Secular humanists...if man is "inherently good" as you claim- where does evil come from?

Question

to the duck boy:
"man is inherently good" stems from thougth processess of preenlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau etc...i simply posed the question b/c in the realm of the secular humanist "box" with people surrounded by the nautral world not allowing for the supernatural- i was wondering how they explained "evil"- it's ironic that most in here could not answer the question without bringing up the idea of culture/society/religion being the cause of evil- when that in itself is a sum of humans living together- therefore evil must come from somewhere else if man is indeed inherently good.

duck boy: btw i'm praying for you to do God's Work.

Answer 1

Evil comes from bad parenting and a bad influence from society and misbehavior.

Answer 2

I don't think that man is actually inherently good. I think that God possesses all "Goodness" and any traces of good that we find in ourselves and/or in the world around us are blesses that he's allowed us to have to make our lives better. Of course the opposite of good is bad which you could define as the absence of goodness. I think that our humanity(our flesh) is inherently bad and that our souls inherently want to seek goodness. Which is why we have a conscious. Even as a young child who doesn't understand many things you still know right from wrong. All together we're a mixture of both. Even when we try our hardest to be on the good side of the spectrum there is no way that we could have all good because then we'd be God. That's when the whole salvation thing comes in. When God over looks the bad and treats you as if you were all good.

Answer 3

Evil is just a word used to describe things that people do that we deem to be bad for society as a whole. There is nothing that humans do that is not also seen in the animal world; this includes incest, rape and murder (don't agree? read some Jane Goodall descriptions of chimpanzees). Yet, we don't call animals evil. We are free to do as we please, but if you want to be a part of a group or society you agree to follow its rules - or risk being removed. Different cultures have different definitions for what counts as incest, rape and murder; so even within human culture we can't agree totally on what "evil" is.

Answer 4

There will always be sociopaths and such. There are today most of them were raised in ultra religios homes thats a fact do the research.
Good people do not need religion to be good. To get good people to do horrnedously evil and vile things to there fellow human beings then you have to use religion. The facts are what they are and history is the proof.

Answer 5

WHO claims man is 'inherently good"? What a ridiculous question. Religious people seem to regard evil is a 'thing'... something that has some corporeal form of existence in the physical universe. Or, perhaps, a 'force', or an innate 'quality' of the universe or of existence. What a load of crap. Evil does NOT 'exist' as a 'thing', or a 'force'... it exists only as an abstract 'concept'... and one that is 'dualistic' in nature, at that. 'Evil' cannot 'exist' without 'good'. They are the two sides of the same coin, in the Yin/Yang sense. One cannot 'exist' without the other; neither can be defined or described, except in terms of the other.

Good/evil is further abstracted in the sense that it represents a 'judgement'... and as a judgement, good/evil is wholly subjective, since it relies entirely upon the 'criteria' that is employed in making the judgement.

So, the real issue is not good/evil per se... rather, it relies upon the CRITERIA that people use in making their judgements of good/evil, it relies on the misconceptions, prejudices and beliefs of the person who is making the judgement, and it relies on the agenda of the person who is making the judgement.

Nothing in the universe is inherently 'good' or 'evil'... it just IS.

Since we all pretty much share the same hardware, and are all wired pretty much the same, and share pretty much the same cultural values in a larger sense, we usually find ourselves on common ground when we judge questions such as "Was Hitler evil?", since we can agree on the criteria. (Murdering 6 million innocents can hardly be regarded as 'good' by a sane person.) However, we should realize that if Hitler had been asked the question "Are you evil?", he most certainly would have been thoroughly offended by the very idea. According to HIS criteria, he would have seen his actions as 'good'... for his people and for 'The Fatherland'. He is known to have said something to the effect that he saw himself as doing the work that Christianity had started, but never finished... i.e., he was doing "God's work". (He was nuts, of course... as are ALL people who see themselves as doing "God's work".)

When we get down to subtler questions, where someone's 'criteria' might depend upon interpretation of a particular verse in the Wholly Babble, or the Koran, for example, these kinds of judgements can get a little stickier.

It's not really about good/evil... it's all about your 'criteria'.

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." ~ Steven Weinberg, Freethought Today, April, 2000

Answer 6

Desire and human need.

51% of the time humans (in general) will do the right thing.

49% of the time they will do something selfish.

The fact that our civilization is the most technologically advanced, with people living twice as long as they did 1000 years ago (living far better lives too) proves this hypothesis.

Answer 7

I don't believe in evil. There is mental illness causes by genes and how the child was raised. You beat the hell out of a kid for 10 years and release them into the world, don't be surprised if they behave worse than you did to them.

Others are simply sick people who are imbalanced. Since we can't cure these people yet, they need to be separated from society.

Answer 8

It is not a dichotomy, but a distribution of varied strategies dependent many times on context.
Your question is ill posed and shows lack of intellectual accomplishment.

Answer 9

From religious zealots... Non humanistic fanatical people!
Less than human excrement's of our culturally depraved society.

Answer 10

Easy:

Illness (pedophile tendencies, for example), learned experiences (if I hit a child it will shut up) and the simple fact that nature does not create everything similarly.
People are born with only one kidney, and people are born with some tendencies (brutality, perhaps) and circumstances allow them to live that tendency.

And REAL evil (Hiroshima/Nagasaki/Nazigermany) etc isn't about social behaviour: the people who were killed were not of any importance to the killers. It is easy to hurt whom you can't see, as you can see from all the flamers on the web.

Answer 11

From us, because 1.) a few people are evil, and 2.) nobody's perfect, so evil will always find a niche somewhere.