Human Nature

Dinosaur Comics picked a mighty day to pull this one!

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"Loves them? They need them, like they need the air."

....and how is that evil?

Because it's silly. And everyone knows that silly people are actually crazy. Crazy = Evil.

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We are both the source of the problem and the solution, yet we do not see ourselves in this light...

I think the philosophy implies that if you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, then you're part of the problem. But I'm ignorant so I'm probably wrong.

The thing I find weird is the term evil, at least outside of a discussion where there are actually sides "in charge" of both good and evil who have "real" control over those terms. If you don't believe that there are Super Beings representing something such as good and evil, it seems that those terms are the wrong terms. But I'm ignorant.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

see, it's that word "evil" that i seem to be hung up on. having bad in you doesn't mean that you have evil in you. does it? isn't evil on a whole different level than that?

i know i could do a much better job at explaining this, but i'm too tired.

It's just a word. And words can never hurt you. At least that's what I learned in grade school out on the playground.

if it's just a word, then what is the point of this whole thread? my head is spinning.

Words ~ The Monkees

PN has that effect on people I've noticed. I think its pretty cool though, that now I can say I know a girl who's head spins around.

Yoda, i wanted to post that!

beware the sticks and stones though

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"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.

doggone it. this is what came to my mind!



i was gonna say, ........ like.....WOW dude.

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something witty goes here......

Good thoughts Yoda. I agree with your original post. I don't think people are evil or good, but I think we are selfish and self-preservationist. We do good, if it makes us feel good or if other people view us as doing good. We are social beings, so we need that social acceptance.

I think our motives are selfish, but even so we can do good. Of course history is filled with violence. With intelligence comes curiosity and with that comes ambition. With ambition comes a will for power and with that the ability to do evil toward our fellow humans to boast ourselves.

Between the two I tend to go more with evil.

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"A candy colored clown!"
Member since Fall 2002
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ok, i was gonna vote evil outright, because i dont think we're intrinsically good, but then i thought - well, we're not intrinsically evil either!

viddy said it. we are at base selfish creatures. we want whatever it takes to make us happy in our few short days on this ball.

so hate me if you must, but I'll give you my religious rundown. [You've. Been. Warned!] I will, however, for the reader's sake, try to keep it basic, and not get technical (read: biblical), so I'm going to over-generalize in a great way. If you want to get technical, by all means, but I dont want to bore.

Religious Rundown:

Us
We are neither good, nor evil. We are not intrinsically bad, nor are we intrinsically good. We just are. And in being, we crave what makes us happy, what makes us feel good. Self-gratification, if you will. This, in itself, is not a bad thing.

Super-Beings
Layer on top of that, those Super Beings that Mark_F alludes to - call them what you will, Good/Evil, God/Devil, whatever. In being, the Super-Beings personify good and evil, and exist on two sides of the moral continuum.

d/Evil
This guy represents all that is bad. Purpose being to get you to do what is bad, or to do bad things. So no. You are not intrinsically bad, it is just that you have self-gratification desires on your mind. The purpose of d/Evil is to engage your self-gratification desire to do anything/everything it wants, even at the expense of yourself, and the people around you. Thus, [as a Very Basic Example], you have people who dont really want to die, but they kill themselves with drugs, alcoholism, etc. Self-gratification drove them to kill themselves. Why? It felt good, baby! [It reminds me of the theme song in True Blood, where the guy sings "I Wanna Do Bad Things to/with You!" Bad? yes. But it'll feel so good!]

Go[o]d
This guy represents all that is good, orderly and decent. Purpose being to get you to think about your actions, and tailor your behavior to behavior that will benefit you, society at large, etc. So no. You are not intrinsically good. [Necessary Technical Digression: A believer would argue tho, that we are given a piece of God's being, called a "soul." An individual soul exists in us all, and that soul will always identify with Go[o]d, and want to do the "right" thing, even if it goes against the human principle of Self-Gratification.]

The Bottom Line
There you are, plain old you, and you just wanna become/do [insert your d/Evil] because it feels good. Something inside [Go[o]d?] is telling you that's a bad idea, or at the least, its gonna hurt someone, even if that someone is yourself. You know it is. You know it will. And you dont want to do anything bad - not really. You just want to enjoy yourself. Doggone it, don't you deserve to be happy???

This is the struggle between Go[o]d and d/Evil. Make yourself happy* or do the "right" thing. Because at day's end Go[o]d is really nothing more than self-sacrifice, and d/Evil is as small as making yourself feel good, at cost.

*I do not mean to suggest that happiness is a bad thing, or that it is intrinsically wrong to be happy, or to make yourself happy. That is not my point. I mean to say that Go[o]d, or "the right thing" is often sacrificed for personal happiness, and that, my friend, is d/Evil.

I'm surprised that the poll results have been so close. Evil is winning right now by only one point. It's 10 to 9. I half expected one to totally beat out the other one.

Also, the whole D/evil, GOoD thing that Mark F pointed out is really weird. I don't think I ever noticed that before.

Evil - Old English yfel, from Proto-Germanic *uƀilaz (compare Middle Dutch evel, Old Saxon/Old High German ubil, Gothic ubils 'bad, wicked, evil')
Devil - from Old English dēofol, from Ancient Greek διάβολος (diabolos, “accuser, slanderer”)

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Good - Middle English, from Old English gōd, from Proto-Germanic *ǥōđaz (compare Dutch goed, German gut), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰedʰ- 'to unite, be associated
God - From Middle English, from Old English god (“deity”), Old High German got (a rank of deity) originally neuter, then changed to masculine to reflect the change in religion to Christianity, both from the Proto-Germanic *ǥuđa-, *ǥuđan

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Neither appear to be related.

We are including politicians in this question, right? If so, we might need to start the poll again...

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

Well, I suppose it's time I weighed in here.

According to Michel Foucault, our human nature is manufactured by history and power relations; there's no scientifically verifiable human nature.

To use Foucault's example, you have the early 18th century when torture was rampant throughout Europe and just 80 years later it's abolished and replaced with the timetable of prisons. Where was this sudden discovery of "human nature?" Why did people become "nice?"

Simple, discipline created our social sciences (legal system, medical advancements, psychology, etc.). As I've said in the shoutbox, discipline creates individuals. That allows for cases (study of the individuals), and that's where our knowledge of "human nature" comes from: a social construct.

Scary? You can cry later.

Then again, I think that just serves to say this is a silly topic to talk about.

Basically, you do good things because you're disciplined...not because you think it's "good."

Some disciplined people kill a lot. Maybe not as many as "undisciplined" people, but percentagewise, I think that many people die in a war where the people in charge came up through a regimen of discipline. This is not an indictment of organized armed forces and especially veterans. I think we owe veterans more than we can ever repay. It's just that "discipline" struck a nerve. (Hell, I'm a "teacher".)