Former Christfag here.
I was raised within the church for most of my life but recently became disenchanted with it all. There is still one concept I find interesting however, original sin, the notion that all humans are evil at birth. I want to explore this concept further.
Authors don't have to be Christian but it also doesn't disqualify them either. Give me some people who think Humanity is evil.
Why seek out misanthropes?
Start with what is evil, scrutinize it. Sure, some people do awful things, but why? Born that way? Nonsense.
You eat an apple from a tree and somehow its an evil sin. Ultimate nonsense.
Isn't this fairly common in Gnostic belief systems?
>Former Christfag here.
I was there too, and I'm a Christian again. Atheism is cringe. With time you will come back to God.
I never said I was Atheist, just that I left Christianity. I call myself a Deist at the moment.
Paradise Lost expands greatly on the idea of Original Sin along with a bunch of other catholic ideas. Get the William Blake version if you can. 10/10, would recommend.
>Born that way? Nonsense
Yeah man surely psychopathy doesn't exist and some people clearly aren't born with those traits.
>I was embarrassed ave come t my sense when everyone else was clearly not going to follow suit
How embarrassing
Sensible enough stage. I was there too.
I looked into Gnosticism some. Spinoza interest you? And this sounds about right Enjoy
>people born with brain deformities are evil
And I suppose you think it was the devil that made them this way. We’re talking about “original sin” something everyone is supposed to have
There's people born without arms and legs, just as much there's people that is born a psychopath and yes psychopaths lack empathy thus are evil.
I'm baffled with your moronic way of viewing things. There's no devil but morons.
Have you read the Bible? Actually read all of the Bible?
Sooner or later you're going to get beyond psychotherapy, with its cheesy moral relativism. You're going to get to good and evil.
What is beyond? Your religion cult? On mental illness yeah.
Hobbes
One could argue than ancient Greeks had this belief. Hesiod says that the current age has the worst kind of men. And is more or less the whole theme of Sophocles work: that man is, if not evil, fundamentally flawed
Not to be that guy but inherited sin is a western doctrine that’s absent in Orthadoxy
You cant say someine with psychopathic traits is evil if they havent hurt anyone
No, in gnostic beliefs the human spirit is divine and ultimately good. But it's trapped in a reincarnating soul which becomes successively trapped in material bodies.
even if they intend to, they say they want to, or they try and are prevented?
Not me, or anything human for that matter
Really? I am not to sure if Hobbes presents a strong and thorough analysis of human nature as being evil. His argument that people are primarily motivated by fear can be defended, but that's about it.
even if they intend to, they say they want to, or they try and are prevented?
The mental case may be bad or “evil”, but again, this is not what “original sin” is on about. The mental case in the ancient world would be classified as demon possessed even.
you actually thought the story was meant to be understood literally?
LOL, butterfly poster confirmed LOW IQ
It’s clearly a story a out parental control and obedience. There are still people who take it literally too.
>there are still people who take it literally too
>therefore it's okay if I take it literally
butterfly poster confirmed LOW IQ
just go back to painting your nails pretty colors
youll be back
I mean if they dont intend to.. someone whos not psychopathic could want to hurt someone too
Humanity isn't inherently evil. We all have a primal drive inside us that can be overcome with self discipline, and this is supported by neuroscience. Our biological drives to have sex and eat as much food as possible may have been beneficial in the wild, but are harmful in modern society. Those who are dumb are both incapable of seeing the consequences to their actions, and incapable of following rules. These dumb people hurt themselves and others. Religious commandments and laws were created specifically for those unable to see the consequences to their actions, yet these people continue to be a threat to the structure of society.
psychopathy isn't 'evil' you dumb baby
>Overcome by self discipline
Neuroscience suggests that much of self control is genetic.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
>self control
You got a definition for that boi?
The capacity to exert and maintain effortful deliberative control over ones behaviour
People surely are resistant to the possibility and fact some people are simply born in some way or the other, that's what really evil and dishonest, denying reality.
We all know that he is the ultimate misanthrope
Control of what things for what end? Is a purposeful, meticulous killer self-controlled? And is it a capacity, or a knowledge or an activity or something else?
People are innately evil in that that's just what they are, genetics is too petty and common to have such an emotional force over one's most essential self.
tripfags are among the dumbest posters
So you have defined self-control as control over oneself. Great job, dumbass.
Can we kill butterfly?
