Are people born wicked, or is wickedness thrust upon them?

Answer 1

what do babies know about hate? all they know is that someone shows them affection and feeds them. hate is a learned behaviour that takes more effort than love. I cannot imagine a person being born with hate.

Answer 2

More people are victims, where wickedness is thrust upon them, than wicked victimizers. Many times, people are self-destructive victims of their own wicked hand. A few people are born wicked, but it is more often the case that people are forced to be wicked to adapt or survive.

Answer 3

This is an age-old question that has never really been totally answered.

Some people go with the Nature argument and believe that people are "wicked", bad, evil, etc. because it's in their blood. Others go with the Original Sin argument and believe it is because of Adam and Eve's fall from grace or some similar conception (depending on religious views). Still others go with the Nurture argument and believe that a person becomes wicked, bad, evil, etc because of the environment in which they are raised. And still others go with some combination of such ideas.

Philosophically, the problem also entails questions of whether or not Free Will exists.

It is my personal opinion that people are born with little more than Potential. Their genes contribute to some extent to their predispositions I suppose, but they do not unquestionably define how things will or must be. Beyond this I believe that people are molded in part by their experiences. And further beyond this I believe that people have Free Will and can choose, to a certain extent, how they will respond to the stage of life that they are presented with. So in short, my personal opinion on the matter is that we are a combination of Nature, Nurture, and Choice. And because of the way childhood development goes, I believe that early on we are based heavily on Nature, as we grow we are further and more significantly shaped by Nurture, and as we get older and start to learn that we can affect real change in our environment we become more and more shaped by our Choices.

It is, therefore, my opinion that the totality of someone is not easily defined as being a direct or indirect result of any single thing or set of circumstances, but rather by the combination of all things that we experience and interact with.

Others will disagree with me.

Answer 4

Wickedness is a choice people make. It is neither part of them at birth nor thrust upon them.

People become who they are because of the choices they make.

Answer 5

Ancient Europeans wrote about Ages of Man.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man

There are also many other references to various
types of world ages or Ages of Man in Hopi
(worlds), Mayan (suns) and other cultures of
antiquity. Giorgio de Santillana, the former
professsor of the history of science, mentions
approximately thirty ancient cultures that
believed in the concept of a series of ages and
the rise and fall of history, with alternating
Dark and Golden Ages.

More details of these Ages are available in the
Yuga concept of the Hindus. The present age
is known as Kali Yuga (age of darkness).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuga

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Yuga

There were no wicked persons during Golden
Age.

Answer 6

I tend to believe it is a reaction to too many wrong decisions. People, I believe are born good and every decision is a choice between good and better. You can figure out the rest of the argument.

Answer 7

We are all born with our past grooves, or sanskaras and that is what defines us, and it is our sanskaras that attracts our birth parents and our environment to us. And sanskaras are the result of our past choices, or Karma.

So, we can change all that by making choices that our more in alignment with our soul, as divine guidance is our prerogative. And it is the choice we make in this moment that will redefine us, or keep the status quo on. It is all up to us.