My brother asked me to start a "light hearted" blog about religion questions that bug people. Readers can pose questions and topics. He suggested topics of: evil, original sin and whether religious people behave better than non-religious people. I presume I am to provide the "light hearted" part.

12/3/10

Why is evil - part 5: the tipping point

Some forms of evil erupt when we allow our animal heritage to influence our behavior instead of putting effort into deliberately choosing to act from our continually evolving human consciousness. But there is an even worse level of evil when we apply our human capabilities of rationality, logic, and complex mental functions to augment our pre-human urges rather than to overcome them. Then we are capable of incredibly monstrous evil. We lose our humanity completely and become the essence of demonic.

Our humanity is found precisely in our capacity for empathy: seeing ourselves reflected in our fellow human beings, feeling ourselves connected to each other, recognizing our wellbeing in the wellbeing of others and experiencing their pain as our own. Our rationality, logic, abstract thought and complex mental functions can be misapplied to serve our own limited individual desires at the expense of others, breaking down our human nature. But our potential for genuine identification with others preserves and enhances our humanity.

Bad behavior in all its forms tends to be strongly related to the degree to which individuals feel a part of, invested in the people with whom they interact. When we genuinely care about the people we interact with, we are more likely to incorporate their well-being into our own sense of well-being. We become more aware of how our thoughts, words and actions affect those with whom we have formed a connection.

When we feel disconnected, when we focus on the differences between ourselves and others, when we separate ourselves from others, our natural human tendency for empathy begins to wear thin. It's when we start to feel that "you" are not like "me", that "they" are, in some fundamental way different from "us", that we begin to open the door in our psyche that allows us to behave in really bad ways. And allowing ourselves to do bad things to each other further desensitizes us, lowers our capacity for empathy and mature control of our actions, inciting us to further bad behavior.

There are all sorts of factors and conditions in our modern life which can weaken our sense of interrelatedness. We have to take a deliberate, conscious, active role in the ongoing evolution of our humanity if we are to develop our unique capacities rather than sinking back into mutual self destruction.

The why of evil always comes down to this feeling of separateness from the other person or people. When we feel connection with others, our own natural sense of self-preservation extends to wrap others with us in a bond of mutual well-being. When that connection is eroded, worn away, cut through, or neglected and left undeveloped, we start doing bad things to each other.

When we, whether individually or in mutually reinforcing group associations, actively use our intellect, reason, and conceptualization capabilities to deliberately and consciously alienate others from ourselves, we pave the superhighway to evil. And we've spent a lot of our "civilized" existence constructing a veritable intercontinental expressway of interconnected thoroughfares to hell. What we really need at this point are some great pavement busting demolition teams!


in the next blog we look at my brother's next question: who actually behaves better?

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