The dark side of human nature

[Bubbles]

I saw people whose hands had been amputated, those with no legs, and others with no heads. I saw everything.

Especially seeing people rolling around and screaming in agony, with no arms, no legs. People died in very bad conditions.

It was as if we were taken over by Satan. We were taken over by Satan. When Satan is using you, you lose your mind. We were not ourselves. Beginning with me, I don't think I was normal.

You wouldn't be normal if you start butchering people for no reason. We had been attacked by the devil.

Even when I dream my body changes in a way I cannot explain. These people were my neighbours. The picture of their deaths may never leave me. Everything else I can get out of my head but that picture never leaves. 


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3582011.stm

People find many excuses to hurt others and to excuse themselves for having done so.

People seem to do this, whether they are religious or not.

The cause, isn't religion IMO, it's something inside people.

Political ideology, some violent aspect of a religion? It can motivate it, but people choose to join in.

Is it just greed? Jealousy?

What causes someone to go out and butcher a child?

What is it that motivates them?

 

So many religions do contain good things, how come they don't reach this part of us.

Humans have been nasty to each other for hundreds of thousands of years.

It's not even lack of education, because some of the worst have been very educated.

 

You would think we would have stopped by now, given how most people know this could be a much nicer world for us all, if it stopped.

[Leonard James]

I think it is probably because empathy was fairly late in evolving, and will take quite a time to override other, more basic instincts.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

I think it is probably because empathy was fairly late in evolving, and will take quite a time to override other, more basic instincts.

According to Leakey there is evidence of periods and places of great cooperation that would put us to shame in past history.

Moral progress is an illusion...particularly when you take attitudes to animals and the natural world into account.

[ekim]

I remember watching the Milgram experiment, which might give a clue.  He used actors as subjects but the students didn't know this.  Here is an extract from His book ...... "I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

[Walt Zingmatilder]

I remember watching the Milgram experiment, which might give a clue.  He used actors as subjects but the students didn't know this.  Here is an extract from His book ...... "I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

Thanks for this.

From a religionethics angle people have used the Milgram experiment to flag up the dangers of religious authority but the authority in the experiment is in fact scientific and indeed any authority can elicit the same response.

[Leonard James]

According to Leakey there is evidence of periods and places of great cooperation that would put us to shame in past history.

No doubt! Progress is not a step at a time, it is often two steps forward and one step back.

Moral progress is an illusion...particularly when you take attitudes to animals and the natural world into account.

I don't think so. Our moral values are slowly improving, but they, too, can do so by two forward and one backward.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

No doubt! Progress is not a step at a time, it is often two steps forward and one step back.

I don't think so. Our moral values are slowly improving, but they, too, can do so by two forward and one backward.

Like you I believe there is scope for ''moral improvement''.
I do not believe in an overall improvement or that there couldn't be regress at any time in the future, the violation of planet Earth forbids it.

[floo]

Whilst there are many good and decent people of faith, it can also bring out the very worst elements of human nature. On this forum there are some decent Christians, who I have time for, even if I don't see it there way, but there are others who bring the faith into disrepute by their self-righteous, ghastly behaviour.

If god exists, why did it pick out quite a number of unpleasant people in the Bible to represent it, like Abraham, for instance?

[torridon]

The dark side of human nature ? in our civilisedness, maybe we tend to forget that we are animals at base; we have been learning to be civilised for a couple of hundred thousand years, but in evolutionary timescales that is just the peel on the skin of an apple. The animal inside is still there, and emerges on occasions, like in Rwanda, or Srebrenica.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

The dark side of human nature ? in our civilisedness, maybe we tend to forget that we are animals at base; we have been learning to be civilised for a couple of hundred thousand years, but in evolutionary timescales that is just the peel on the skin of an apple. The animal inside is still there, and emerges on occasions, like in Rwanda, or Srebrenica.

Animals do not divert billions into nuclear weapon research in order to produce an H Bomb.

[Udayana]

The dark side of human nature ? in our civilisedness, maybe we tend to forget that we are animals at base; we have been learning to be civilised for a couple of hundred thousand years, but in evolutionary timescales that is just the peel on the skin of an apple. The animal inside is still there, and emerges on occasions, like in Rwanda, or Srebrenica.

hmmm ... that seems to slander animal life and our animal past ... no doubt there are situations in which violent animal passions control our behaviour, but genocide is definitely a deliberate, calculated, human activity - performed to demonstrate and exercise power over others.
 
 

[torridon]

Most animals with territorial instincts would use weapons to completely eliminate rival groups if they could; rivalry between baboon or chimp troups is bloodthirsty and uncompromising; no taking prisoners for them.  Humans are the apes with brains to make deadly weapons, that makes us so much more dangerous. 

