Evil

[whyBish]

Are we slaves to our electrochemical activity or does our spirit or soul (if they do exist) direct the formation and function of these discharges and patterns.
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Yup, exactly the root I was mentioning above.

...except I would not have described it as being a slave to our electrochemical activity, but more that our electrochemical activity is who we are (as opposed to the soul or spirit is who we are and can bypass the laws of physics).

I also have been pondering this issue for far too long, and the more I think about it, the more I dislike the labels good and evil when used as an explanation for observed behaviour (whether it exists or not). This is because it does not help towards understanding. Is a rapist evil, or is the rapist making decisions to do so on some basis (or impulse or imbalance or whatever)? Labelling as evil is post-facto, so we cannot predict that a person will be likely to do XYZ, or that people under certain circumstances are likely to respond in certain ways etc. does not lead to an understanding of cause and effect as we don't have a test for 'evil' that is not post-facto.

As an end-note, I spent four years as a non-Christian living with up to twelve Christian fundamentalists debating these and various other issues (where did the water from the flood go, why can we see light from stars more than 40k light-years away, why did God set up the universe to look as if cosmology/evolutionary ideas are plausible, is science fundamentally any different to a belief/religion, what are the fundamental axioms of science, what are the fundamental axioms of Christianity, how many scientific axioms can (fundamental) Christianity take without generating inconsistencies, how many Christian axioms can science take without creating inconsistencies, can both be internally consistent individually and explain the world (i.e. does every event that occurs have an adequate Christian, and Scientific explanation), what are the goals of the two systems, can a population with the two separate systems coexist (or will one win out), what are the implications of the two systems in how one will lead life, if one system is wrong but people believe it, would that be a bad thing?), and I would like to state for the record that when it comes to things like this, the last thing I want to do is change someones mind, all I am after is to find out why they think the way that they do :)