Question for all or any

[Fountain79]

I guess the closest I would describe myself would be a Christian. I don't go to church regularly, I do read the bible and can quote passages, just don't ask me to quote the part that it come from but I would say I have a basic understanding of the bible. While I am not an atheist, I could see where someone would believe in that manner just as I could see someone who believes in a higher power. That being said, questions and thoughts revolve in my mind.(normally when I should be doing something else, like right now):

Let's say that there is no god and that things just happen:

Are we merely the by-product of b/millions of years of chance and/or mistakes?

How can we explain the existence of pure evil in our history? (see Hitler, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, et al) Now these men didn't come from the greatest home lives but I think we can agree that other people have come from bad home lives and went on to become relatively normal people.

There are other questions but they are not materializing at this time. Back to grading...feel free to comment...

[beam me up scottie]

1. I don't believe in evil.

Not as a separate entity anyway.

Actions are evil, not people.

[Az]

4. I believe in evil

Just as I believe in good. It doesn't exist as a thing in this universe. It is something that is defined by our minds. A combination of what we know to be harmful to ourselves and our fellow humans. It is not fixed and is ever changing. As our understanding of what harms ourselves and others expands so to does our definition of evil.

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. I have always believed, since I was a kid,

that the (I think it is) 2nd law of thermodynamics - everything is in a constant state of decay - does not apply to life. Life is naturally self-organizing and the mechanics of it is evolution. While the inert parts of the universe progress to greater simplicity, life progresses to greater complexity. There may even be a certain reciprocity in that, in keeping with yin/yang, positive/negative. So, yes, it is just millions of years of accidents, but within a framework that naturally develops toward intelligence and possibly beyond - though I can't quite fathom what that stage beyond intelligence might be.

Part of human development is the development of community. This is balanced against the actualization of the individual. There is a natural proclivity for social consciousness which is balanced against the natural proclivity for self-interest. As with any system, sometimes things get out of whack and people develop who are totally inclined to the social side, even to the neglect of themselves. We call the saints. Others, who are totally inclined to the self, to the accumulation of power to the neglect of the greater good, we call psychotic. Pure evil, like Hitler, is merely a psychosis in the hands of a charismatic person. Without the charismatic personality, he'd have probably wound up just one more asshole on death row.

There's my two cents.

[lvx35]

5. Funny opening statement.

I just wrote a big diary entry about how the second law of thermodynamics drives all life. Wacky coincidence to see the corralary here.

[Az]

6. Life on earth is not really inconvenienced by the 2nd law

The mistake made concerning life on this planet and entropy is simply that the earth is not a closed system. There is incredible amounts of energy pounding the earth every day from the sun.

Another failure in applying the 2nd law to life arising is that it does not say standing pools of order cannot occur as the system as a whole moves toward entropy. That is to say that certain areas can increase order for a time if in the end the equation balances out.

Thus the universe is moving towards entropy while stars charge planets with energy throughout the system. Each behaving according to the 2nd law and order still quite able to arise for a time. A time being quite a long time in our scale of things.

[lvx35]

9. I think entropy can create "order".

A little more detail regarding your second point...

My understanding of entropy is that it can create "order" by its nature, aside from the disorder it is associated with in the theory. An example is snowflakes. An area of wet warm air pushes into and area in the upper atmosphere,(macrostate) and as the number of microstates that have achieved thermodynamic equalibrium increases, (an increase in entropy, right?) the tempurature levels out, and a second "order" is born in the crystalization of the snowflakes from the water.

I might be wrong, but I was checking it out and I found this site:
http://www.entropylaw.com/
which seems to be saying the same thing.

[Az]

11. That is consistant with pools of order

arising in an ongoing system trending towards entropy. As long as the total entropy in the equation is increased pools of order can arise.

[lvx35]

12. Yeah, you're right, but the details are interesting.

There's a sweet paper on it I just read on why the world creates so much "order":
http://www.entropylaw.com/thermoevolution10.html

"The answer to the question is that the system will select the path or assembly of paths out of otherwise available paths that minimizes the potential or maximizes the entropy at the fastest rate given the constraints. This is a statement of the law of maximum entropy production the physical selection principle that provides the nomological explanation, as will be seen below, for why the world is in the order production business"

[Az]

3. Sheesh, not exactly minor little questions there, you hit the jackpot

Ok, info first. I am an atheist so while not speaking for all atheists my views do come from an explanation not including gods.

This notion that we are the result of chance is a bit misleading. Yeah, mutations are chance (relatively speaking, more on that later maybe). But the process of natural selection isn't chance.

Imagine you have a deck of cards. You toss the cards in the air and set aside all the aces that land face up. Repeat. Sooner or later you will have all the aces in your hand. It was by chance that they landed face up. But it was selection that pulled them out.

Natural selection is a bit like that. When a mutation occurs it is typically harmless and changes nothing (most of our DNA is junk). Sometimes it affects things in a dramatic fatal manner. But every once in a while its effects are positive. Nature placing the pressures it does on life the life form with the positively effective mutation will out perform its kin. It will have a better chance of survival and likely produce more offspring over time. Thus the mutation through natural selection becomes dominant.

Evil is a slightly different matter. Many religions proclaim evil to be a tangible thing. The product of specific beings. Some believe evil to be violation of laws written into the fabric of the universe.

But from a nonreligious perspective evil is an abstract construct. That is there is no such thing as something being inherantly evil. Evil is a judgement based on a societies values. Thus one society can perform actions that another society believes to be completely evil yet the former society sees it as good.

