desire/need to belong and therefore justify this kind of too me nonsense, so be it, it is what it is.

Not that the world is in crisis, but the world as we know it really lacks any inherent value, since it is just an illusion. Maya is the Buddhist concept. Christianity doesn't really address this, but I can assume that if the spiritual life is the real life, as Jesus says, then this life lacks reality. If this life lacks reality, there are no consequences for our actions.

Solomon verifies this when he says that all is meaningless under the sun. Eat, drink, and be merry.

I don't know if the devil actually exists, but I do know that he exists in our mind everytime we think bad thoughts about us or others, which brings us only pain and mizery and bad actions, that harm us and others around.

"Why is that you and I where never told that in our brain we hold in just one single tiny ivory cell... this kingdom called heaven or this kingdom called hell. "

Look again. They aren't.

According to which religion, yours?

Religion?

/me checks pulse. (8) ain't got one, o no. (8)

Gypsy troll moving on.

Morality is, at its core, a way to deal with emotions in a society. For the most part, things that, if it happened to your mother, your child, your neighbor, would feel like a kick in the gut, we consider immoral. It is not a logical calculation, it is a visceral reaction. The rest of it is built upon that foundation.

Torture / killing [an innocent person] is immoral because it makes us feel bad.

Nothing is or can be immoral or wrong in some kind of "greater" or mystical or universally important sense. Because it isn't. Its all just stuff that happens. But that isn't really what we are ever talking about when we talk about morality.

usure?

'And if it is, then one person cannot really hurt another person (Marcus Aurelius) because the person who is hurt is LETTING them hurt him.'

Now, I've never read Marcus Aurelius, and Original Position already pointed out that you erred in your characterization of Stoicism, but...if the quoted is an accurate description of Marcus Aurelius' position on the existence of 'doing harm' to another, then I must 'confess' (he wrote 'Confessions'--get it) that I consider this viewpoint ludicrous, regardless of any prior assertions on which it may depend.

Do you think you have control over how you feel, or do you think others can control how you feel?

There is nothing to indicate the minds exist independently of the body, nor that the body exists independently of the mind (I challenge anyone who argues otherwise to go for a run and tell me it didn't affect their thoughts).

One might even reasonably argue that the distinction isn't needed except for physical clarifications (in the same sense that it is useful to talk about "foot" or "hand" as separate phenomena). Also, distinction is really the wrong word, as often it is a matter of discrimination rather than distinction. The mindful is elevated and the bodily denounced, "strangely" enough often by people who focus a lot on the nature of the mind.

There is definitely a connection, but there seems to me evidence that the mind or spirit is separate. For one example, the consciousness of myself I have always had, despite my body changing from small to big. Secondly, old people can have lively spirits even though their bodies are withering. And Stephen Hawking.

There is the unchanging "I" which moves my body. My body doesn't move me. The nature of that I will probably always be a mystery to science.

So your awareness in life isn't different now from when you where 5 years-old? That doesn't seem plausible to me. A more likely scenario is that you change, but feel like you don't. The example of "mind moving body" is a tautology, as the body/mind-dualism is already implied.

Personally I find that it is the static that does not exist. The universe is change, there is nothing stagnant - we only perceive some things that way.

My feelings may have changed through time, but the awareness of myself has not changed. If it had, I would probably be a psychotic. It's the awareness of the awareness, if you will. There is some synthesizing mechanism in my mind which I call Me. It's how I distinguish my feelings from the wind blowing.

It might be a tautology but I'm not going to try to prove mind-body dualism here. It just seems to me the evidence is on its side. It's an interesting discussion though as I think it's far from clear cut.

Since different cultures have different views on this, to the extent that different perspectives are intuitive to them... I'm guessing this is mostly in the mind (irony intended).

Personally I see no reason to differentiate body from mind, except as an anatomical exercise (which can be useful, but that doesn't mean it is intrinsically true). I see nothing that dualism explains that monism can not, but I see many things monism explains that dualism can not.