Dostoevsky
Sophistry will be the death of you, Socrates.
It's always the damn sophists!
Did you read the source you provided?
>When confronted with an estimate of extremely high heritability of executive functions, one’s first reaction may be despair that executive control abilities are fixed and immutable (one might also think that because Shifting was the only executive function to show significant environmental influences, it is the only one amenable to change). In other words, one might think that our results necessitate the interpretation that executive control abilities are all “nature” and no “nurture” and thereby fundamentally challenge recent research on environmental manipulations to improve executive function performance. Such interpretations are incorrect, however. Contrary to common misconceptions, high heritability does not mean that environmental factors cannot and do not affect executive functions.
>In fact, our results do not negate the findings of recent studies demonstrating that it is possible to improve executive control abilities through targeted training.
>How can these results be reconciled with our finding of high heritability for executive functions? Generally speaking, heritability is an estimate of the genetic influence on individual differences around a population mean (i.e., the population variance), rather than an estimate of the influences on the mean itself. Thus, environmental factors can influence a population’s average at the same time that genetic factors influence its variance (Scarr, 1992). The effects of training on executive functions may be analogous. Targeted training can certainly improve individuals’ performances on executive function tasks (hence affecting the group mean), but, as long as training effects influence all individuals roughly equally (reflecting an equal change from baseline across individuals), individual differences in executive functions could still be due almost entirely to genetic influences. Moreover, it is also important to note that differences in environments can themselves be genetically mediated (e.g., individuals predisposed to have good executive functions selecting environments that nurture those executive functions), leading to gene-environment correlations (Neale & Cardon, 1992). In such cases, environmental effects are included in the estimate for heritability, because they are themselves genetically influenced. These considerations clearly suggest that the current findings should not be taken as evidence that executive control abilities are immutable and cannot be influenced by environmental manipulations.
Self control is something that can be improved. Self control can be improved with things as basic as meditation, patience or believing you have a non-exhaustable amount of self control. If self control does happen to be majorly genetic, then those without self control should be taken out of the gene pool, or have those specific genes edited.
Character limit was reached on that post. I'm also going to say that the study you linked was measuring those three executive functions linked to self control, but not self control itself.
Well its phenomenally defined user. Doesnt mean its poorly defined or invalid.
I think the end or purpose is irrelevant but it is sustaining an intention deliberatively without interference. For me its generally to do with opportunity costs - competing with other actions with more immediate reward. A killer can be self controlled if he goes through the effort to make sure he doesnt get caught rather than acting on impulse.
This is a very general ad hoc footnote on heritability which is more for the benefit of the fatalistic reader than anything else though is still always going to be a true point.
But there is generally no real evidence that bares on this issue either way. Any studies about improving executive function are inconsistent and there isnt really enough evidence to say definitively you can improve them nor that those improvements even affect peoples lives. Those studies also dont look at the latent level meaning they cant be compared to this study at all - Executive tasks at the none latent level have a much lower heritability (40 - 60%) but this is probably because executive tasks are notoriously dirty which is why this research group has been using latent variable statistics and given the simplicity of the tasks they study, its not surprising that they might actually have stumbled on a largely genetic long term construct.
The genetics dont mean logically that executive function cant be changed environmentally and there are many different ways this may occur. But the fact that the study shows that there is a very high heritability rather unambiguously shows that this just doesnt seem to be an affect when looking at your general population - its easier to predict someones executive function from their relatives xf than the lifestyle they choose to live.
Ive never heard of belief in a nonexhaustable self control being beneficial and i dont believe that.
As with patience and meditation you could make an argument of gene-environment interaction as your quotation says... people who are better at xf might get the benefit. Theres a certain irony in that committing to an extensive training person to help self control... requires self control.
Yes these are component processes necessary for self control and not all of them. Then again though you will never get a study which can totally study "self control" its too broad.
I think I believe that people can learn to train in specific tasks and can learn to develop mechanisms to cope with poor self control. But i dont believe there is unambiguous evidence that we can systematically train self control.
>Ive never heard of belief in a nonexhaustable self control being beneficial and i dont believe that.
Maybe I didn't articulate the idea accurately enough but it would be comparable to the placebo effect.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
>Theres a certain irony in that committing to an extensive training person to help self control... requires self control.
This is both an oversimplification and an overexaggeration.
I’m an atheist, dingdong. Of course I don’t take it for anything but a fable.
Is this ironic dimwittedness?