Society creates about it an understanding by which people interact and abide by shared rules. Given the right set of rules a person can commit the most atrocious acts all while believing they are doing good. Redefine a person as a monster and killing them becomes a righteous act. Convince a person that the body is just a shell for an immortal soul that can be condenmed to hell for eternity and suddenly a little torture doesn't seem such a bad idea to save that soul.

There can of course also be evil that comes from rejection of social standards. Individuals that for a variety of reasons have given up on being part of society and instead strike out and take or harm for their own purposes. But the scale and degree of their evil is typically far less than the degree and harm to which someone can commit out of an act of percieved righteousness.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. I'll try

"Are we merely the by-product of b/millions of years of chance and/or mistakes?"

We might indeed be. But being restricted to a physical existence, how can we know otherwise? The "Blind Watchmaker" idea -- that evolution is random and undirected -- is the only reasonable conclusion we can draw from our limited perspective right now. Using Faith as a scientific shortcut is a kind of cheating, which is why the two methods of knowledge have kept separate.

"How can we explain the existence of pure evil in our history? (see Hitler, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, et al)"

You're assuming these people are "pure evil". I maintain that they are NOT "pure evil," but relatively ordinary people. This introduces the idea of "the banality of evil".

"Pure evil" makes the evil person and his/her acts special and supernatural. Yet every lesson of history teaches us that evil is the result of common mistakes, flaws, foibles, and common men.

(Sorry for all the quotation marks -- they were easier to place than using italics all the time.)

A doctrine of Pure Evil also allows us to believe, incorrectly, that we are Good People who are incapable of doing anything that evil. But that's not true. And it's the great danger of being human.

--p!

[lvx35]

8. Evil is born of ideology.

Any person doing "evil" typically has an ideology where what they are doing is good. For Hitler, it was a painful process of genetic purication that had to occur to user in 1000 years of peace, known as the "Third Reich(Rule)". The genetically purified people would be happy. For Gayce, I can't speculate...But when I do things people would consider evil, it tends to come from a sense that life is so beautiful that I can't do anything wrong. I'm sure Gayce and bundy had their thing, W has his, you have yours.

[mestup]

10. Wow. So many intellectuals here on DU!

I learn so much every time I log on.

The older I get the more I tend to believe that "evil," regardless of how a culture/religion defines it, is simply a lack of education. (Education devoid of any religious or political agenda.)

I have a small poster I found many years ago, with the following quote:

"For in the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught." -Baba Dioum

[lvx35]

13. great quote

"We will love only what we understand"

That part of the quote really warmed my heart. Its interesting to think as well that so often those with great understanding, I mean real understanding, are those with great love, and I think the opposite is also true.

[FM Arouet666]

14. What is pure evil????

You hit it on the head with the meaning of life. We are products of millions of years of evolution, in the vastness of the universe and time this planet evolved living creatures which have become self aware. The universe is as indifferent to the collision of two particles in deep space as it is to the holocaust. Upon death, you return to the vastness of time, where you were a million years before your birth. Cold reality. This is the only life we have, religion, philosophy and science have been created by humankind to improve what we experience in our lifetime. We should be guided by this heritage, endeavoring to improve our lives and the lives of all around us.

Now, why does the existence of Hitler cause you to question this? Humans are capable of unspeakable cruelty. Pure evil? Something so evil that there must be a supernatural realm from which it was spawned? Hitler loved children, if they were blond and blue eyed, and loved animals, he was a vegetarian and wanted to be an artist. Don't get me wrong I am not defending him, but he is not some other world anomaly, his is just a human, a very evil human.

"No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.
But I know none, and therefore am no beast." Richard III

[onager]

15. W.H. Auden's take is pretty good...

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return...

From the poem "September 1, 1939"--that being the date Hitler's Panzers rolled into Poland and kicked off WWII.

FWIW, as a great satire points out, the younger Adolf Hitler was a dream political candidate--a decorated and wounded war veteran who loved dogs and the memory of his sainted mother. Not to mention a non-smoking, teetotaling vegetarian who endlessly preached (but did not practice, as usual) "family values."

Even later on, when he controlled most of Europe, he was nothing but an ordinary human with bad teeth and stomach problems.

The notion that he "became evil" or something strikes me as near-superstitous nonsense. Hitler's plans for the Jews were laid out in 1923 in "Mein Kampf." He WROTE THEM DOWN, along with his plan to turn Eastern Europe and Russia into vassal states for the new Reich.

But nobody paid attention. The German people, with "evil done to them" after WWI, wanted revenge. The Western democracies wanted a strong anti-Communist govt. in central Europe after the events of 1917 in Russia.

Everybody got a lot more than they bargained for.

[manic expression]

16. There is no evil

Only ignorance. When people forget that they are truly good, bad things and actions occur. It is complete oblivion from that which is eternal: the truth in the world that, in a physical manifestation, is justice.

On your first question, since there is undeniable free will (how do you know this? Everything you do is, in essence, a decision), many actions are the results of individual motivation; the reactions to these actions are expected. However, events ALWAYS follow the flow of existence, in that things begin, live and end. Everything works this way. Although everything follows this course, know that there is infinitely more than this. Look at what is beyond the cycle, and THAT is what is omniscient, true and eternal.

Sorry if that didn't make sense, but I hope it helped.

[Old Mouse]

17. Evil is subjective - there is no pure evil

Murder, mass murder, joyful killing, torture, all exist in nature. To believe it "evil" when it happens in our species is egotism. We are of nature, we are not above it.

That is not to say evil does not exist, it's not a natural occurrence - death and suffering being natural in and of themselves. Evil is created as a concept of the conscious awakened mind, when you have willfully avoided loss or empathy as the reason for condemning of an act or action. The adherence of subjective morality, the created concept of good and evil, is a higher function; a true act of free will.