Yes, yes, “I’ve got a complicated elaborate morality system and forcing myself into a framework of good/prosocial and evil/antisocial for the purpose of discussion is beneath me, blah blah blah.” Save it for the comments thread, snowflake.
For the record, I found the "Antichrist Baby" onesie doing an image search for "evil baby," it is apparently for sale on Amazon, and here we are in 2022.
I don't think people are that different than dogs, and non-dog people like to vilify some breeds. I've known sweetheart pit bulls and aggressive yellow labs. Always blame the owner. Good parents make good kids, bad parents, well...
I started thinking about this years ago when my brother attended Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings to blame all of his problems, including his alcoholism and drug addiction, on our father. I remember telling him, “Our parents had parents. We can trace this back to Adam and Eve or we can take responsibility for our own lives when we turn 18”.
My brother then threatened to “throttle” me and slammed down the phone. I have not seen him, or missed him, in decades.
Thanks Tereza. The kids called me “Snakebite” so when they started having children I became “Granny Snakebite”. I like that Guttermouth’s Substack is so engaging. I love the rational exchange of opposing ideas. It’s my lonely hobby.
Where does a circle start? Any point you choose; i.e. the parents of the parents of the parnets of... Add external factors like war and malnutrition and inbreeding and so on and the deck isn't so much stacked but rather dunked in glue.
None of which removes choice and personal responsibility.
Why not? Is there a part of us, the very special part that chooses good or evil, that we alone create? If your 'soul' had been plunked in the body and life circumstances of Pol Pot (c'mon, we have to expand evil beyond Hitler), would you have made different choices? If you didn't create that part of you that chooses, why do you deserve credit for it? Or blame?
I think the soul is the embodiment of our own moral superiority that allows us to not bother asking why people do bad things and what would cause us to do the same in their circumstances.
To answer your questions and dispensing with the notion that he and I are of different races (ethncities and cultures, rather), if I was in all ways identical to Pol Pot then obviously I would have made the same choices under the same circumstances, as I would have been identical with regards to what defined his choices.
So that kind of question, while fun, is rather pointless. And dictators like Pol Pot are bound by the very power they wield: they cannot "mellow out" as that is seen as weakness by their underlings. There's an undefined point of no return, and it can be unknowable unless one has passed over to the far side.
More interesting is what you (I) would have done had we been the way we are now when it comes to morals and ethics (our yardstciks for good and evil), but living in [time and place of choice].
If I read your questions like that, meaning I as I am now suddenly incarnates in his body (which year by the way, and do I gain knowledge of his language?), what would I do? Well, that would be 100% contingent on where in his career he is. Say it happens when he is in Paris. I wouldn't have joined the communist militias fghting the germans, I'd have tried to get out - possibly trying to go to the US even.
Why it doesn't remove choice and personal responsibility? Because without that we are animals. I can't put it briefer than that. I have a temper, and I'm as vindictive as a badger with haemorroids - that's my factory floor settings so to speak. But I also have value and morals, and I also have a conscience I have to live with since I can't get rid of it, and furthermore I prefer living in society than outside (which I've tried, no thanks, indoor plumbing and hot food has a greater value than any ehtics once you've been homeless in winter).
And sometimes, these conflict and I have to solve that conflict, often in split-second decisions with imperfect information and emotional interference, just like everyone else (yes, even psychopaths which are extremely rare, fewer than 1/10 000).
That's why the answer to you "Why not?" is because without it we are animals, automatons, robots. There's always choice and sometimes all the options suck or are evil.
Hope that rambling diatribe contains something useful?
Oct 10, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022Liked by Guttermouth
It's interesting following the longer arcs of Christianity... I.e. Zoroastrian influence on the exiled, enslaved rabbis of the first temple Jews got into good/evil. But moreso into the new testament gospels. Prior to that seems to have been a more unity/one world God planet and we're more acting like the beasts around us if we raid the next village and slay or rape them. Something the Vikings still had in their Norse religion. Less value judgement around the whole thing, you were the main wolf pack they were the flock of lambs.
Then there's a lot of kerfuffle over the mix up of Lucifer with the Babylonian tyranny. Blake misrepresentation of that passage as a fallen angel. And Satan originally was more just a court advocate, translation would be adversary. All in all a lot of creative invention around hell and a modern anti Christ comes heavy with baggage born of heavier baggage of these depictions of Hell that didn't used to exist.
Just as the number two needs to be created from the number one, duality comes from unity. Jesus's I am the light. I am A son of God (like we all are) harkens to these unifying sources. So if anti Christ is anti light and you're claiming to be something that doesn't or can't exist. Black hole's well the jury's still out they're probably just Einstein Rosen Podolsky bridges of shared information.
If Christ as in translation 'saviour' then what was Jesus saving people from? Ignorance? Letting them know that they are unified and eternal? If you're anti that then just working for a structural church that veils the true meanings can mean you're an anti-christ. Like translating it as "am I not THE son of God?" Instantly putting a very different heirarchical feel to it and worship up and obey up and be dutiful up to the bishops. Etc.
Well, you've got an interesting dichotomy THERE, too, in historical philosophical thought. Before most cultures settled into the kind of good/evil binary we have now, being "wild" or more similar to animals was often how one described "evil," especially to the Greeks- which would suggest, if I was being an asshole (which I nearly always am) that they would be fine with the orderly, goal-driven genocide of the Holocaust, seeing it as simply a vast public work by a highly civilized state.
I think Plato would have absolutely agreed with the Third Reich, if the architects were the appropriately-chosen expert class and had grounded their strategy of the Final Solution in the greater good.
What is "Republic" if not eugenics-enabled fascism?
The "But if we did it the way I envision it, then it would work"... we all think it, but only those who believe it can become leaders.
There's a very good reason Diogenes didn't become the philosopher of choice for leaders and their offspring down the ages. His is the philosphy of individual freedoms and truths; Plato's writings is the philosphy of the state.
Well, Judaism is just the evolution of "my god's bigger than yours!" to the concept of "my god is The God and while he likes us better than he likes everyone else, everyone else is part of his creation."
The Middle East was full of local gods and Judaism has absorbed all of the prior beliefs and renamed them. The concept of the presence of God called "Shechinah" is described as the "feminine" aspect.
The concept of a sacrificed and risen god is pretty common too throughout world religions.
Maybe why I always gravitate to the Baha'i position that there is no one true religion and the prophets were all just messengers for their time. Also removes the structural hierarchy of the 'church'.
Yes and when nomads go agricultural and fighting for land becomes common. Then it's useful to tell your people you are the chosen ones, it's your god-given land, the king is devinely placed and we're all good to take it and murder the existing people there.
Pre settled people often had mother figure deities at the top. These were toppled by male figureheads. The myths often allude to this too.
I always believed that nurture was more influential than nature ... however, during my 25 years in law enforcement I met several very young children, 4,5,6,7 years old who I just knew were future Jeffrey Dahmers!! Seriously, these boys were scary. They were violent. They showed true sociopathic behaviors. It was downright frightening. I’m convinced that some children are just born fucked up and nothing can save them.
Ha! Although I believe *most* babies are born good and prosocial( autism being vax and potentially Uber ultrasounded inutero related) ...
I truly believe , through no fault of their own, that psychopathy ( not sociopaths, right?) damaged brains are freaking evil. The brains are Abi-normal on ways that Mel Brooks would not find funny.
I DO wonder if these defects are planted( by Evil or by higher management?)by a need for there to be evil foils in populations.
I'm inclined to think that A) things like you're talking about are indeed prenatal/perinatal or teratogenic, and B) they have always been present in varying ratios in human population throughout history. That ratio depends not only on the relative presence/absence of environmental causes in a given moment in history but also, in the case of heritable aspects of these, whether a population reproductively selects for psychopathic traits or rejects them.
I think a certain low percentage of psychopathy has probably become baked into human populations because it serves some broader evolutionary value to populations, but when the ratio moves too far, we feel it.
