The Origin of evil

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Sy Borg
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Re: The Origin of evil

Post by Sy Borg »

As you'd know by now, I don't believe in evil as an objective "thing", but there is an oft-observed and well-accepted way of parsing "evil" from otherwise - the objectification of sentient life.
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Ranvier
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Re: The Origin of evil

Post by Ranvier »

Greta, you always express thoughts so much better than I can. I admire the efficiency of your words.
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Re: The Origin of evil

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Yeah, Greta, you impress best when you express. Your efficacy is in the efficiency of your words. Your impressive effect is through your expressive affect.
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Re: The Origin of evil

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Ranvier wrote:Greta, you always express thoughts so much better than I can. I admire the efficiency of your words.
Thanks Ranvier, it's kind of you to say so :) My forum history history is replete with endless gusts of hot air. However, in recent times my nephew has made me aware I babble (in meatspace too). When I looked back at what he said, yes, far too many monologues. Babble babble babble. So, I'm trying hard not to these days. As with jazz, it seems to takes experience to learn when to leave space.

Kurt Vonnegut speaks well about simplicity in writing:
KV wrote:They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don't really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school --- twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify --- whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

-- Updated 11 Aug 2017, 02:10 to add the following --
-1- wrote:Yeah, Greta, you impress best when you express. Your efficacy is in the efficiency of your words. Your impressive effect is through your expressive affect.
This is true of all. When we try to impress we fail to express and we make a weak impression. I guess that, when we try to express rather than impress, we stress noblesse rather than that about which we obsess.

Oops, we digress ... how evil of us! More or less. Pam Ayers is not dead, she just smells funny.
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Ranvier
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Re: The Origin of evil

Post by Ranvier »

True. Our thoughts often turn to prose in motive other than to express. I'll keep that in mind each time I identify the reason that I wish to contribute to a given thread.
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Socrateaze
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Re: The Origin of evil

Post by Socrateaze »

Ranvier wrote:I agree, although I don't perceive greed as an absolute evil or the fact that some people don't want to cooperate. We're born with inherent burden of individual genetic makeup forced to react to the external environment, collecting wealth of data in experience and for some knowledge of how to satisfy that greed and lust. What is evil, is the lie we perpetuate about ourselves and our reality to continue to function in self interest. Self interest is not evil but there is something wrong with the society and each individual that feels the need to lie about it. That's evil. For every "pathology" there is always a yang, masochist for sadist; people who wish to die and people who wish to kill; people who wish to give and those who wish to steal; except perhaps pedophilia which is difficult to reconcile with the immaturity of the moral agent desired. Otherwise, I would not claim a moral high ground to judge such deviancy from "normal", as it would cause me to lie about my right to do so. The only thing one can do is to be honest about the futile attempt to separate self from such reality.
The ability to separate ourselves is influenced by others. We may choose to live in peace, but others can still compel us to stay in the pattern of "evil". To wish the world to be a better place may not be enough, because others don't have the same wishes. We often find ourselves locked in a cycle of evil, in which we have to answer evil with evil for the sake of survival. The lie is not that we have a certain belief about a bad world that is good, but rather the other way around. Many people cannot deal with conflict. I recently saw this again with a friend, who would rather stick her head in the sand than face the reality of the situation.

Pedophilia is the perfect example of how the nature of people triumph over social stereotypes. When something goes wrong inside a person, their instincts and nature rule them, but the real problem lies in the fact that we choose to address that deviant behavior with social logic. Where this logic fails us science has to take over in an attempt to bring such people back into our agreed norms. This cannot be achieved by the knowledge we use to understand our lives on a daily basis. This is also the problem with general evil, as per classic definition, it works on impulse. The lie is not within our nature, but in how we have developed methods to suppress it. The suppression of our nature is the lie and therefore we cannot understand evil.
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Re: The Origin of evil

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Very perspicacious thoughts Socrateaze. I'm still learning as there are no ready answers to existential dilemma. What are the right and wrong choices in the grand scheme of reality? One thing seems to be certain that "evil" can't be conquered with evil. The burden of good would be to allow for evil to learn through logic in experience of an outcome, hopefully before both perish.
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Re: The Origin of evil

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Ranvier wrote:True. Our thoughts often turn to prose in motive other than to express. I'll keep that in mind each time I identify the reason that I wish to contribute to a given thread.
I will too - too often I don't. In a world full of trickery and display behaviour it's easy to be swept up in the games and forget about what it is about philosophy that first attracted us to these forums.
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Re: The Origin of evil

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I see, Greta, you went into recess with your largess. The premiss is to not miss the naughty miss, in the mist when she redies to kiss.
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Re: The Origin of evil

Post by Dark Matter »

Harris wrote:Every living being is a conscious independent being which has senses of pain and pleasure. Bodily sensations of pain and pleasure can be seen as a form of awareness of the states and properties of one’s own body. Such awareness makes people capable to analyse behaviour of a living being in terms of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.

