Is the human nature naturally good or bad?

I believe it's both.

We were created in the image of God, so in a sense, we are inherently good in many ways. We have a conscience. We know right from wrong, deep in our Spirit, and we are capable of choosing right.

But, we also sin against God and rebel from Him. And when we do that, the more we do it, the more we blind ourselves to the truth of what is good. The more we seek what is sinful instead of following God, the more we give ourselves over to darkness and have a harder time seeing the light and choosing it. Because sin is enticing and has a lot of temporary pleasures.

I believe we are, to some degree, good hy nature, but we are also weak in our humanity. Our human bodies are weak and the flesh desires sinful things. God gives us good things, like sexual pleasure for example, and in our flesh, we twist them into something perverted, like pornography.

Or God gives us something good like confidence and wisdom, and we pervert it into pride and arrogance.

Pretty much the entirety of the Old Testament, in the Bible, exists to show us that we always fail God's law. Even the Israelites, who were His chosen people and witnessed countless miracles of God saving them from slavery from the Egyptians, STILL rebelled against God constantly and chose evil things over the good things God commanded.

So, do we need government? I would say absolutely, although I believe our true government and judgement ultimately comes from God, not the White House. Whether or not the White House is the proper place for many of these laws is definitely debatable. I lean pretty Conservative Libertarian on many issues. But regardless, we do need someone to rule over us. We were designed that way, to be governed by God.

When left to our own devices, we do a lot of evil things. We do some good things too, sure, but it has been shown over and over and over again, in human history, that when humans try to take God's law into their own hands and make something different or in their minds "better," great atrocities occur.

So yeah, that's pretty much what I believe about that. I don't think it's as simple as that we are, by nature, good or bad. I think we are sort of both. Designed to be good, in the image of God, but also given weaknesses in our humanity and the free will to choose evil, and we very often make the wrong choice when faced with that decision.

 

You really believe evil is subjective? I've heard people say this before, but I honestly just don't believe they actually hold to that when it comes down to it.

I mean, let's take something like, say, torturing babies for fun. You wouldn't say that is, objectively, evil? It would be fine for someone out there in the world to declare that that's not evil, it's actually good? Would you just accept that and say "well, it's subjective, so who am I to say you're wrong"?

I mean, if you actually held to this belief and took it to its logical conclusion, then you wouldn't be able to ever tell anyone they're doing something wrong. Because who are you to say? If someone is going around raping people, who are you to tell them that's bad and they should stop? If it's all subjective, then as long as it's fine for them, nobody can say otherwise. Do you really believe that's how the world works? Because it seems very clear to me, just from simple observation, that the world does not work like that at all. That would be completely chaos.

 

Nice question. I feel humans have the potential to become a prophet of peace as well as a harbinger of horrors. An individual is capable of kindness as well as cruelty. Virtue and Vice are both our inherent nature. Atleast, that is my truth. I admit that I do have the tendency to kill, rape and destroy..however, I also have the tendency to heal, nurture and protect. I'm a sum total of these tendencies. Society would be wrong in judging me as a decent man just because I have till date never been accused of any heinous crime. Because in the recesses of my heart I know I'm both the god as well as the devil. It is just that I put a leash on the devil side...doesn't mean I'm a virtuous chap. It just happens that I'm rewarded when I express virtue and punished when I express vice (although certain vices are "rewarded" aplenty by our noble society). This dichotomy forms the engine for transcendence.

It is rubbish to claim that the end goal is to cultivate flawless virtue..virtue in the absence of vice ceases to have an identity or existence. Just as darkness is necessary to cognize light, vices is necessary to cognize virtue. A fully virtuous society is a stagnant dead society with people unaware of the value of virtue. Good and evil is inter-are. Absence of one puts the other out of business.

As a few lucky slaves who are aware of their slavery to these tendencies of virtue and vices, our job is to take that leap into the oasis of silence within..navigate...and figure out what the fuck is the whole game about..where is the ball rolling to? what's the point? Is there an plane beyond dichotomy? what is this virtue really? what is vice? does the classification matter? if yes, if vices propels you towards virtue, isn't vices a tool towards growth? what's growth anyway? you wake up at the exact moment you planned, you transcended lust, you don't have greed, you have no idea what sloth is, you are an epitome of industry, hardwork and service, and you remain joyous, day in day out, today, tomorrow, every day..like a clockwork, winning every battle over your vices...does that give you contentment? Can you even stay like that in unwavering consistency??? Or is virtue something that manifests as a direct result of getting out of ego, as a direct result of contentment, as a direct result of surrender?