Getting along politely with the neighbours is a quite recent phenomenon for us, it only really started when we began living communally in villages at the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago.

[Udayana]

Well, if the chimps were to build drones to take out entirely harmless villages on the other side of the world, then we would certainly regard them as human rather than animal.

Our (apparantly) peaceful and civilised behaviour is as much "animal" in origin as tribal hostilities and violence. For me our "human" side is the ability to think in abstractions and includes being able to detach ourselves from the destruction we actually perpetrate.

[Sassy]

The dark side of human nature ? in our civilisedness, maybe we tend to forget that we are animals at base; we have been learning to be civilised for a couple of hundred thousand years, but in evolutionary timescales that is just the peel on the skin of an apple. The animal inside is still there, and emerges on occasions, like in Rwanda, or Srebrenica.

We are not animals. Never were, never will be and certainly cannot use any old excuse such as being one to defend what happens in situations as Rose has made us aware about.


The evil in mans nature is what is harnessed and those who follow and condone evil are more likely to commit it.
It starts with just one seed and can lead to evil beyond that we would want to see or accept possible.

[Leonard James]

We are not animals. Never were, never will be and certainly cannot use any old excuse such as being one to defend what happens in situations as Rose has made us aware about.


The evil in mans nature is what is harnessed and those who follow and condone evil are more likely to commit it.
It starts with just one seed and can lead to evil beyond that we would want to see or accept possible.

That is all a load of stupid and outdated rot.

[torridon]

We are not animals. Never were, never will be and certainly cannot use any old excuse such as being one to defend what happens in situations as Rose has made us aware about.

Well we are, of course, at base, animals, we don't need a Phd in biology to recognise that basic fact.  Understanding what we are, and where we have come from, I would have thought would be something every person would want to consider sooner or later. To understand our present, we need to know our past.

[Shaker]

We are not animals. Never were, never will be

Another one for FSTDT.

[Sassy]

That is all a load of stupid and outdated rot.

HITLER

One seed that proves my point.

And ignorance like yours which allowed it.... Point proven.

[Sassy]

We are not animals.. We named animals, animals... and we also were the caretakers of what God created.
Only man could believe his own stupid made up reasoning. A reasoning which excludes God.
Even those Christian Scientist do not stoop to such stupidity.
It is as stupid as evolution believes that simple forms of life spontaneously arose from non-life.
God created man in his own image he is not listed in the animals and their kinds.

Man is made in the image of God and is not an animal.

[Stranger]

We are not animals.. We named animals, animals... and we also were the caretakers of what God created.
Only man could believe his own stupid made up reasoning. A reasoning which excludes God.
Even those Christian Scientist do not stoop to such stupidity.
It is as stupid as evolution believes that simple forms of life spontaneously arose from non-life.
God created man in his own image he is not listed in the animals and their kinds.

Man is made in the image of God and is not an animal.

Sassy blindly asserted without the suggestion of a hint of a scintilla of any reasoning or evidence.

What a surprise...

[torridon]

We are not animals.. We named animals, animals... and we also were the caretakers of what God created.
Only man could believe his own stupid made up reasoning. A reasoning which excludes God.
Even those Christian Scientist do not stoop to such stupidity.
It is as stupid as evolution believes that simple forms of life spontaneously arose from non-life.
God created man in his own image he is not listed in the animals and their kinds.

Man is made in the image of God and is not an animal.

OK, whatever ...

[floo]

We are not animals. Never were, never will be and certainly cannot use any old excuse such as being one to defend what happens in situations as Rose has made us aware about.


The evil in mans nature is what is harnessed and those who follow and condone evil are more likely to commit it.
It starts with just one seed and can lead to evil beyond that we would want to see or accept possible.

Of course we are animals. You don't half talk a load of silly nonsense!

[floo]

We are not animals.. We named animals, animals... and we also were the caretakers of what God created.
Only man could believe his own stupid made up reasoning. A reasoning which excludes God.
Even those Christian Scientist do not stoop to such stupidity.
It is as stupid as evolution believes that simple forms of life spontaneously arose from non-life.
God created man in his own image he is not listed in the animals and their kinds.

Man is made in the image of God and is not an animal.

How do you know?

[Shaker]

How do you know?

She doesn't.

It's just the invincibly ignorant human exceptionalism that thrives in a theistic mindset.

[floo]

She doesn't.

It's just the invincibly ignorant human exceptionalism that thrives in a theistic mindset.

But to be fair not ALL theists come out with the crazy garbage which Sass does with almost every post.