Purty much. I personally also feel that it's partially karma/soul purpose ( or maybe porpoise!) driven. " OK, we need some truly heinous things to happen in this set of lives, bevause : lessons. It's gotta come from this Soul Family. Who's going to volunteer for this shit show? "
There's always been brain miswiring, just as there's always been other malformed body parts. There's always been the ones driven out of the pack for reasons sometimes hard to discern.
The brutality of survival in earlier times meant that society and natural conditions both led to a lot of culling.
Good and evil are created by humans when describing and moralising about acts done by other humans. There is no act so vile it hasn't been called a virtuous duty, and vice versa, somewhen and somewhere throughout history.
We create evil by acting and we create good from not acting evil, but without evil first having been done there can be no good.
Going beyond good and evil does not mean ignoring the creation of that false pair, it simply means acknowledging that there is only the will, the word and the deed and that there isn't any one to blame but oneself for ones deeds.
A bleak, lakonik and harsh truth which is why the majority of us prefer to defer moral judgement to the ghosts and spirits made up by us and our forefathers, or to modern nihilist and relativist equivalents to the openly religious yokes and groupthink formatting of old.
The other side of this you can delve into the whole Hobbesian "we're inherently evil and need the Leviathan of the state to keep us in check"
Through to its opposite Rousseauian "Man is born free yet everywhere are chains" and the noble savage.
The evidence weighs to pretty high violence levels, People watched cute chimps Jane Goodall? And we're a bit saddened went they went to bed remembering one of the chimps cupping the blood of his previous mentor and drinking it after having smashed his face in.
Pinker did the best modern analysis. Bregman tried to debunk it with Human-Kind book but every chapter was full of "meh", and ultimately so what if only 10% are psychos, or fire the guns? it still drags us all to was and the bullets hit the pacifists just as hard.
This is why I wanted to try to explain the binary choice in the poll by accommodating "good/prosocial" and "evil/antisocial," because what are we going to say, chimps are "evil" for murdering each other?
The truth is, I would probably be the "obligatory it depends BS option" if I didn't already know what I meant by the choices. "Good" and "evil" as categories are all cultural contexts, but that doesn't mean they aren't "real" concepts if we dig down deep enough. We continue to use the words for a reason.
It's not unusual for very small children to try to comfort any distressed person near them. Really mean kids from the get-go are pretty rare.
And then socialization takes over, a dominant kid in older pre-school will start to define favored and unfavored playmates and others will follow that lead, and outliers begin that long sad journey of always being in the minority.
Socialization that way is natural; we're pack animals and the alpha pair always manifests in every setting, whether it's a male/female pair or a leader and the henchperson.
I came across a website yesterday called vigilantcitizen.com through reading a link about the most expensive hotel suite in the world. It is in Las Vegas and costs $100,000 per night with a 2 night minimum. It is decorated with butterflies and pharmaceutical pills as the main motif, with a lot of art by Damien Hirst, including a vitrine with a dental chair with a sewing machine on it, a black painting formed with thousands of dead flies, a vitrine with three flayed, butchered sheep crucified upside down, a bar done as a glass case with medicine wrappers strewn inside like garbage, etc. etc. The butterflies allegedly are a reference to “Monarch” programming which involves techniques for using traumatic and terrifying shock on children to split the personality in hopes of producing more programmable, mind-controlled slaves. I note the mockery of the Christian crucifixion reference. It reminds me of that artwork that received a great of publicity some years back, Called “Piss Christ.” Things like this seem to get a great deal of publicity in the “media.” I wonder why? “Somebody” seems to really “have it in” for “Jesus.” Also, “somebody” keeps making movies about “the Holocaust” from every possible angle, including the new Pixar animation about a mouse in Anne Frank’s Attic. Aren’t there already hundreds of them by now? How many movies about the Holdomor? Most people probably have never even heard of that. Why not? It involved millions more people. Couldn’t we just have taken the funds that went into the last ten or fifteen HolocaustTM Movies and put it towards a couple of Holdomor flicks in the interest of diversity? Anyway, this T-shirt, what is behind it? And, what is it’s connection to “the HolocaustTM” which, by the way, seriously needs to be investigated. But, you are not supposed to do that, of course. Isn’t it even illegal to ask? Why is that? Because it is “Evil?” to even question the enshrined narrative? Kinda like how you are not supposed to examine voting machines, or you can get your medical license cancelled for speaking the truth about “COVID.” Of course “the HolocaustTM” is “settled science” so “Thou Shalt Not Point Out Contrary Evidence.” You don’t get to jeer at the story of “the Holocaust.” You only get to jeer at “Jesus.” “Somebody” is trying to promote and enforce this loveless psychopathic drip feed. This onesie is just one more drip. Pardon my jeer!
Interesting comment. EVERYTHING should be open to questioning.
I came across vigilantcitizen.com about a year ago and found it very interesting. The report on the extremely creepy Denver International Airport is very eerie. It does seem like "they" are telling us what they're going to do to us.
Professor Norman Davies was denied tenure at Stanford for attempting to include the millions of non-Jewish Europeans who died at the hands of Nazi Germany.
Happy ending (kinda): he left academia and made a fortune writing books.
Sorry. Had to go for the Obligatory "it depends" BS option because, well, it depends. I'm inclined to think most of us are born prosocial with a need to belong. Why are baby everythings so damn cute? So we'll fall in love with them and protect them.
Some children are born psychopaths who will torment siblings and blow up frogs and then run for Congress or become a CEO...no matter how ideal their childhoods.
Some children exhibit antisocial behavior because of bad parents and difficult childhoods. Some will overcome it as adults. Some will end up in prison.
Was Ted Bundy born or made? IMO, he was a born predator.
Are the kids shooting each other on Chicago's South Side born predators or products of their raising? I suspect most would do better in a stable home with married, committed parents in a safe neighborhood with good schools. Catherine Austin Fitts calls it the "Popsicle Index".
Humans are born with the drive to survive, as any other creature is. Humans are born to recognize "us/not us." That's survival, and works really well in very small societies. Works less well in bigger societies where you must learn to recalibrate the concept of "us/not us."
Any good trait can become a bad trait when overexaggerated.
Well, the answer is no, as babies lack the capacity for decisions made from moral principles.
I know the tug of war between genetics and socialisation is fun, but the reality is they interact and not in some comfortably logical and linear way, like "learning to read before age X (as my child did, incidentally, but then my child is very special) is 70% genetics", fake quote is fake by the way: instead it's messy. And dynamic which is a fancy way of saying too chaotic for us to properly and consistently pin down.
Though not a native english speaker, I'm pretty sure "Anti Christ Baby" takes a hyphen between "Anti" and "Christ", so to me it looks not like some edgy statement and more like "Hi! I can't english". As a member of the imaginary fanclub of the not imaginary Lynne Truss, remarks like that are a compulsion (her book "Eats, shoots, and leaves" manages to be educational, riotous and irreverent while simultaneously being a good check-list for us non-native speakers).
Home field advantage example: how much a detriment dyslexia is, is 100% dependent on how much time is spent training spelling, readin and writing. So even if the basis for the condition is an abnormality in the brain, how severe the iteration is up to the socialisation.
It's like painting. The genetics is the canvas, the oils and the brushes. The socialisation is the painter's skill, dedication and integrity. The nd product is the kid.
Which to continue the metaphor then grabs the brush and starts painting itself when it grows up.
I believe most humans are at conception a blank slate . Neither good nor evil. (I also have the nagging question of where does free-will and karma enter into the mix?) We then have the nature vs. nurture concept to deal with from actual birth. That along with DNA coding which can have abnormal blips that can produce things such as high aggression or perhaps the “bad seed” or a Mother Theresa. While good parenting certainly has an impact, it doesn’t account for some offspring running amuck. Nor does bad parenting always produce socially abhorrent behavior. Personality traits, peers, cultural norms, influencers also play a part in the human condition.
