...........that can be passed from one individual to another?




I'll come back to this thought. Curious what you might think....

I don't think it is a sickness.

I think it's a measure of distance from our self

I don't think it's a sickness either, .. I think it's just human nature.. a need to rebel! Also i don't think it can be passed to other people, but I do think that people influence each other negatively to do wicked things!
:lolhit:

That which is considered Evil or Deviant appears to change from person to person.
A person can influence the people around them to take on their personal beliefs. The head of a household can influence children.
Handed down beliefs are the only inherited influences that I can see being passed from one to another.

The practices of some societies have shocked new arrivals in their area. Many called barbaric, heathen, evil or various other names.
Yet, these practices were accepted by a people as the norm.

Could be that Evil or Deviance is like beauty...In the eye of the beholder.

I tend to believe in the inherent goodness of people. When people are considered evil - there is a reason & it's related to their own sense of self worth & how they deal with that.

The religious view is that Satan is behind evil, possessing or coercing people into evil acts. I don't accept this at all. It's just a religious urban legend.

Originally posted by Dan Fussell
Could be that Evil or Deviance is like beauty...In the eye of the beholder.

I have to agree somewhat with this. An example would be the native hawian islanders. They had a socially acceptable practice of sleeping with relatives. They actually had different words for doing it with different relatives. It was an expression of love to them and not considered wrong.

A humorous anidote...
When the Christian missionaries arrived they were appalled that all this incest was going on and immediatly started preaching that incest was wrong. Unfortunately they didn't realize that the islanders had a variety of different words for incest depending on the specific relatives involved. The missionaries only preached that sex with a brother was wrong. It caused a lot of confusion for the poor missionaries because everytime they would learn a new word for incest they would preach about that specific act being wrong but the islanders still kept having incest. There were something like eight diferent names for incest in the hawian language, all designating a different relatives.

There is no inherent Evil. Some people are just more aggressive than others. In pre-history these people would be leaders of a tribe.

We have this ideal of self control now, which is absolutely necesary for Society to exist. Those who can't control themselves are "bad" and are imprisoned or killed.

Ok, part of the reason i ask is, that I struggle with the idea that we are all born good and evil.

I think that it may be learned. Nature/nurture kind of deal.

Things like abuse, molestation, and alcholism.

If one is a child molester, chances are he was molested, and so on down the line. If your innocence is interrupted by a learned evil, aren't you more capable of repeating such a thing?

Instead of all of us being born with good and evil, I think we are merely born with the Capability to Choose such things.

Send a young first time offender to prison, chances are he will leave a more seasoned criminal, probability of reoffending.....high.

See what I am getting at?

Evil doesn't exist, other than as a label. For example, it is supposedly evil to kill . . . except when it is state sanctioned, the work of a pruning gardener. etc. A knife can kill in the hands of a murderer or save lives ion the hands of a surgeon.

I think of good and evil as being that which tends towards order and chaos respectively. Absolute order means stagnation, absoilute chaos speaks for itself, the ideal is not good or evil but a balance between the two. When that balance is not present the problems start. It is not so much that 'evil' is contagious but that imbalance leads easier to imbalance than it does to equilibrium.

Originally posted by creetwins
...that can be passed from one individual to another?

Bad ideas and teachings can and are passed from one to the other all the time.

I noticed you mentioned child abuse etc.... being passed, but the fact remains there still had to be #1. If a person was never abused but ended up abusive where did this come from? I wouldn't call it evil just a malfunction in ones make up. There are kids{few and far between} that have had nothing but love and caring in their life, but for some reason they still have a switch that goes off that causes them to be violent. Evil is a strong word that I believe is miss used. A person kills, no one really knows why, all they can come up with is that they were evil, 200 years go by and it is learned that the person had lead poisoning, etc.... Nothing evil at all just something that was not known at the time of his crime. Using the word evil can cause alot of problems just look at how some of the bible thumbers told gays of their evil doings. AIDS was there punishment for being gay, gay is evil, so there must be a form of punishment. Of course this was/is stupid and one has nothing to do with the other{gay---evil}.

i agree with dan when he says that evil is in the eye of the beholder. but one persons' behaviour certianly has the potential to influence another person's behaviour, regardless of whether you consider that behaviour to be good or evil.

but if you do look at evil as a sickness, what is the cure?

Originally posted by sputnik
[
but if you do look at evil as a sickness, what is the cure?

This depends, yesteryear it could have been as simple as something in the water. There is research that shows a serial killer has a different brain pattern then the norm. As time goes by we learn more and more maybe some day we will know how to stop the killing bug.

Originally posted by creetwins
[B]Ok, part of the reason i ask is, that I struggle with the idea that we are all born good and evil.

I think that it may be learned. Nature/nurture kind of deal.

Things like abuse, molestation, and alcholism.

If one is a child molester, chances are he was molested, and so on down the line. If your innocence is interrupted by a learned evil, aren't you more capable of repeating such a thing?

These are learned behaviours. When someone is brought up in an alcholic home, or has been abused, unless they get delivered from it, there is a good chance that they end up like their parents. People get trapped in these cycles of oppression. Even when they determined not to become like their parents, they often do. Until the cycle is broken and they are delivered from it. Jesus came to set the captives free and deliver people who are bound and oppressed. Of course, in order to get delivered, one must be willing to recieve Jesus into their hearts and be willing to change the negative though patterns in their life.

Instead of all of us being born with good and evil, I think we are merely born with the Capability to Choose such things.
Although, we do have choices and those choices will effect who we become, Satan along with his demons are bent on the destruction of humanity. They come to steal, kill and destroy. They come to lure people into sin, and to lead people down the path of destruction. They use the learned behaviour as a means of trying to get people to follow that path of destruction.

Send a young first time offender to prison, chances are he will leave a more seasoned criminal, probability of reoffending.....high.

A lot of times people reoffend, but many other do not. There are also many in prison who have accepted the Lord and have repented of their old ways.

Originally posted by the J Man
Although, we do have choices and those choices will effect who we become, Satan along with his demons are bent on the destruction of humanity. They come to steal, kill and destroy. They come to lure people into sin, and to lead people down the path of destruction. They use the learned behaviour as a means of trying to get people to follow that path of destruction.


IF satan where real then wouldn't it be a stupid move on his part to get rid of the one thing that gives him his life/spirit force? I think that when some folks don't understand an upsetting thing they are too quick to use the old satan card. Maybe instead of blaming bad things that happen to us on a made up bad guy we should research and learn what the real problem is?