YOU have the power to eradicate evil in the world. How would you accomplish this? (page 5)

jam

So can we conclude, evil and good go togather like

ham and cheese, bacon and eggs and JW,s and insanity.

Evil will never be eradicated as long as there are living

organism on this planet.

jgnat

Given the opportunity, I think people gravitate to good. Except for the psychopaths.

I think good can be summed up as "do no harm".

A lot of strife comes from a failure or a refusal to understand. To do evil to others is to see them as less than human, less than ourselves. It takes a terrific amount of dissonance to accomplish that.

So I still say, remove the reasons for corruption in the first place; chaos, war, instability, ignorance, suffering, failure of human rights...give people the freedom to prosper, and they will.

james_woods

Do you think that the above would settle the issues in Syria, Jgnat? (let alone the whole world?)

This mental excercise always boils down to one thing - Who gets to pick what is evil and what is good, and how are you going to make everybody else think the same way without rewiring their brains into conformance?

botchtowersociety

I think good can be summed up as "do no harm".

I think it is more than that. The Golden Rule is not "do not do," it is "do."

And here's another thing, evil is not a thing in and of itself. All evil is, is a relative absence of good. It is what happens when we choose a lesser good over a greater one.

Given the opportunity, I think people gravitate to good. Except for the psychopaths.

People may gravitate towards good, but even non-psychopaths make poor choices, choosing lesser goods over greater ones. This is what we call evil, and we all of us do it.

jgnat

In Syria, sure. If the leaders were required to work it out (resign) and allow the insurrectionists to set up a replacement government. I would even predict that this is exactly what will happen. The only question is how much stupidity, how much ego, how much horror will continue until someone says enough. It's been done before and is happening right now in Rwanda, for instance. Cambodia is rebuilding after the Khmer Rouge. It is in our nature to rebuild after horror...not descend in to greater horror.

As an aside, the horror of the loss of life from the first world war, might have been made worse by leaders being inured by the numbers involved. The way we internalize numbers, a hundred is not that much worse than ten thousand. So a horrified general, losing ten thousand, moves a marker on a board an hurls another ten thousand to their deaths.

It's not so hard to work out what is evil. I've summed it up above. Taken out of the equation are all the prohibitions and taboos that various cultures have added over time.

You do not need conformity for peace. You do need to speak to one's neighbour as a fellow human being. Exchange bread, perhaps.

Vanderhoven7

The problem is human nature.

It's who we are.

So we need a new nature to eliminate evil.

Almost everyone agrees that war, divorce, hate, discrimination etc is evil, but what we seem to lack is the power to abandon our paticipation.

Everybody wants to change the world, but few want to change themselves.

metatron

Establish a large degree of telepathic empathy in the human race. "I feel your pain" becomes a reality. Evil solved.

By the way, I think this might happen with the help of electronics (such as Google glasses)

metatron

jam

Let us see what Socrates say on the subject.

He believe that nobody willingly chooses to do wrong. He

maintained that doing wrong always harmed the wrongdoer

and that nobody seeks to bring harm upon themselves.

In this view all wrong doing is the result of ignorance.

This means that it is impossible for A human being to

willingly do wrong because their instinct for self interest

prevents them from doing so. Human have A powerful

instinct for benefiting themselves.

An example;

A psychologically distraught person obessed with cutting

themselves, he is trying to relieve psychological stress.

They discover this provides relief. Here we must keep the

distinction between ends and means clear in our minds.

They do not cut in order to harm their flesh, they cut in

order to relieve stress.

A basic principle in Socrates perspective is that choices,

right or wrong, serve the ends that the chooser seeks

to obtain and not the means through which the ends

are realized.

leavingwt

BTS: Is there any evidence to support the idea that you or I would make a different choice about anything if we were taken back in time 24 hours and had to replay that 24 hours, if we were unaware of the rewind? If not, are we not already robots? (Sam Harris put forth something along these lines.)

What do you think?

Aaron Eldridge

Defeat death.

YOU have the power to eradicate evil in the world. How would you accomplish this?

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