Would one say a Neanderthal clubbing someone over the head in the next clan he runs into and taking his food an act of evil? We’re encoded for survival, so that would put him on par with predator animals trying to survive. How does that reconcile with the biblical “thou shalt not steal” code? If Mary and Joseph had been lousy “parents,”, would Jesus have gone astray? After all, God relegated him to this earthly realm in the flesh, so would he not have been subject to our same humanness? Does altruistic behavior connote innate goodness? Man is capable of the most astounding kindness and love for his fellow man and also the most brutal and unimaginable cruelty. We are told that we are made in the image of God, and would by that notion, all mankind not be innately good, however man has shown to be much less than God-like. To me that’s where the free-will might come into play. All I know is it’s a conundrum wrapped in an enigma.
I picked good, under the assumption of modal logic. Most people are born pretty decent, and while the line between good and evil runs through each of their hearts, by and in large people are remarkably good and social. There's probably, I don't know, 1-5% or so that are born monsters and if they manage to be decent it is through great effort.
Otherwise the evil people are those who are evil by choice; whether or not they recognize that their choices are evil, they didn't have to choose it.
Whenever I think about good and evil I wonder how funny that socially constructed dichotomy might seem to any intelligent beings somewhere more than 5 parsecs away like, say, a planet orbiting Deneb.
Why so? Do you see a socially oriented critter having a different sort of scale for "good Glorb/bad Glorb"? Or do you mean a non-socially oriented intelligent critter?
My sense that everything that can recognize individual entities also recognizes and categorizes them as "good news/bad news". As the categories expand, that becomes good/evil, or something similar.
I’m having to think about this, but my instinct is that if our ideas of goodness or otherwise, in a moral sense, have their roots in social structures then social structures that exist anywhere else may produce very different ones. Ones that we may be unable to even conceive.
This gets at most of what I believe. The part of me that continues exploring cultural and metaphysical evolution tells me that there are, despite this, some first principles that all humans, possibly even all mortal sentient life, must share. These are much more limited in scope than we would like to believe, to your point, but they are ironclad and nearly (or possibly even) genetic at this point.
There are only three logical options: God is Evil, Evil is God or Evil does not Exist. If God created evil, then God is Evil. If Evil created itself, then Evil is God. So those of you who believe that people can be born bad, take your pick of which of the first two you believe. But don't wimp out and be logically inconsistent that God is all-good and created everything but bad people created themselves.
Is it wrong to murder? Rape? Steal? Abuse? From what do you derive you sense of right and wrong, good and evil? If we all arose from the primordial ooze for no reason and are bound by laws of survival of the fittest, isn't anything permissible if it serves my needs? For example, is it permissible to, idk, create a virus/vaccine combo to sicken and kill a lot of people because some rich billionaires and old money banksters and royal types think there are too many of us useless eaters on the planet? I mean, who's to say it's wrong?
I wrote this a few years ago"
-----------------------
How did we get here?
What existed before the Big Bang? What blew up? Why did it blow up? That one explosion created everything in the universe that exists, has ever existed, or will ever exist?
So, we arose from the primordial ooze about 4 billion years ago. When did the first organic molecule start reproducing itself? Why did it reproduce itself? How did we get from the first organic molecule to the first living cell?
The simplest life form on Earth is the virus. But, the virus reproduces inside a living cell. There were no living cells before there were living cells.
The simplest single celled life form on Earth today is the mycobacterium, but it really isn't that simple. How/why would that just come into being for no reason?
Cellular reproduction of single cell organisms like mycobacteria (mitosis) has six distinct phases (prophase, prometaphase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase, and cytokinesis). Why did the first single celled organism double its DNA and split in two?
Assuming all those assumptions, how did we get from single cell organism to a rodent let alone the blue whale or the human being?
How do we explain all the great diversity of life in the fossil record? The Cambrian Explosion?
When did our first primate ancestor look up into the night sky and wonder how he got here or what his existence meant?
How do we explain all those gaps in the fossil record?
Was life on this planet seeded by space aliens? Where did that life come from? Big Bang, folks, we’re on the clock.
Perhaps there was no Big Bang. Perhaps we live in a multiverse, so there is no clock. As I understand the theory, life in different universes in the multiverse vibrates at different frequencies. How did a life form from another universe manage to change its essential vibration to get to our universe? Why? When?
Are we all part of some big computer simulation? Yeah, like, totally. A computer simulation requires a programmer…or creator. Where have I heard that term before?
Atheists mock people who believe in a Creator and claim knowledge they do not have. They claim knowledge that no one has. In the end, atheism is just their version of the religion they mock.
Where did God get the ingredients? How did thought become matter? Where did God come from?
Nothing can answer these questions. Neither believer in God nor agnostic nor atheist can answer these questions, because human language isn't capable of describing the Unknowable.
Most believers make God in their own images and ascribe emotions to God that are entirely human. God isn't capturable within the realm of human consciousness.
None of us have the answers this side of the grave, which is my point.
Atheists mock people of faith, but their beliefs are no less fantastical in human terms. In my experience, they will believe almost anything to deny a Creator.
If the universe and life were created by an accident of physics for no reason, then where do we derive our sense of right and wrong, good and evil?
One person's definition of good (the psychopaths who want to cull the herd) is 7.9 billion people's (we useless eaters in the herd) evil.
All religions are cults; all of them, in normal operational form, have been used to kill and abuse uncounted multitudes. (I count all purported "secular" forms in this category.)
Tiny little children not yet doctrinized have an innate sense of right and wrong.
I'd describe a cult as any social grouping to which admission requires an acceptance of a stated set of beliefs, and to deny any of them, or question any of them, invites accusations of not being a good member and endangers one's social standing in the group.
That right there is why christianity was so succesful for 1500 years, compared to all the faiths it replaced. Same with islam.
This is not a value judgement, to be clear, it's just the way it is. The idea of proselytising and converting xenos was alien until Saul had his revelation, more or less. Normally at the time, expeting the jews, you went to the god that you fancied had the most say in your daily doings and dealings, or the gods of your people.
Christianity is most definitely a cult which over time matured to become the conceptual normal, the touchstone, in how everyone born inside its cultural influence thinks about religion.
Again, for the benefit of any follower of Christ, this not a value judgement; it's just the way things are.
There is a difference between religion and faith. And, yes, human beings have been co-opting God for their purposes since the beginning. That isn't God's fault. It's ours.
IMO, human beings kill, maim, and destroy with or without the excuse of a religious tradition. The Nazis and the Communists (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) were especially "good" at killing lots of people.
Early Christians rescued and raised abandoned children. They started hospitals and cared for the sick and disabled. They created communities to support each other and took care of widows and orphans. This was unheard of in the ancient world.
Yes, much has been done while invoking the name of Jesus. There is a difference between the actions of men, no matter what they believe, and the will of God.
Wow, lots of responses here. I'm going to bring it back to the original poll of whether people are inherently good--and I'm going to agree with you both!
To CM, I entertain the possibility of God but refuse to consider a God who's a worse parent than me. Whether God is evil or an absentee slumlord are both the same result. Believing that evil exists because God's a sadist and is into suffering and death isn't a God worth having around. I DO think there's a way that an all-loving God can logically exist but that's a MUCH longer discussion.
To SCA, if there is no God then we're the products of our genetics and our circumstances, nothing else. There is no morally superior soul that follows us from body to body. So this is much more hopeful than having an evil God around because, while there's no purpose or meaning other than minimizing pain and fulfilling your replication quota, at least there's not a malevolent God plotting against us.
'Believing' is making up your mind in advance of the evidence, so I don't believe in believing anything. However, I'm willing to entertain the possibility of God or monkey genes, just not a God who likes some (or One) better than everyone else. That would be a crummy God.