I believe in the latter....but when you are immersed in the relaxed alertness of surrender, when you are drenched in the silence in your being, won't the very thought of virtue and vice disappear in the flames of awareness... all that is gonna be left left is just a dash of laughter as you perceive the non existent trying to assert it's existence

 

People are complicated.

 

Most animals, but mostly mammals i think are capable of altruistic behavior within their own group this is to ensure their survival so in that sense there is clearly some some of instinctive moral compass such as "do not kill your own", there is some exceptions to this but it is true for the most part and they are even capable of cross-species friendship/protection even when it does not benefit them at all but humans are probably better than every other animals out there at this. Having said that if you take a bird view as a whole humanity has certainly created the most misery on earth, ignoring the countless species they recklessly exterminated about 250K ago if you did not fear a human your specie was at a risk of extinction. For most lifeforms on earth humans are certainly the threat and plainly not born good(if good mean not killing and eating them) but now i may be biased here yet if i were an animal i would rather a human get to me rather than any other predator, the concept of suffering for your prey is utterly alien to them.
That being said there are people out there who are born with personality disorder like sociopathy or psychopathy, within their own specie they are clearly born not-good.

 

I'm not really sure why you sent your reply to me specifically. I agree with this statement, and it makes perfect sense in line with my answer to the question above. It doesn't really have anything to do with my post that you quoted, though, so I'm not sure what you were responding to exactly.

 

Yes, i believe good and evil are subjective and there is no such thing as an objective good and evil. Humans and animals by nature have the purpose of survival and procreation, our actions were with the sole purpose of achieving this goal. However we have evolved a consciousness and the ability to think and this is what allows us to decide if something/someone is good or evil.

To answer your example about torturing babies i dont think this is "objectively" evil, i think this is "subjectively" evil (or just evil, since objective good and objective evil does not exist there is no need to specify that its subjective). With the statement "well, it's subjective, so who am I to say you're wrong"? you seem to imply that if good and evil are subjective that somehow makes it meaningless/arbitrary/invalid and we can automatically dismiss any claim about good and evil on the basis that its subjective but i dont agree with this idea. I think that our difference in opinion lies in what it entails for something to be subjective or objective.

 

It literally does... your opinion of what is right or wrong is completely meaningless if there is no objective standard. You never have any right to tell someone else that what they are doing is wrong, if you admit that it's totally subjective. It 100% makes it meaningless, arbitrary, and invalid.

Tbh, I'm not really interested in debating this at this time. I have a lot going on in my life, and this is a hugely complicated discussion that I don't really want to get into anymore. I'll leave you with this video, if you want to understand my view more. I agree with Mike Winger in this debate, and I think his debate opponent Doug exhibits many logical fallacies that he doesn't recognize as such. I think you are doing the same, so perhaps you won't recognize them either, but maybe Mike can explain it better than I can.


(Playback doesn't work on NoFap, but if you click on it it should take you to the video on YT)

 

Oh, and also, I think this statement is absolutely insane. Just wanted to mention that.

If you say this isn't objectively evil, you are essentially saying it isn't evil. That is the logical conclusion if you follow your view logically to its end. Torturing babies for fun is only evil to you, in your opinion, but if someone else came along and said it was good to torture babies for fun, that would be true for them, and that would be fine. That's horrifying to me, and it should be horrifying to you as well.

 

I can kind of see where you're both coming from and I think you are both operating on different definitions of what is "good", "evil", "subjective" and "objective".

There are some schools of philosophy that would state that objective moral valuation as such does not exist due to our profound ignorance / human limitation in general and prescribe different methods to try to approximate value (does x behavior appear to have utility, practicality, improve the state of being for oneself and others, etc.) These values are, by definition, subjective but still provide a potential pathway to determining the "correct" behavior.

Then there is the post-modernist claim that absolutely everything is 100% subjective, arbitrary, open to interpretation and there are no possible means of determining any sort of value whatsoever. This "philosophy" is a contradiction in of itself as the fundamental presuppositions of post-modernism are themselves deconstructed and rendered arbitrary when examined through the post-modernist framework.

In short, these discussions can get complicated.

