"Assuming we would agree that there are objectively evil actions" What follows after this assumption makes sense, but this is a crucial BIG assumption. How is this established in the first place without appealing to religious dogma?

In addition, there is the case of thoughts not leading to actions that are necessarily viewed as evil. For instance, to borrow an example I mentioned in another comment: OnlyFans. Imagine a person entertaining lustful thoughts for an OnlyFans performer whose remote services have been duly purchased, so that everything is legal. There is consent, there is no adultery, no infidelity, no actual deed has been performed. Under a worldview like Christianity, that would still be evil. But I fail to see how the same could be said on a non-religious worldview.

@user77058 to 2nd comment: You are treating "leading to actions" in an entirely local manner. What about more diffuse emergent effects? See

@Rushi The thing is that anything can have diffuse emergent effects, and so by the same token you would also have to ban many other things besides OnlyFans to remain consistent. The Internet itself has many diffuse emergent effects. Should the Internet therefore be prohibited all around the world? Stack Exchange probably also has diffuse emergent effects. Should Stack Exchange therefore be deleted?

@user77058 those are quite different questions 😉. Personally, I don't believe that religions, at their origin at least, are anything but personal. Eg Christianity was a fringe underground nefarious persecuted² group. (²) because it was persecuted by the colonial power — Romans, as well as the in group — Jews. What its shape would be after becoming the official religion of the dominant power is anyone's guess. Many writers have conjecture that the Torqemadas (of which there are legion) would first put Jesus to the stake. See Chomsky on liberation theology

And before you protest that there is no anyone's guess because that is exactly the the arc of history let me clarify: I mean what would Jesus direct if he were court priest of Constantine or Mussolini or Bush or Trump, or if he were Pope at the height of Papal power etc. we dont know. My personal guess is he would refuse and /or subvert the office. But obviously there is no way I can justify/prove these counterfactuals. If there were, official Christian countries would not ra-ra celebrate as they participate in genocides!! The deepest level, religion must be a matter of personal conscience

@user77058--I think we can objectively recognize evil as the destruction of good. Then the discussion turns to the nature of particulars, which I feel is a separate question. But for instance, internal thoughts of hate and bitterness can objectively harm a person emotionally, even with no action. And for the example you give, briefly, I'd say it is like breaking fine china, yet while rationalizing it by calling it cheap dishware, or by denying it is breaking at all, while only being able to leave behind a stronger and more insatiable desire to break even more fine china.

Also, to answer your objection to one of @Rushi 's comments, there is a distinction between something with intrinsically diffuse evil effects, versus a "mixed bag" like the internet, where we can take the good and avoid the evil. The internet is like a large city; it can be used for good if we avoid the evil parts of town, so to speak. But it's different for something that has diffuse evil effects by its very nature.

@user77058 in the OnlyFans example you gave, you're simply assuming that there's nothing wrong in lust. One does not need to presuppose religion to recognize lust as wrong (they simply need to recognize what constitutes proper sexual desire), but set that aside for a moment (I won't try to convince you to give up on your pornography) and substitute the thought for something that you yourself regard as wrong. If someone entertains thoughts of adultery or abuse, would you really not regard those thoughts as evil?

@PeterRankin "I think we can objectively recognize evil as the destruction of good" But this shifts the problem to now having to objectively determine what is good. How do you determine that something is objectively good in the first place and that something else is destroying it?

@PeterRankin "And for the example you give, briefly, I'd say it is like breaking fine china, yet while rationalizing it by calling it cheap dishware, or by denying it is breaking at all, while only being able to leave behind a stronger and more insatiable desire to break even more fine china." - I'm not really understanding this analogy and the point you are trying to get across with it.

@PeterRankin About OnlyFans and instrically diffuse evil effects: How can you objectively establish that OnlyFans has intrinsically diffuse evil effects?

@Mutoh "One does not need to presuppose religion to recognize lust as wrong (they simply need to recognize what constitutes proper sexual desire)" - How can you objectively determine what constitutes proper sexual desire? For instance, would you consider homosexuality to be proper or improper?

@Mutoh "If someone entertains thoughts of adultery or abuse, would you really not regard those thoughts as evil?" First of all, there are views like Emotivism, so whether evil actions objectively exist is debatable. But even if I were to concede your examples, if someone is capable of entertaining those thoughts without those thoughts leading to actions, then it's not clear why the thoughts themselves would be a problem.

@user77058--With the fine china analogy, I just meant that it's important to properly acknowledge the value of a thing being destroyed to understand why the action is evil, which I feel is especially important in the example you give. People who think it's "no big deal" are downgrading the potential of marriage and of a faithful spirit, which I think is made clearer when comparing this with a married couple deeply in love; or by considering the emotional and general wreckage that results within a marriage from unfaithfulness, both physical and mental, to varying degrees.