Sorry, I thought the 'where did God come from?' series was to show the concept of God is illogical. But are all religions cults except paganism? I guess that confused me too into thinking you were atheist.
Tereza, people who don't believe in God call religious belief fairy tales. I believe sky daddy is the preferred term. My point is that what one must people to explain our existence without a Creator is pretty fanciful as well.
I've apparently touched on some nerves with my comment, which was mean to provoke thought. Yes, you can say I believe in fairy tales. But so do you.
I hope you don't think that I'm calling religious belief fairy tales, or saying that about you. I agree with you that explaining existence happening by accident is extremely convoluted. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has a brilliant book on that called God's Debris.
And you haven't touched on my nerves at all. I consider myself a gnostic, so I think that Truth wants to be known, whether you call it God or Reality. Same diff.
First, actions can absolutely be rated on a scale from good to evil based on how much suffering they cause to how many people. No argument from me that all those things are wrong plus breeding weapons of bio-terrorism and punching holes in pipelines. Is killing a million people a million times more wrong than killing one? I'd say yes.
So who's responsible for those million deaths? Is it only direct action of ambushing someone in an alley, or operating a drone in a warehouse in Texas and then going to your kid's baseball game? Is it the person who ordered the strike? All the people involved who approved the strike? Everyone who funded it through tax dollars? Everyone who looked the other way like it had nothing to do with them?
Actions can evil but people are not. If you insist that they can be, make sure your nose is clean for everywhere your money goes and what it does. Evil is catching.
I'm not sure how I gave you the impression that I believe in B, Evil is God and we hoisted ourselves into creation through the happy accident of monkey genes. I'm placing my bet on C, Evil doesn't Exist--I can do evil but I can't be evil. And you made my point exactly--if I'm a child of God made in his image, I can't possibly be evil without God being evil. It would be an insult to God to say his image is evil.
Wouldn't "God is an absentee landlord" also qualify as logical?
Put creation on the stove, add water when it's starting to boil, lower the heat and put the lid on, and then let it simmer while you go look for the morning paper in the garden, so to speak?
Oh good, lots of fun responses while I went to aerial class. In the Judeo-Christian definition, our relationship to God is as children. So let's say I decide to be an absentee parent and leave my kids to fend for themselves, with a well-stocked knife drawer, because if they kill themselves or each other, I could care less. Would that meet the definition of a loving parent or an evil parent? If I would never do that to my kids, does that make me more loving than God?
Oct 11, 2022·edited Oct 11, 2022Liked by Guttermouth
I don't understand your reply. I just wondered if the idea that god (Abraham's god that is, there are lots others) got the whole thing going and then wandred off or just watches doesn't qualify too, according to you.
Hypotheticals and parapbles and analogies are usueful tools for demonstrating principles, but they are never proof of anything.
At least Odinn admits he's the dad that went out for cigarettes and never came back, but he left you this bunch of advice for how to not get done over by other dumb humans.
The idea of absentee deities that have their own business to worry about and find us interesting little blips in a harsh and imperfect universe feels far more accurate to my experience of how life and the world works.
It is certainly more freedom-loving and comfortable than some omnipresent omniscient and omnipotent being sitting as judge jury and executioner, even over those who has never even heard about it.
That was a major problem during the christianisation of South America: since the ancestors weren't baptised, they went to Hell according to the dogma of the time, causing enormous anxiety among the indians converted, since they would otherwise be reunited in the afterlife.
As I recall (no guarantees I'm not mixing things up in my mind), the solution was the invention of a kind of retroactive intercession by Christ, where the ancestors were given dispensation for having been born too far away to recevie the word in time. So a little time in Purgatory to have your sins removed, a symbolic baptism and presto, indians all satisfied, not the least because it gelled with their own cultural and pre-christian beliefs. Very practical and quite the humane solution for its time.
The theologian William Law defined evil beautifully, I thought, as a willful turning away from the light of God, describing it as a fruit that would otherwise ripen into sweetness but by rejecting the sunlight, becomes astringent and bitter.
All that's saying is that evil people created themselves. Who made them someone who would reject the sunlight? Did God make that sun-shunning baby? Are they genetically programmed to be astringent fruit of a bitter tree? Or have their circumstances of being born into the shade of a 20-story tenement (with no elevator) blocked the light?
My arborist would tell William Law that no fruit willfully turns against the light--some of my trees have contorted themselves into Eiffel towers trying to reach it. As MotW makes the analogy with dogs, why do we blame people who exhibit bad behavior and not look at what circumstances made them that way?
Forgive me if I'm being rude, I get overly excited about this topic since it's one of my favorite rants.
This gets into the argument of free will. People will very often choose the damaging path for themselves (or even a damaging small choice) while knowing full well it will hurt them. Eyes wide open but doing it out of temper. I've done it myself.
I myself think evil is weakness, magnified, because it's so much easier to be bad or allow bad to happen, than the opposite. It's in every sense a negative capacity, not a positive one.
Yay! I suspected this might be a crowd where I didn't need to pussyfoot.
So here's a lot we agree on: we're all capable (perhaps equally if given the same options/ life circumstances) of making bad choices, and they always hurt us and sometimes hurt others. Damage sounds a little too permanent for my taste, like a sledgehammer in a china shop, and I think we're more bouncy-backy than that.
So self-inflicted harm certainly isn't evil, since we're both perpetrator and victim. And if evil is weakness, then strengthening the person and their good choices would solve it.
Ah, the relativity of evil! I define actions as good if they alleviate suffering and better if they enable people to alleviate their own suffering, bad if they cause suffering and evil if they induce others to cause suffering.
The 'leaders' of my country just inflicted a winter of horrendous suffering by hundreds of millions of people with the push of a button. They're bragging about their willingness to push other buttons to up the suffering ante to billions. Do they qualify as the rabid ones? And where are the laws and punishments that would discourage that?
For the record, I found the "Antichrist Baby" onesie doing an image search for "evil baby," it is apparently for sale on Amazon, and here we are in 2022.
I don't think people are that different than dogs, and non-dog people like to vilify some breeds. I've known sweetheart pit bulls and aggressive yellow labs. Always blame the owner. Good parents make good kids, bad parents, well...
Who made the parents bad, who were supposedly once good kids too?
I started thinking about this years ago when my brother attended Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings to blame all of his problems, including his alcoholism and drug addiction, on our father. I remember telling him, “Our parents had parents. We can trace this back to Adam and Eve or we can take responsibility for our own lives when we turn 18”.
My brother then threatened to “throttle” me and slammed down the phone. I have not seen him, or missed him, in decades.
In my experience, AlAnon doesn't do that. Or shouldn't.
100% correct. AlAnon teaches those living with Alcoholics how to take responsibility for their own enabling behavior and their own personal growth.
Yep. I've never known anyone who didn't have a good journey with AlAnon. I considered it when I was younger.
I did not have a good journey with AlAnon. (Founded a local group with a friend.)
Great name. And byline. Not to mention photo. Oh, and great post--well put!
Thanks Tereza. The kids called me “Snakebite” so when they started having children I became “Granny Snakebite”. I like that Guttermouth’s Substack is so engaging. I love the rational exchange of opposing ideas. It’s my lonely hobby.
Everyone knows your "lonely hobby."
Typo. I meant ‘lovely hobby’. People I know loves it when I’m spoiling for a debate. Especially my husband.
Where does a circle start? Any point you choose; i.e. the parents of the parents of the parnets of... Add external factors like war and malnutrition and inbreeding and so on and the deck isn't so much stacked but rather dunked in glue.
None of which removes choice and personal responsibility.
Why not? Is there a part of us, the very special part that chooses good or evil, that we alone create? If your 'soul' had been plunked in the body and life circumstances of Pol Pot (c'mon, we have to expand evil beyond Hitler), would you have made different choices? If you didn't create that part of you that chooses, why do you deserve credit for it? Or blame?
I think the soul is the embodiment of our own moral superiority that allows us to not bother asking why people do bad things and what would cause us to do the same in their circumstances.