 

Yes i agree, we are operating on different definitions of "subjective" and "objective".
My understanding of it is that by definition there exists no "objective" moral valuation and when we talk about good and evil we are by definition talking about a "subjective" good and evil, this is independent of the value attached to it (as opposed to the post-modernist claim that everything is arbitrary and has no value which perhaps TakingTheSteps thinks is the point im trying to make when i use the word subjective)

Lets take Utilitarianism for example, the action that maximizes the sum of the utility of all people is the right action. If you accept this statement as true and that this is what captures the essence of whats right and wrong (I think there are plenty of arguments against this but thats not the point im trying to make so just assume its true for the sake of my argument) then this looks completely objective, based on the statement either an action is right or wrong and there is no uncertainty in it however utility itself is an abstract concept based on happiness, sadness, pain and pleasure which are all subjective and abstract concepts that are impossible to quantify and arent necessarily qualitatively equal to eachother so we can only estimate utility and all of our estimates will by definition be subjective.

Maybe my definition of "subjective" and "objective" is flawed so im curious what in your opinion it means for something to be "objective" and what the schools of philosophy are that do state objective moral valuation exists?

 

Like i said we seem to disagree on what it entails for something to be subjective (and therefore also disagree that this makes it meaningless, arbitrary and invalid) and i think this is where our difference of opinions comes from, i do see the point your trying to make and i agree its a complicated discussion. I will save the video for later, thanks for sharing (at the moment i have youtube blocked to avoid procrastinating on upcoming exams)

 

Your definitions are not necessarily flawed, it's just a matter of perspective. Every method of valuation has to start somewhere, with a set of presuppositions that are then used to define terms, which are then used within a logical framework to attempt to make sense of things.

Classical philosophy (from the ancient Greeks and Romans, etc.) would generally state that there are objective moral truths that can be ascertained through the use of reason and observation of nature.

Morality from a religious perspective would of course rely on divine revelation to determine what is true. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, the commandments of God would be considered objective truths.

 

I'm not really sure how I would answer this differently than everything I already said, so I will just leave it at that. I feel like I already explained what I think, and I don't want to repeat myself.

 

I believe, yes, but not arbitrarily. I also believe in gravity, but not arbitrarily. There are many, many reasons to believe in the validity of the Bible. It's not like I just chose some random religion and said "I'll believe this one."

We all "believe" in a lot of things in life. Belief isn't a bad thing unless it's not founded on anything solid and has no evidence to support your belief. Christianity has tons. But that's a whole other subject that I think would derail this thread pretty quickly, because it's complex.

These videos are a good place to start. But notice I say a good place to start, not an end all, be all. People have been studying this stuff for thousands of years, and I myself have studied it for years, so I can't give you one simple statement that will magically prove to you that Christianity is true.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ3iRMLYFlHuhA0RPKZFHVcjIMN_-F596

 

I would say I agree with a lot of what @TakingTheSteps has already said in his initial post, hopefully what I'm adding gives more understanding.

If you look in Genesis chapter one, you will see that by the end of the chapter it says "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day." All that God made at this point included mankind, so as you said since we are created from God and God is good mankind was then also good, that was up until Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit.

Romans 5:12 "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—". In this verse the word 'death' is talking about spiritual death i.e. separation of mankind from God, the bigger picture of the devil's plan was not just to get God unhappy with Adam and Eve but to separate man from the Kingdom of God by making man tainted with sin. So by that act of sin all people from birth are sinful in nature.

This is where the death and resurrection of Jesus comes in. Sin was imputed onto Jesus when He died and He rose as the righteous saviour. He did this to so that we can vicariously through Jesus die in our sinful nature and have our spirits transformed into a righteous one, you can look in 2 Corinthians 5:16-21.

Understand we don't often look at ourselves the way God sees us. We tend to think that because I did something good therefore I am good or if I did something bad therefore I am bad, but God looks at our spirits, that is not to say He is blind to our acts, He does see them and is aware that our flesh will desire to do wrong even though we have a spirit that desire to do right. God counts those who have accepted Christ as righteous.

 

I agree with most of what you said, but not this. The Bible doesn't teach the concept of "original sin," or that we are, by nature, sinful at birth. A baby hasn't committed sin yet. Babies aren't guilty of sin before they have sinned themselves. There are many reasons why this is a problematic view, one of which being that Jesus is said to be like us in every way, yet without sin. So if he was like us in every way and born fully human (as the Bible says he was), then he would also have that status of sinful by nature, which he clearly did not.

We are sinful because we sin. We aren't sinful automatically just by being born.

In regards to whether or not we are good, in a sense we are good, because as you said, God said that all that he created was good. However, that was before the fall. We can see pretty clearly in Luke 18:19 that Jesus says that "no one is good except God alone."

 

I was ressing Ecclesiastes this morning and this verse reminded me of this thread. It sums it up perfectly.

"This only I have found: God created man upright, but they have gone in search of many schemes."
Ecclesiastes 7:29