Animals normally are considered in conscious states but with the lack of capacity to be introspectively aware of themselves. Apparently, they do not form beliefs about what conscious states they are in, for they lack the requisite concepts to do so. Therefore, they are thought to be blind with respect to their own self.

Man, on the other side has an introspective awareness of his own conscious state that is made up of a belief that emerges out of the direct acquaintance with conscious state.

Introspective awareness of the conscious self plays a unique cognitive role in the understanding of morality. Morality can be seen as relationship between pleasure and pain, goodness and evil, and sensations of right and wrong. These ideas serve a fundamental concept of self which is usually different from the conceptions of other individuals.

The power of introspective awareness is basically the cause of feelings of self-respect that render fulfilment of any desire as contribution to self-interest. Every man respects the authority of his own individual in determining which experiences make his life go better. If narrowly thinking, a life of pleasurable sensation is better for the person even if one does not prefer it. This idea, in general, tempts people to overwhelm generally accepted moral standards using their alluring desires and consequently get involve in wishful thinking and believing in something about themselves that lacks adequate evidence because they want their seductive beliefs to be true. Being under the influence of tempting and attractive desires people try to avoid any discomfort from conflicting thoughts about their own self-image by turning their attentions to other matters or in sceptical thinking they try to construct hypotheses on the fly to prove weakness of the evidence that conflicts with their self-image. Arguably, they can practice self-deception about their motives and reasons to favour their dear desires.

When a person lacks control over his desires, inner conflict often results in the victory of evil over good. His actions may stem from appetites or desires that are not properly ruled by some higher part of the self.

As there is a propensity to evil deep in all people therefore, in some cases people are too quick to make up their minds to take an unjustified action because their appetites are too strong. The wicked among such people neglect the incentive of respect for moral law altogether; even when they act in accord with the moral law, they do the right thing for the wrong reasons and so are corrupt in their cast of mind.

Uncontrollable desires can easily lead people to hedonism which is the doctrine that pleasure is the good. Hedonism has usually been viewed as self-indulgence so the behaviour of a hedonist is morally susceptible. Unscrupulous hedonism is the cause of immoral acts such as theft which brings pleasure to the thief but pain to the victim.

Intentional activities of hedonists and their motivated processes of avoiding unpleasant truths result in their mental states of ignorance, false beliefs, unwarranted attitudes, and inappropriate emotions which are objectionable because that give hedonists a way to camouflages and support their greed, cruelty and other forms of wrongdoings. Their tactics also include rationalization, wilful ignorance, and systematic ignoring. Another strategy that unscrupulous hedonists may put into action is the distortion of standards of rationality for a false belief by exaggerating favourable evidences for what people want to believe, disregarding contrary evidences, and resting content with minimal evidence for pleasing beliefs.

Collective of unscrupulous hedonists share false beliefs and unwarranted attitudes that are provocative and contentious. Such collective tends to abuse and degrade morality by the use of debauchery as rhetorical weapon that undermines tolerance. They encourage insult for moralists based on malice and endanger commonly accepted standards of morality. When motives and consequences are evil that reduce unscrupulous hedonists into representatives of cruelty and callous moral negligence.

A lack of perception or feeling for others, lying off the scale of the ethical, in the form of a brutality or beastliness virtually falls out of the category of the human. Disrespect is inherently vicious and emphasizes the animal aspects of human life. Among evil or vicious motivations, a basic type is cruelty which is the desire to cause suffering a disposition which contrasts markedly with brutality. Such cruel behaviour is directly an attempted expression of power.

Maliciousness is another form of evil which is the desire that other people’s happiness should not exist. Normally, people in this state of mind get pleased if others come to grief, even though they do not bring it about themselves.

Both brutality and maliciousness are parts of the character of unscrupulous hedonists. People who cleverly conceal their dishonesty, there is no argument the moralist can provide is likely to change their minds.

Wealth, possession, and power which were acquired by means of deceptive deeds mainly cause superiority complex and arrogance in the behaviour of unscrupulous hedonist. However, in reality, posh lifestyle of a deceiver is only a hollow ostentation because at the foundation unscrupulous hedonist remains a cunning wicked thief who masters in stealing by exploiting forbidden practices. The main secret behind his successes in fact is the antipathy of general public against immoral, harmful, and notorious activities that leave no rival in the field who may compete the unscrupulous hedonist in his destructive activities. Without facing competition culprit is the king of felonious world.