To answer your questions and dispensing with the notion that he and I are of different races (ethncities and cultures, rather), if I was in all ways identical to Pol Pot then obviously I would have made the same choices under the same circumstances, as I would have been identical with regards to what defined his choices.
So that kind of question, while fun, is rather pointless. And dictators like Pol Pot are bound by the very power they wield: they cannot "mellow out" as that is seen as weakness by their underlings. There's an undefined point of no return, and it can be unknowable unless one has passed over to the far side.
More interesting is what you (I) would have done had we been the way we are now when it comes to morals and ethics (our yardstciks for good and evil), but living in [time and place of choice].
If I read your questions like that, meaning I as I am now suddenly incarnates in his body (which year by the way, and do I gain knowledge of his language?), what would I do? Well, that would be 100% contingent on where in his career he is. Say it happens when he is in Paris. I wouldn't have joined the communist militias fghting the germans, I'd have tried to get out - possibly trying to go to the US even.
Why it doesn't remove choice and personal responsibility? Because without that we are animals. I can't put it briefer than that. I have a temper, and I'm as vindictive as a badger with haemorroids - that's my factory floor settings so to speak. But I also have value and morals, and I also have a conscience I have to live with since I can't get rid of it, and furthermore I prefer living in society than outside (which I've tried, no thanks, indoor plumbing and hot food has a greater value than any ehtics once you've been homeless in winter).
And sometimes, these conflict and I have to solve that conflict, often in split-second decisions with imperfect information and emotional interference, just like everyone else (yes, even psychopaths which are extremely rare, fewer than 1/10 000).
That's why the answer to you "Why not?" is because without it we are animals, automatons, robots. There's always choice and sometimes all the options suck or are evil.
Hope that rambling diatribe contains something useful?
So I think we then agree, people are inherently good.
Not what I said at all. :) That's always my problem, more thoughts wants out than I'm able to express in a clear and consistent manner.
Wonder what is more horrible, us being born evil and striving for good, or us being born good and trying to refrain from evil?
It's interesting following the longer arcs of Christianity... I.e. Zoroastrian influence on the exiled, enslaved rabbis of the first temple Jews got into good/evil. But moreso into the new testament gospels. Prior to that seems to have been a more unity/one world God planet and we're more acting like the beasts around us if we raid the next village and slay or rape them. Something the Vikings still had in their Norse religion. Less value judgement around the whole thing, you were the main wolf pack they were the flock of lambs.
Then there's a lot of kerfuffle over the mix up of Lucifer with the Babylonian tyranny. Blake misrepresentation of that passage as a fallen angel. And Satan originally was more just a court advocate, translation would be adversary. All in all a lot of creative invention around hell and a modern anti Christ comes heavy with baggage born of heavier baggage of these depictions of Hell that didn't used to exist.
Just as the number two needs to be created from the number one, duality comes from unity. Jesus's I am the light. I am A son of God (like we all are) harkens to these unifying sources. So if anti Christ is anti light and you're claiming to be something that doesn't or can't exist. Black hole's well the jury's still out they're probably just Einstein Rosen Podolsky bridges of shared information.
If Christ as in translation 'saviour' then what was Jesus saving people from? Ignorance? Letting them know that they are unified and eternal? If you're anti that then just working for a structural church that veils the true meanings can mean you're an anti-christ. Like translating it as "am I not THE son of God?" Instantly putting a very different heirarchical feel to it and worship up and obey up and be dutiful up to the bishops. Etc.
Well, you've got an interesting dichotomy THERE, too, in historical philosophical thought. Before most cultures settled into the kind of good/evil binary we have now, being "wild" or more similar to animals was often how one described "evil," especially to the Greeks- which would suggest, if I was being an asshole (which I nearly always am) that they would be fine with the orderly, goal-driven genocide of the Holocaust, seeing it as simply a vast public work by a highly civilized state.
Not sure Socrates and Plato would have agreed with the Third Reich! Rather posed the question what is the good life.
Neitzsche said Christianity was Platonism for the masses.
I think Plato would have absolutely agreed with the Third Reich, if the architects were the appropriately-chosen expert class and had grounded their strategy of the Final Solution in the greater good.
What is "Republic" if not eugenics-enabled fascism?
I was always a little bemused by all that admiration for Plato.
Most of us are utopians and/or fascists if we're really being honest with ourselves. Some of us just recognize it as an impulse best left unexercised.
100%. I'd like to run everything, for the benefit of all living things, of course.
The "But if we did it the way I envision it, then it would work"... we all think it, but only those who believe it can become leaders.
There's a very good reason Diogenes didn't become the philosopher of choice for leaders and their offspring down the ages. His is the philosphy of individual freedoms and truths; Plato's writings is the philosphy of the state.
Well, Judaism is just the evolution of "my god's bigger than yours!" to the concept of "my god is The God and while he likes us better than he likes everyone else, everyone else is part of his creation."
The Middle East was full of local gods and Judaism has absorbed all of the prior beliefs and renamed them. The concept of the presence of God called "Shechinah" is described as the "feminine" aspect.
The concept of a sacrificed and risen god is pretty common too throughout world religions.
Maybe why I always gravitate to the Baha'i position that there is no one true religion and the prophets were all just messengers for their time. Also removes the structural hierarchy of the 'church'.
What's the accrediting agency for prophets?
What's the accrediting agency for religions?
The same agency as for all memes- reproduction rate.
Precisely.
All subjective. You decide.
Yes and when nomads go agricultural and fighting for land becomes common. Then it's useful to tell your people you are the chosen ones, it's your god-given land, the king is devinely placed and we're all good to take it and murder the existing people there.
Pre settled people often had mother figure deities at the top. These were toppled by male figureheads. The myths often allude to this too.
I always believed that nurture was more influential than nature ... however, during my 25 years in law enforcement I met several very young children, 4,5,6,7 years old who I just knew were future Jeffrey Dahmers!! Seriously, these boys were scary. They were violent. They showed true sociopathic behaviors. It was downright frightening. I’m convinced that some children are just born fucked up and nothing can save them.
I saw it too in CPS. It's sad to face that reality because kids are so wonderful.
Ha! Although I believe *most* babies are born good and prosocial( autism being vax and potentially Uber ultrasounded inutero related) ...
I truly believe , through no fault of their own, that psychopathy ( not sociopaths, right?) damaged brains are freaking evil. The brains are Abi-normal on ways that Mel Brooks would not find funny.
I DO wonder if these defects are planted( by Evil or by higher management?)by a need for there to be evil foils in populations.
I'm inclined to think that A) things like you're talking about are indeed prenatal/perinatal or teratogenic, and B) they have always been present in varying ratios in human population throughout history. That ratio depends not only on the relative presence/absence of environmental causes in a given moment in history but also, in the case of heritable aspects of these, whether a population reproductively selects for psychopathic traits or rejects them.
I think a certain low percentage of psychopathy has probably become baked into human populations because it serves some broader evolutionary value to populations, but when the ratio moves too far, we feel it.
women have always been attracted to psychos, fuck knows why
Because we're stupid and dishonest and greedy, probably. :)
At least as many men are attracted to psycho bitches. Can we say, “Some pathologically insecure people are attracted to psychopaths”?
Absolutely.
And I think some people are just turned on by danger and have poor judgment.
Me in a nutshell!
That's where the not-very-nice 'broverb' "Don't stick your dick in crazy" comes from.
>> "Don't stick your dick in crazy"
It might get bitten off...
Power and confidence.
Then one discovers those are often poorly-domesticable traits in the micro-setting.
Nope.
ok, i'll be more precise, a lot of women..
Look, you rightly took me to task about the domestic violence thing, this is the same shit.
are you sure you have the right person, i dont recall discussing domestic violence
Nope.
you need to use your words....
Something ruined me quite young. I cried when Jack Palance died instead of Alan Ladd in Shane.
