Is there such a thing as absolute good and absolute evil?

Your question about good and evil is a timeless one, but your reliance on the Torah as the sole "measuring stick" is a cop-out that shuts down the harder, more honest debate humanity has wrestled with for millennia. You claim that without a religious framework, morality becomes dangerously relative, leading to horrors like rebranding pedophiles as "minor attracted individuals." I’ll bite—yes, there is good and evil in the world, but we don’t need a divine text to define it. Let’s go back to Socrates, who didn’t have the Torah and still managed to carve a path toward moral clarity without invoking gods.

Socrates, as we know from Plato’s dialogues, believed that the pursuit of the good was the highest aim of human life. He didn’t appeal to sacred texts or divine commandments. Instead, he used reason, relentless, unflinching reason, to interrogate what we mean by "good." In the Euthyphro, he famously dismantles the idea that the gods define goodness. He asks: Is something good because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is good? If it’s the former, then morality is arbitrary, just like your Torah-based morality risks becoming when you let someone else, divine or not, define good and evil for you. If it’s the latter, then goodness exists independently of the gods, and we can know it through reason. Socrates’ point is clear: morality isn’t a gift from above; it’s a human responsibility to discover through dialogue, self-examination, and logic. So how does a non-religious person, define good and evil? Simple: good is what promotes human flourishing, happiness, justice, compassion, the ability to live freely and authentically. Evil is what destroys it, cruelty, oppression, exploitation, like the abuse of children by pedophiles, which you rightly call out. We don’t need a holy book to see that harming the innocent is wrong; we feel it in our bones. Evolutionary biology backs this up: humans developed moral sentiments like empathy and fairness because they helped us survive as social creatures. The disgust you feel at the term "minor attracted individuals" isn’t Torah-derived, it’s a hardwired human response to a violation of our deepest instincts to protect the vulnerable. Your fear of moral relativism is a straw man. Yes, unchecked relativism can lead to dangerous places, history shows that, from the Nazis’ twisted "morality" to modern euphemisms that sanitize evil. But rejecting relativism doesn’t mean we must cling to ancient texts. Socrates didn’t. He taught us to question, to reason, to seek universal truths through the examined life. The Torah, the Bible, the Quran, they’re just cultural artifacts, products of their time, often contradictory and open to interpretation, even "eye for an eye" isn’t literal in traditional Judaism. If you lean on them alone, you’re outsourcing your moral agency to someone else’s words, not grappling with the messy reality of human experience. Philosophers like Kant later built on Socratic reasoning, arguing for a universal moral law, the Categorical Imperative, that we should act only on principles we could will to be universal. No gods needed, just logic. Contrast that with your approach: if the Torah defines good, what do you do when it clashes with modern values, like its tolerance of slavery or treatment of women? Do you blindly follow, or do you use reason to critique it? If the latter, you’re already halfway to Socrates. The rebranding of pedophiles as "minor attracted individuals" isn’t a product of moral relativism, it’s a product of intellectual cowardice, a failure to call evil what it is. But we don’t need the Torah to name it. We need courage, reason, and an unflinching commitment to human dignity. Socrates would have torn that euphemism apart in a heartbeat, not by quoting scripture, but by asking: Does this serve the good? Does this protect the innocent? The answer is a resounding no, no divine revelation required.

So yes, good and evil exist. But they’re not handed down from on high, they’re discovered through the hard, messy work of being human. Stop hiding behind the Torah and start reasoning like Socrates. The truth doesn’t care about your measuring stick.