Are you saying I have not thought things through properly?
It is not easy to present such in a forum but here is how I often thought it through properly.
Because evil is a very loose term, first we have define and agree on what is meant by ‘evil’.
What is evil?
What is not good is by default evil. Evil is any thing that is net-negative and net-harmful to the individual and therefrom to the well being of humanity.
The concept of evil can be very subjective and to ensure a high degree of objectivity we need to establish the following;
- Obtain a full or thorough listings of what acts are generally termed directly or synonymously as ‘evil.’
- Obtain consensus on what is obviously recognized as evil.
- Put aside contentious elements for further deliberations.
I don’t thing it is difficult for us to agree on a list representing what is obviously ‘evil’.
- Do you or in general most people will agree mass genocides, mass rapes, serial killing, premedited murder, tortures, torture then murder are ‘evil’.
- Do you agree deliberately lying is evil albeit of low degree in comparison to those in 1.
If we do a serious exercise of a taxonomy of the elements of evils, I am sure you and I [and most people] can agree on a listing on what is obviously recognized as evil whilst putting aside whatever is contentious. This common consensus of what is evil as supporting with a list of evil elements is our objective grounds [not absolute but open for contentious views any time].
Do you agree with the above definition of evil and establish objective grounds for further discussions?
No one is born like anything,
This view of yours is not effective to the issue.
The effective approach is to start from empirical evidence of the acts of what are regarded as evil as established in the exercise above.
It is a fact there are committed acts of genocides, mass rapes, mass murder, premeditated murders, tortures of others, and all sorts of acts that are recognized as evil. Such evils will continue to be committed in the future till humanity does some thing to prevent them.
It is from these facts of evils based on empirical evidence and conceptual deliberations that we seek the root causes of these acts.
It is well recognized in research the basic root causes of evil of any human acts are traceable to two main root causes, i.e.
- Nature or
- Nurture
The evils can be
- purely nature or combined with nurture
- purely nurture and
If humans are brought up in the wild, I don’t believe all humans brought up in such a way would be totally feral because all humans has evolved to date with our human_ness nature within our DNA. Thus a percentage may turned feral but not ALL humans will turn feral.
My point is all humans has the potential [note] to turn feral because we evolved with a feral [beastly] base but as humans we have sufficient strong neural circuits that inhibit [evolved over 6 million years] such beastly potential. It is different with pigs which were domesticated not too long ago in comparison.
But as I had proposed, it is likely 20% [conservatively] will have weaker inhibitors to suppress the beastly impulses within and thus they have an active [activated not dormant] beastly or evil potential. These are the ones who will kill easily and commit other types of evils.
Why do I say 20% conservatively?
Such an approximation can be inferred from real evidence from patterns of human acts and elements.
Note the Principles of the Bell or Normal Curve which indicate ‘roughly’ human elements and variable are generally distributed in sets of percentiles.
Take for example human heights, 20% of all human will likely to be under [say] 4 feet 6 inches and 20% be over 6 feet and the rest having an average of say 5 feet 6 inches. I am guessing the figures but if we are to do actual measurements of all humans [or a large sample] we can establish the various heights within the various percentile sets.
My present guess is 20% [conservatively] has an active evil tendencies to commit various degrees of evil. To guess that 20% of people will lie, cheat, bribe, etc. to some degrees is very likely.
Words cannot be evil, you have to enact them to make them evil, and as soon as you enact an idea, it is your interpretation – you doing it. In other words, it is peoples interpretations which are misreading it, or otherwise enacting it in some way, as well as people like you misreading it by reading that into it.
It is obvious words themselves do not commit evil.
However, words in a context of ‘evil’ [as defined above] can trigger the evil prone humans to commit evil.
This is so obvious with ideologies that has evil laden elements that brainwash its followers to commit terrible evils [as defined] and violence.
What you have assumed is some one reading any texts and interpreting it, enact on it and its results are evil. I believe you are not thinking through this point properly.
What we have in reality are the following;
- People with active good tendencies
- People with active evil tendencies
- Texts [ideas] with good laden elements
- Texts [ideas] with evil elements.
A. The majority of good people with tendencies to do good when exposed to texts [ideas] with good element will do good and they will not enact and ignore texts with evil elements. case]. However a small percentage of good people on the fringe may be influenced to commit evil when they are exposed to evil elements in various texts, especially religious texts with evil elements as in the Quran.
B. The majority of evil people with active tendencies to commit evil, when exposed to texts [ideas] with evil elements, will feast on them and commit evils. These evil prone people may or may not enact good elements when reading them.
C. It is also possible for evil prone people to read texts with good elements but misinterpret them with evil lenses and thus commit evil based on a misinterpretations.
From what you have assumed, what you have missed out the prior existence of people who are born with active evil tendencies.
These unfortunate people who are born with an active evil tendencies are like those who are born color-blind. It is due to the wrong connections in the brain during fetus developments and other reasons. The way they are nurture in their life could make their evil tendencies worst or lesser. For the hardcore, i.e. those with really bad connections in the brain, no amount of exposure to good environment, preventive or corrective measures can curb their evil tendencies. There are loads of empirical evidences for such cases.
Note one example;
Are mass murderers born with their brains already predisposed to kill? Researchers have been trying to answer that exact question over the course of multiple decades. In order to try to determine if mass murderers have similar brain structure, scientists have been conducting brain scans of these killers. These scans have found that the brains of mass murderers have similar properties. The study also found that 50 percent of the differences in these killing brains are genetic.Read more at inquisitr.com/3052145/brain- … 1csCmbx.99
The above is just a clue but if one were to read more extensively on the subject, there’s possible truth to the hypothesis.