So Little Do We Know

SOMETIMES YOU GET SUCKED back into these online email chat groups even if you try to slip away. Responding to a discussion about serial killers, ted bundy in particular, a discussion group member concluded that evil is real, it exists, and it takes over people like ted bundy, all because of adam's fall from grace in the garden of eden. The most alarming feature of his words was his description of evil as being "amongst us", rather than "within" us. Almost as if he considers evil to be something tangible, a measurable physical force, rather than a concept, albeit a very useful one. "Evil" is a judgment we make about human behavior, an opinion, an attitude, a thought. To the extent that thoughts and attitudes are real, evil is real, and rest assured it is. My thoughts are real, or at least i think they are; aren't yours? Avoiding overly simplistic, arbitrary explanations, explanations involving adam's fall from grace and evil as a force of nature, helps us to steer away from erroneous beliefs about causal connections, problems, and solutions. The epidemic of mass murders and serial killings in america is most likely not caused by anything outside the human mind, and not going to be solved, or even ameliorated, for instance, by prayer, unless prayer can alter fundamental human nature. The key to understanding evil is understanding human behavior, and the key to understanding human behavior is understanding what, why, and how what we call "evil" is evil. A thorough exploration of the human brain using nano tech robots might be a good start. Sociology, behavioral economics, and psychology, all very new sciences, are nothing other than a search to understand ourselves, who, as far as we know, are the source of all good and evil. No matter how much we want to attribute good and evil to "God", we end up back with ourselves, with nothing to really study other than ourselves, because god is, for all practical purposes, just another concept, like good and evil. NO matter how real God is to us, to us, he is still a concept, so little do we know about him, or anything else.