In this article, I have brought to light only few aspects to elucidate why people turn into detrimental beasts. I recommend you to watch following two videos which make emphasis on what strokes and tactics the culprits or unscrupulous hedonists embrace by neglecting the conventional moral standards to make their success ultimate.

“Human reality is the pure effort to become God without there being any given substratum for that effort, without there being anything which so endeavours. Desire expresses this endeavour.”

Page 576
Being and Nothingness
Jean-Paul Sartre

“Thus, my freedom is a choice of being God and all my acts, all my projects translate this choice and reflect it in a thousand and one ways, for there is an infinity of ways of being and of ways of having.”

Page 599
Being and Nothingness
Jean-Paul Sartre
I corrected the intended links.
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Re: The Origin of evil

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Ranvier wrote:Very perspicacious thoughts Socrateaze. I'm still learning as there are no ready answers to existential dilemma. What are the right and wrong choices in the grand scheme of reality? One thing seems to be certain that "evil" can't be conquered with evil. The burden of good would be to allow for evil to learn through logic in experience of an outcome, hopefully before both perish.
People will perish, "good" and "evil" will not.
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Re: The Origin of evil

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Another problem is which evil do you mean. The personal feeling of having done something mischievious and evilminded, the diffamation of society to have done something against the rules, the evil punished by law if made public. Evil is multidimensional
and not just a single trivial variable, simple to dispute about. Evil is the will of Iblis or Satan , to resist against gods will. But who would judge, him who said skin for skin in the bible and was once a servant of god now seperated from his creator. Evil isn't centered to religion is mostly a violation against the rules of a system or a violation against your personal ethical rules or a violation against the will of some religion. Evil itself is for the roman catholic church the separation of ones own person from god. Evil itself has something childish in it's own meaning. Who wants to lift the dunning finger to you. It's for myself in connection with sigmund freud , the destructive power in the i and it level of your conscience and nothing else. Evil is better defined psychologically as a destructive sprout inside of your psychological predisposition. It's even the same for a certain group of people, that the destructive side of one's mind and emotions is expressed more or less with evil. And this is the origin of evil. I wouldn't talk about religious terms but more of destructive mechanisms inside of your psyche in terms of evil. But this is a lasting drive inside of the human psychological status quo which has to be controlled via the all controlling i of ones personal conscience.
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Re: The Origin of evil

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SimpleGuy wrote:Another problem is which evil do you mean. The personal feeling of having done something mischievious and evilminded, the diffamation of society to have done something against the rules, the evil punished by law if made public. Evil is multidimensional
and not just a single trivial variable, simple to dispute about. Evil is the will of Iblis or Satan , to resist against gods will. But who would judge, him who said skin for skin in the bible and was once a servant of god now seperated from his creator. Evil isn't centered to religion is mostly a violation against the rules of a system or a violation against your personal ethical rules or a violation against the will of some religion. Evil itself is for the roman catholic church the separation of ones own person from god. Evil itself has something childish in it's own meaning. Who wants to lift the dunning finger to you. It's for myself in connection with sigmund freud , the destructive power in the i and it level of your conscience and nothing else. Evil is better defined psychologically as a destructive sprout inside of your psychological predisposition. It's even the same for a certain group of people, that the destructive side of one's mind and emotions is expressed more or less with evil. And this is the origin of evil. I wouldn't talk about religious terms but more of destructive mechanisms inside of your psyche in terms of evil. But this is a lasting drive inside of the human psychological status quo which has to be controlled via the all controlling i of ones personal conscience.
We can control evil to a degree, but then instinct takes over. The conscious is always override by the subconscious in the end.
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Re: The Origin of evil

Post by Atreyu »

Ultimately, Everything originated from the same Primordial Source.

Therefore, the ultimate origin of evil, strangely enough, is the same origin of good. Both good and evil ultimately came from the same Source...
Namelesss
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Re: The Origin of evil

Post by Namelesss »

Harris wrote:The Origin of evil
All 'good', and all 'evil' exist in the judgmental vanity/thought/ego of the beholder!
We do not see what is 'out there', we see what is 'in here' reflected!
If you see 'evil', it is your own reflection!

"Perhaps it is the curvature of space that, like a funhouse mirror distorting our own reflection, we imagine strangers." - Mythopoeicon

As far as 'origin', there is no 'origin', there is Here! Now! Always!
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