Purty much. I personally also feel that it's partially karma/soul purpose ( or maybe porpoise!) driven. " OK, we need some truly heinous things to happen in this set of lives, bevause : lessons. It's gotta come from this Soul Family. Who's going to volunteer for this shit show? "
There's always been brain miswiring, just as there's always been other malformed body parts. There's always been the ones driven out of the pack for reasons sometimes hard to discern.
The brutality of survival in earlier times meant that society and natural conditions both led to a lot of culling.
Good and evil are created by humans when describing and moralising about acts done by other humans. There is no act so vile it hasn't been called a virtuous duty, and vice versa, somewhen and somewhere throughout history.
We create evil by acting and we create good from not acting evil, but without evil first having been done there can be no good.
Going beyond good and evil does not mean ignoring the creation of that false pair, it simply means acknowledging that there is only the will, the word and the deed and that there isn't any one to blame but oneself for ones deeds.
A bleak, lakonik and harsh truth which is why the majority of us prefer to defer moral judgement to the ghosts and spirits made up by us and our forefathers, or to modern nihilist and relativist equivalents to the openly religious yokes and groupthink formatting of old.
The other side of this you can delve into the whole Hobbesian "we're inherently evil and need the Leviathan of the state to keep us in check"
Through to its opposite Rousseauian "Man is born free yet everywhere are chains" and the noble savage.
The evidence weighs to pretty high violence levels, People watched cute chimps Jane Goodall? And we're a bit saddened went they went to bed remembering one of the chimps cupping the blood of his previous mentor and drinking it after having smashed his face in.
Pinker did the best modern analysis. Bregman tried to debunk it with Human-Kind book but every chapter was full of "meh", and ultimately so what if only 10% are psychos, or fire the guns? it still drags us all to was and the bullets hit the pacifists just as hard.
This is why I wanted to try to explain the binary choice in the poll by accommodating "good/prosocial" and "evil/antisocial," because what are we going to say, chimps are "evil" for murdering each other?
The truth is, I would probably be the "obligatory it depends BS option" if I didn't already know what I meant by the choices. "Good" and "evil" as categories are all cultural contexts, but that doesn't mean they aren't "real" concepts if we dig down deep enough. We continue to use the words for a reason.
Chimps can be some of the most vicious murderers on the plant. Some folks survive such attacks to serve as a cautionary tale: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/man-lost-face-05-mauling-hell-new-chimpanzee-victim-article-1.364450
Oh, I know. Why do you think I'm constantly using them as a metaphor for the savage nature of man?
Give me a lowland gorilla to share a Macanudo and a bourbon.
It's not unusual for very small children to try to comfort any distressed person near them. Really mean kids from the get-go are pretty rare.
And then socialization takes over, a dominant kid in older pre-school will start to define favored and unfavored playmates and others will follow that lead, and outliers begin that long sad journey of always being in the minority.
Socialization that way is natural; we're pack animals and the alpha pair always manifests in every setting, whether it's a male/female pair or a leader and the henchperson.
True. We generally know from age 5/6 if a kid will be a persistent problem and in which ways. Not having any tools to avert this doesn't help matters.
Edit: By "we" I mean teachers of course.
Some natural survival traits are very ugly under "civilized" lights.
https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.875937862.5071/ra,shortsleeve_one_piece,x1000,heather_grey,front-pad,750x1000,f8f8f8.u1.jpg
I came across a website yesterday called vigilantcitizen.com through reading a link about the most expensive hotel suite in the world. It is in Las Vegas and costs $100,000 per night with a 2 night minimum. It is decorated with butterflies and pharmaceutical pills as the main motif, with a lot of art by Damien Hirst, including a vitrine with a dental chair with a sewing machine on it, a black painting formed with thousands of dead flies, a vitrine with three flayed, butchered sheep crucified upside down, a bar done as a glass case with medicine wrappers strewn inside like garbage, etc. etc. The butterflies allegedly are a reference to “Monarch” programming which involves techniques for using traumatic and terrifying shock on children to split the personality in hopes of producing more programmable, mind-controlled slaves. I note the mockery of the Christian crucifixion reference. It reminds me of that artwork that received a great of publicity some years back, Called “Piss Christ.” Things like this seem to get a great deal of publicity in the “media.” I wonder why? “Somebody” seems to really “have it in” for “Jesus.” Also, “somebody” keeps making movies about “the Holocaust” from every possible angle, including the new Pixar animation about a mouse in Anne Frank’s Attic. Aren’t there already hundreds of them by now? How many movies about the Holdomor? Most people probably have never even heard of that. Why not? It involved millions more people. Couldn’t we just have taken the funds that went into the last ten or fifteen HolocaustTM Movies and put it towards a couple of Holdomor flicks in the interest of diversity? Anyway, this T-shirt, what is behind it? And, what is it’s connection to “the HolocaustTM” which, by the way, seriously needs to be investigated. But, you are not supposed to do that, of course. Isn’t it even illegal to ask? Why is that? Because it is “Evil?” to even question the enshrined narrative? Kinda like how you are not supposed to examine voting machines, or you can get your medical license cancelled for speaking the truth about “COVID.” Of course “the HolocaustTM” is “settled science” so “Thou Shalt Not Point Out Contrary Evidence.” You don’t get to jeer at the story of “the Holocaust.” You only get to jeer at “Jesus.” “Somebody” is trying to promote and enforce this loveless psychopathic drip feed. This onesie is just one more drip. Pardon my jeer!
Interesting comment. EVERYTHING should be open to questioning.
I came across vigilantcitizen.com about a year ago and found it very interesting. The report on the extremely creepy Denver International Airport is very eerie. It does seem like "they" are telling us what they're going to do to us.
Pride.
Professor Norman Davies was denied tenure at Stanford for attempting to include the millions of non-Jewish Europeans who died at the hands of Nazi Germany.
Happy ending (kinda): he left academia and made a fortune writing books.
Sorry. Had to go for the Obligatory "it depends" BS option because, well, it depends. I'm inclined to think most of us are born prosocial with a need to belong. Why are baby everythings so damn cute? So we'll fall in love with them and protect them.
Some children are born psychopaths who will torment siblings and blow up frogs and then run for Congress or become a CEO...no matter how ideal their childhoods.
Some children exhibit antisocial behavior because of bad parents and difficult childhoods. Some will overcome it as adults. Some will end up in prison.
Was Ted Bundy born or made? IMO, he was a born predator.
Are the kids shooting each other on Chicago's South Side born predators or products of their raising? I suspect most would do better in a stable home with married, committed parents in a safe neighborhood with good schools. Catherine Austin Fitts calls it the "Popsicle Index".
I didn't click any option.
Humans are born with the drive to survive, as any other creature is. Humans are born to recognize "us/not us." That's survival, and works really well in very small societies. Works less well in bigger societies where you must learn to recalibrate the concept of "us/not us."
Any good trait can become a bad trait when overexaggerated.
Well, the answer is no, as babies lack the capacity for decisions made from moral principles.
I know the tug of war between genetics and socialisation is fun, but the reality is they interact and not in some comfortably logical and linear way, like "learning to read before age X (as my child did, incidentally, but then my child is very special) is 70% genetics", fake quote is fake by the way: instead it's messy. And dynamic which is a fancy way of saying too chaotic for us to properly and consistently pin down.
Though not a native english speaker, I'm pretty sure "Anti Christ Baby" takes a hyphen between "Anti" and "Christ", so to me it looks not like some edgy statement and more like "Hi! I can't english". As a member of the imaginary fanclub of the not imaginary Lynne Truss, remarks like that are a compulsion (her book "Eats, shoots, and leaves" manages to be educational, riotous and irreverent while simultaneously being a good check-list for us non-native speakers).
Home field advantage example: how much a detriment dyslexia is, is 100% dependent on how much time is spent training spelling, readin and writing. So even if the basis for the condition is an abnormality in the brain, how severe the iteration is up to the socialisation.