@user77058--Natural good is what accords with life, health, functionality, and being intact; and so natural evil includes things like death, disease, murder, violence, emotional pain, physical pain, etc. I think this topic would deserve a separate question and discussion, though. But we often affirm the basics of what is good and evil in our everyday lives, especially selfishly. If we are sick, we take measures to try to get better, because we recognize that our physical well-being is a natural good, and that disease is a natural evil, as an example.

@user77058 "if someone is capable of entertaining those thoughts without those thoughts leading to actions, then it's not clear why the thoughts themselves would be a problem" but isn't thinking itself an action? And wouldn't a disordered will be in itself a problem, even if the only one harmed is the thinker? It is not clear to me why you find no problem in entertaining thoughts which are, admittedly, evil, since that evinces the very character of the person.

@PeterRankin How do you objectively measure the "value" of something in the absence of religious presuppositions? You talk about the "value" of marriage compared to OnlyFans. First of all, I fail to see how the two concepts are mutually exclusive. I'm pretty sure there must be married couples out there who either consume or offer services on OnlyFans, which would falsify the false dichotomy. Secondly, again, how do you objectively assign moral value to things? Who decides what's the optimal evaluation metric? What moral framework are you proposing? Utilitarianism? What's the utility function?

@PeterRankin "But we often affirm the basics of what is good and evil in our everyday lives, especially selfishly. If we are sick, we take measures to try to get better, because we recognize that our physical well-being is a natural good, and that disease is a natural evil, as an example." - This sounds like utilitarianism (maximization of well-being, minimization of suffering). The issue is once again objectively defining the utility function, and showing mathematically that OnlyFans produces less net utility than some other better mutually exclusive alternative you are putting forward.

@Mutoh "one determines what is proper sexual desire by analyzing the nature of sex, and the nature determines what it is." - What's natural is what happens in nature, in the real world, according to the laws of Physics. The laws of Physics clearly allow homosexuality, OnlyFans, and withered plants. No physical laws are violated. I fail to see how this helps your case.

@Mutoh "but isn't thinking itself an action? And wouldn't a disordered will be in itself a problem, even if the only one harmed is the thinker?" Thinking is in fact an action, but we were talking about the concrete external behavior that was seen as problematic. If thoughts can be had without producing the external behavior that is seen as problematic, then it's not clear to me what's problematic about the thoughts themselves. Sure, you can assume that thoughts are in and of themselves evil, but that's begging the question, you are assuming what you are supposed to show to be the case.

@user77058 that's the fallacy of equivocation. "Nature" in the relevant sense (i.e. what something is) is equivalent to "essence". For example, it is natural for plants to photosynthesize but not for rocks. If you know what sex is (and it's not rocks or plants) then you know its nature and what is in accordance with it.

@Mutoh Your concept of "essence" is an arbitrary abstraction you are imposing on the real phenomenon. The laws of physics do not really care about arbitrary abstractions. The laws of physics only care about quarks, gluons, strings (if String Theory is true), forces, fields, energy, quantum mechanics, gravity, space, time, etc. As far as I can tell, withered plants and OnlyFans are events in nature supported by the laws of physics.

@user77058 if an intention would lead to external acts which you would regard as problematic, then again I ask: why wouldn't the intention itself be problematic? Is it because you presuppose that only an external act can be problematic? You need to analyze what exactly counts as a problem.

@user77058 essence is simply what something is. If you want to contest the concept, you need to claim that we can't really know what anything is. In which case, you wouldn't even be able to recognize an OnlyFans or a physical law.

@Mutoh " if an intention would lead to external acts which you would regard as problematic, then again I ask: why wouldn't the intention itself be problematic? Is it because you presuppose that only an external act can be problematic? You need to analyze what exactly counts as a problem." My analysis was building on me conceding your assumption that some actions are indeed problematic. If that assumption is given, then sure I can see how one could argue that thoughts can be problematic as well in certain contexts. But you haven't yet established the assumption to be true in the first place.

@Mutoh "essence is simply what something is. If you want to contest the concept, you need to claim that we can't really know what anything is. In which case, you wouldn't even be able to recognize an OnlyFans or a physical law." - If you are talking about ontology, then that all the more supports my case that you would need to go all the way down to the fundamental ontological nature of things, and that would lead you to particles and physics (in a non-religious worldview). I don't see how you can fit the notion of "proper order" and "disorder" into that. Everything is just particles.

@user77058 "But you haven't yet established the assumption to be true in the first place." But wouldn't that be a different question than your OP? Not simply whether there are evil thoughts, but evil actions at all in the first place. You might as well ask whether there are non-religious variants of moral realism, period.

@user77058 that's presupposing materialist atomism, not non-religiosity per se, because many atheists reject it. But even that assumption isn't self-evident - do you mean to say that we can only know what something is if we know about it down to the subatomic level? But it's not like we didn't know what plants or sex were before microscopes, for example. How do you even know what is (essences!) a "particle" in the first place? Essentialism is pretty much essential to making sense of the world, and if it is incompatible with atheism, so much the worse for atheism I guess...