evil – Harmonia Philosophica

Religious violence. Analyzed?

Artificial intelligence can help us to better understand the causes of religious violence and to potentially control it, according to a new Oxford University collaboration. The study is one of the first to be published that uses psychologically realistic AI – as opposed to machine learning.

The study published in The Journal for Artificial Societies and Social Stimulation, combined computer modelling and cognitive psychology to create an AI system able to mimic human religiosity, allowing them to better understand the conditions, triggers and patterns for religious violence. (1)

We like to analyze things.

To find the logic behind the deepest evil.

But there is not logic in the shadows.

The cosmos is a bad place.

Full of free will and degradation.

Devil’s biggest trick is that he has convinced us he does not exist.

You must believe that there is malice in the cosmos in order to fight it.

No logic. No cause and effect. Just pure malice.

But there is a way out.

The darkness can be fought.

But not through the light.

This is too logical and predictable to even remotely work.

But through transforming the darkness itself.

Look inside.

You are the raging abyss.

Dark.

Furious.

The destroyer of worlds.

And at the same time…

The life-giver of the cosmos.

A small snail.

A delicate flower.

Birds singing.

It is not that the abyss is far away.

This IS the abyss.

Whispering gently…

Are you afraid enough?

FISH. BEACH. DEATH. (Inaction as a source of evil)

Beach. Children. Parents. Sun and joy. Some kids catch some small fish. They put them in a bucket of water. Eventually they forget about them for a while and some of the fish die. A little kid is crying. Parents intervene indifferently and put the rest of the fish back into the sea. And life on the beach continued. With play and laughter. Under the morning sun…

And yet, under that pleasant sun, something had died excruciatingly. Not because someone actively did something. But because someone was just indifferent and inactive. Now they were just some small fish. (Although this was certainly not a trivial matter for them if you asked them) Yet in another era this kind of indifference killed Jews. Or blacks. Today the same indifference kills Christians living right next to us. And we continue to play under the pleasant sun.

Forgetting that being good is not simply a state of “doing no harm”. Being good requires energy and strength. Being good requires vigor and determination. On the contrary, evil is usually not some action (e.g. commit murder) but the omission to actively do good! One needs to take active action against temptation and evil in order to be good! “I do nothing” is not enough!

No, being good is not easy at all.

Oops!

The little fish !!!

Are we getting less violent? No. (And we cannot)

Scientists battle over whether violence has declined over time.

Contrary to a popular idea among researchers, modern states haven’t dulled people’s long-standing taste for killing each other in battle, a controversial study concludes. But living in a heavily populated society may up one’s odds of surviving a war, two anthropologists proposed.

As a population grows, larger numbers of combatants die in wars, but those slain represent a smaller average percentage of the total population, say Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee and Charles Hildebolt of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. That pattern holds for both small-scale and state societies, the researchers reported in Current Anthropology on October of the previous year.

Increasing absolute numbers of war dead in human societies have resulted from the invention of ever-more-lethal weapons, from stone axes to airborne bombers, the researchers suspect. But Falk and Hildebolt show that states, which centralize political power in a bureaucratic government, are less likely to lose large portions of their populations to war than are small-scale societies, such as hunter-gatherers. That’s a consequence of large populations acting as a buffer against war casualties among noncombatants, not a lesser appetite for violence, the researchers contend. (1)

We believe we are progressing, but there is no data to attest to that. We like to believe we are getting better, but we have only ourselves to testify to that.

People always killed people.

Evil is part of the cosmos from the very beginning.

We cannot discard it from the world.

Only the Maker of that world can.

All we can do is endure.

And give bread to that little sparrow…

God is Dead. Along with some babies. The era of Enlightenment as an Era of Evil.

‘We promised our little boy every single day that we would take him home’, said the mother of little Charlie. We want to give him a bath at home, put him in a cot which he has never slept in but we are now being denied that. We know what day our son is going to die but don’t get a say in how that will happen’ [mother of Charlie – source]

An article written in the occasion of the Charlie Gard case…

The cosmos is an evil place.

This is the harsh reality today. And anyone not admitting it, is either lucky enough to have temporarily avoided that evil, stupid or part of that evil.

We live in the age of death. Not death in the sense of physically dying. This was always the case. And all we had to do was to accept it. But a spiritual death.

We are in the age of euthanasia justified by the notion of “human dignity”. As if all those people who die every passing minute have non. We live in the age of killing babies, where the murder is named “termination” and the “right to my body” is misinterpreted as a right to destroy another person into pieces and suck him into a vacuum only because you prefer drinking mojitos at Mykonos without anyone annoying you. We live in the age of childless leaders, who prefer to adopt dogs rather than human children who suffer. We live in the age of society destroying the notion of family, thus sentencing the souls of young child into a life of misery, just in order to be regarded as “progressive”. And this happens at the same time when pedophilia is starting to be considered acceptable in the name of the “enlightenment” of our “modern” society. We live in the age of hospitals and courts deciding who lives and who dies, all in the name of some nicely named “right”. We live in the era where people believe in science, which in turns believes humans as spiritual beings do not exist…

God is dead.

He used to Be among us. But we killed him.
Because we were part of Him as well.
And we could thus kill Him with our own actions if we wished so.

God is dead.

And no, this is not something to celebrate about.
Charlie is in his cot now. Don’t cry anymore…

The problem of Good… The problem of Evil… The problem as the Solution!

People talk about the problem of evil.

But they never talk about the problem of good… wonders philosopher William James. We have learnt that the world is inherently good and we worry about the problem of evil? Or are we too blind to see the inherent evil of the cosmos so as to wonder about how can good even exist?

But wait a minute. Does it even matter? Good. Evil.

What does it matter in a cold soulless world?

But we do not live in such a world do we?

Sometimes the problem is the solution…