It's like painting. The genetics is the canvas, the oils and the brushes. The socialisation is the painter's skill, dedication and integrity. The nd product is the kid.
Which to continue the metaphor then grabs the brush and starts painting itself when it grows up.
I agree with the results!
I believe most humans are at conception a blank slate . Neither good nor evil. (I also have the nagging question of where does free-will and karma enter into the mix?) We then have the nature vs. nurture concept to deal with from actual birth. That along with DNA coding which can have abnormal blips that can produce things such as high aggression or perhaps the “bad seed” or a Mother Theresa. While good parenting certainly has an impact, it doesn’t account for some offspring running amuck. Nor does bad parenting always produce socially abhorrent behavior. Personality traits, peers, cultural norms, influencers also play a part in the human condition.
Would one say a Neanderthal clubbing someone over the head in the next clan he runs into and taking his food an act of evil? We’re encoded for survival, so that would put him on par with predator animals trying to survive. How does that reconcile with the biblical “thou shalt not steal” code? If Mary and Joseph had been lousy “parents,”, would Jesus have gone astray? After all, God relegated him to this earthly realm in the flesh, so would he not have been subject to our same humanness? Does altruistic behavior connote innate goodness? Man is capable of the most astounding kindness and love for his fellow man and also the most brutal and unimaginable cruelty. We are told that we are made in the image of God, and would by that notion, all mankind not be innately good, however man has shown to be much less than God-like. To me that’s where the free-will might come into play. All I know is it’s a conundrum wrapped in an enigma.
I picked good, under the assumption of modal logic. Most people are born pretty decent, and while the line between good and evil runs through each of their hearts, by and in large people are remarkably good and social. There's probably, I don't know, 1-5% or so that are born monsters and if they manage to be decent it is through great effort.
Otherwise the evil people are those who are evil by choice; whether or not they recognize that their choices are evil, they didn't have to choose it.
Whenever I think about good and evil I wonder how funny that socially constructed dichotomy might seem to any intelligent beings somewhere more than 5 parsecs away like, say, a planet orbiting Deneb.
Why so? Do you see a socially oriented critter having a different sort of scale for "good Glorb/bad Glorb"? Or do you mean a non-socially oriented intelligent critter?
My sense that everything that can recognize individual entities also recognizes and categorizes them as "good news/bad news". As the categories expand, that becomes good/evil, or something similar.
I’m having to think about this, but my instinct is that if our ideas of goodness or otherwise, in a moral sense, have their roots in social structures then social structures that exist anywhere else may produce very different ones. Ones that we may be unable to even conceive.
This gets at most of what I believe. The part of me that continues exploring cultural and metaphysical evolution tells me that there are, despite this, some first principles that all humans, possibly even all mortal sentient life, must share. These are much more limited in scope than we would like to believe, to your point, but they are ironclad and nearly (or possibly even) genetic at this point.
There are only three logical options: God is Evil, Evil is God or Evil does not Exist. If God created evil, then God is Evil. If Evil created itself, then Evil is God. So those of you who believe that people can be born bad, take your pick of which of the first two you believe. But don't wimp out and be logically inconsistent that God is all-good and created everything but bad people created themselves.
Is it wrong to murder? Rape? Steal? Abuse? From what do you derive you sense of right and wrong, good and evil? If we all arose from the primordial ooze for no reason and are bound by laws of survival of the fittest, isn't anything permissible if it serves my needs? For example, is it permissible to, idk, create a virus/vaccine combo to sicken and kill a lot of people because some rich billionaires and old money banksters and royal types think there are too many of us useless eaters on the planet? I mean, who's to say it's wrong?
I wrote this a few years ago"
-----------------------
How did we get here?
What existed before the Big Bang? What blew up? Why did it blow up? That one explosion created everything in the universe that exists, has ever existed, or will ever exist?
So, we arose from the primordial ooze about 4 billion years ago. When did the first organic molecule start reproducing itself? Why did it reproduce itself? How did we get from the first organic molecule to the first living cell?
The simplest life form on Earth is the virus. But, the virus reproduces inside a living cell. There were no living cells before there were living cells.
The simplest single celled life form on Earth today is the mycobacterium, but it really isn't that simple. How/why would that just come into being for no reason?
Cellular reproduction of single cell organisms like mycobacteria (mitosis) has six distinct phases (prophase, prometaphase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase, and cytokinesis). Why did the first single celled organism double its DNA and split in two?
Assuming all those assumptions, how did we get from single cell organism to a rodent let alone the blue whale or the human being?
How do we explain all the great diversity of life in the fossil record? The Cambrian Explosion?
When did our first primate ancestor look up into the night sky and wonder how he got here or what his existence meant?
How do we explain all those gaps in the fossil record?
Was life on this planet seeded by space aliens? Where did that life come from? Big Bang, folks, we’re on the clock.
Perhaps there was no Big Bang. Perhaps we live in a multiverse, so there is no clock. As I understand the theory, life in different universes in the multiverse vibrates at different frequencies. How did a life form from another universe manage to change its essential vibration to get to our universe? Why? When?
Are we all part of some big computer simulation? Yeah, like, totally. A computer simulation requires a programmer…or creator. Where have I heard that term before?
Atheists mock people who believe in a Creator and claim knowledge they do not have. They claim knowledge that no one has. In the end, atheism is just their version of the religion they mock.
You may have arisen from the primordial ooze.
I am child of God made in His image.
Where did God get the ingredients? How did thought become matter? Where did God come from?
Nothing can answer these questions. Neither believer in God nor agnostic nor atheist can answer these questions, because human language isn't capable of describing the Unknowable.
Most believers make God in their own images and ascribe emotions to God that are entirely human. God isn't capturable within the realm of human consciousness.
None of us have the answers this side of the grave, which is my point.
Atheists mock people of faith, but their beliefs are no less fantastical in human terms. In my experience, they will believe almost anything to deny a Creator.
If the universe and life were created by an accident of physics for no reason, then where do we derive our sense of right and wrong, good and evil?
One person's definition of good (the psychopaths who want to cull the herd) is 7.9 billion people's (we useless eaters in the herd) evil.
All religions are cults; all of them, in normal operational form, have been used to kill and abuse uncounted multitudes. (I count all purported "secular" forms in this category.)
Tiny little children not yet doctrinized have an innate sense of right and wrong.
But I agree entirely with your first sentence.
I think that could be an overly facile statement for someone of your erudition, depending on the definition of cult you're using.
For my money, a cult is evangelical, exploitative, and exclusive, and that doesn't necessarily describe every religion that exists.
How are you defining "cult," here?
I'd describe a cult as any social grouping to which admission requires an acceptance of a stated set of beliefs, and to deny any of them, or question any of them, invites accusations of not being a good member and endangers one's social standing in the group.
"...evangelical, exploitative, and exclusive..."
That right there is why christianity was so succesful for 1500 years, compared to all the faiths it replaced. Same with islam.
This is not a value judgement, to be clear, it's just the way it is. The idea of proselytising and converting xenos was alien until Saul had his revelation, more or less. Normally at the time, expeting the jews, you went to the god that you fancied had the most say in your daily doings and dealings, or the gods of your people.
Christianity is most definitely a cult which over time matured to become the conceptual normal, the touchstone, in how everyone born inside its cultural influence thinks about religion.
Again, for the benefit of any follower of Christ, this not a value judgement; it's just the way things are.
Have you met little children?
There is a difference between religion and faith. And, yes, human beings have been co-opting God for their purposes since the beginning. That isn't God's fault. It's ours.
IMO, human beings kill, maim, and destroy with or without the excuse of a religious tradition. The Nazis and the Communists (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) were especially "good" at killing lots of people.
Early Christians rescued and raised abandoned children. They started hospitals and cared for the sick and disabled. They created communities to support each other and took care of widows and orphans. This was unheard of in the ancient world.
Yes, much has been done while invoking the name of Jesus. There is a difference between the actions of men, no matter what they believe, and the will of God.
All religions are cults.
This is completely wrong:
"This was unheard of in the ancient world."
You don't have to look farther than the Code of Hammurabi to find detailed laws for orphans and widows.
Wow, lots of responses here. I'm going to bring it back to the original poll of whether people are inherently good--and I'm going to agree with you both!
To CM, I entertain the possibility of God but refuse to consider a God who's a worse parent than me. Whether God is evil or an absentee slumlord are both the same result. Believing that evil exists because God's a sadist and is into suffering and death isn't a God worth having around. I DO think there's a way that an all-loving God can logically exist but that's a MUCH longer discussion.
To SCA, if there is no God then we're the products of our genetics and our circumstances, nothing else. There is no morally superior soul that follows us from body to body. So this is much more hopeful than having an evil God around because, while there's no purpose or meaning other than minimizing pain and fulfilling your replication quota, at least there's not a malevolent God plotting against us.
'Believing' is making up your mind in advance of the evidence, so I don't believe in believing anything. However, I'm willing to entertain the possibility of God or monkey genes, just not a God who likes some (or One) better than everyone else. That would be a crummy God.
I've never said anywhere that I don't believe in what for convenience we call God.
The "consensus" here seems to be go Judeo-Christian or go home.
I've noticed.
In threads elsewhere in Substackia I've often remarked that "pagan" is a slanderous and untruthful epithet.
Sorry, I thought the 'where did God come from?' series was to show the concept of God is illogical. But are all religions cults except paganism? I guess that confused me too into thinking you were atheist.
What is "paganism?"
Tereza, people who don't believe in God call religious belief fairy tales. I believe sky daddy is the preferred term. My point is that what one must people to explain our existence without a Creator is pretty fanciful as well.
I've apparently touched on some nerves with my comment, which was mean to provoke thought. Yes, you can say I believe in fairy tales. But so do you.
None have the answer this side of the grave.
I hope you don't think that I'm calling religious belief fairy tales, or saying that about you. I agree with you that explaining existence happening by accident is extremely convoluted. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has a brilliant book on that called God's Debris.
And you haven't touched on my nerves at all. I consider myself a gnostic, so I think that Truth wants to be known, whether you call it God or Reality. Same diff.
Amen.
First, actions can absolutely be rated on a scale from good to evil based on how much suffering they cause to how many people. No argument from me that all those things are wrong plus breeding weapons of bio-terrorism and punching holes in pipelines. Is killing a million people a million times more wrong than killing one? I'd say yes.
So who's responsible for those million deaths? Is it only direct action of ambushing someone in an alley, or operating a drone in a warehouse in Texas and then going to your kid's baseball game? Is it the person who ordered the strike? All the people involved who approved the strike? Everyone who funded it through tax dollars? Everyone who looked the other way like it had nothing to do with them?
Actions can evil but people are not. If you insist that they can be, make sure your nose is clean for everywhere your money goes and what it does. Evil is catching.
I'm not sure how I gave you the impression that I believe in B, Evil is God and we hoisted ourselves into creation through the happy accident of monkey genes. I'm placing my bet on C, Evil doesn't Exist--I can do evil but I can't be evil. And you made my point exactly--if I'm a child of God made in his image, I can't possibly be evil without God being evil. It would be an insult to God to say his image is evil.
Wouldn't "God is an absentee landlord" also qualify as logical?
Put creation on the stove, add water when it's starting to boil, lower the heat and put the lid on, and then let it simmer while you go look for the morning paper in the garden, so to speak?
Oh good, lots of fun responses while I went to aerial class. In the Judeo-Christian definition, our relationship to God is as children. So let's say I decide to be an absentee parent and leave my kids to fend for themselves, with a well-stocked knife drawer, because if they kill themselves or each other, I could care less. Would that meet the definition of a loving parent or an evil parent? If I would never do that to my kids, does that make me more loving than God?
I don't understand your reply. I just wondered if the idea that god (Abraham's god that is, there are lots others) got the whole thing going and then wandred off or just watches doesn't qualify too, according to you.
Hypotheticals and parapbles and analogies are usueful tools for demonstrating principles, but they are never proof of anything.
At least Odinn admits he's the dad that went out for cigarettes and never came back, but he left you this bunch of advice for how to not get done over by other dumb humans.
The idea of absentee deities that have their own business to worry about and find us interesting little blips in a harsh and imperfect universe feels far more accurate to my experience of how life and the world works.
It is certainly more freedom-loving and comfortable than some omnipresent omniscient and omnipotent being sitting as judge jury and executioner, even over those who has never even heard about it.
That was a major problem during the christianisation of South America: since the ancestors weren't baptised, they went to Hell according to the dogma of the time, causing enormous anxiety among the indians converted, since they would otherwise be reunited in the afterlife.
As I recall (no guarantees I'm not mixing things up in my mind), the solution was the invention of a kind of retroactive intercession by Christ, where the ancestors were given dispensation for having been born too far away to recevie the word in time. So a little time in Purgatory to have your sins removed, a symbolic baptism and presto, indians all satisfied, not the least because it gelled with their own cultural and pre-christian beliefs. Very practical and quite the humane solution for its time.
Kind of like limbo.
The theologian William Law defined evil beautifully, I thought, as a willful turning away from the light of God, describing it as a fruit that would otherwise ripen into sweetness but by rejecting the sunlight, becomes astringent and bitter.
All that's saying is that evil people created themselves. Who made them someone who would reject the sunlight? Did God make that sun-shunning baby? Are they genetically programmed to be astringent fruit of a bitter tree? Or have their circumstances of being born into the shade of a 20-story tenement (with no elevator) blocked the light?
My arborist would tell William Law that no fruit willfully turns against the light--some of my trees have contorted themselves into Eiffel towers trying to reach it. As MotW makes the analogy with dogs, why do we blame people who exhibit bad behavior and not look at what circumstances made them that way?
Forgive me if I'm being rude, I get overly excited about this topic since it's one of my favorite rants.
I enjoy excited ranting, so no problem.
This gets into the argument of free will. People will very often choose the damaging path for themselves (or even a damaging small choice) while knowing full well it will hurt them. Eyes wide open but doing it out of temper. I've done it myself.
I myself think evil is weakness, magnified, because it's so much easier to be bad or allow bad to happen, than the opposite. It's in every sense a negative capacity, not a positive one.
Yay! I suspected this might be a crowd where I didn't need to pussyfoot.
So here's a lot we agree on: we're all capable (perhaps equally if given the same options/ life circumstances) of making bad choices, and they always hurt us and sometimes hurt others. Damage sounds a little too permanent for my taste, like a sledgehammer in a china shop, and I think we're more bouncy-backy than that.
So self-inflicted harm certainly isn't evil, since we're both perpetrator and victim. And if evil is weakness, then strengthening the person and their good choices would solve it.
But for many things, evil is in the eye of the beholder and who's gonna run the re-education camps to ensure everyone thinks rightly?
There are always people with a natural taste for the bad stuff and they only need the right combination of circumstances to indulge this.
That's why we have laws and punishments, so the garden-variety taste-for-evil but not-willing-to-face-consequences types are discouraged at the start.
The others, the rabid ones, you have to cull when you see evidence of their actions.
Ah, the relativity of evil! I define actions as good if they alleviate suffering and better if they enable people to alleviate their own suffering, bad if they cause suffering and evil if they induce others to cause suffering.
The 'leaders' of my country just inflicted a winter of horrendous suffering by hundreds of millions of people with the push of a button. They're bragging about their willingness to push other buttons to up the suffering ante to billions. Do they qualify as the rabid ones? And where are the laws and punishments that would discourage that?
And potentially rescuer as well, like in the drama/victim triangle: https://firststeprehab.co.za/drama-triangle/