It is all well and good to conceptualize and intellectualize the concept of evil. I would agree that psychopaths have an untreatable mental disorder, this has been shown by studies and brain scans that have shown a marked difference in the frontal lobes of their brains and physiological differences as well. And yet, I would add that there is a spiritual component to it as well. It is somthting that you can detect through your spiritual and bodily senses. It can raise the hair on your head, it is an aura of darkness, it can change the features of a face when the mask is removed. Evil is subjective until you are on the other end of it. Then, believe me, you and the perpetrator are not one on any level of the spectrum whatsover. You are dealing with a completely separate entity there. And it does not respond to light or love or reason or sanity. At it's core it is fearless. Yes, it does feed off the fear of others and on a large scale it seeks to separate, to compartmentalize itself.

This is why all those who consiously participate in the compartmentalization of evil are in their part feeding into this destructive energy, even though they may not be themselves, entirely 'bad' people. When you have large atrocities you have many thousands of people making these individual decisions. The bureaucrats, the administrators, the lobbyists, those who make the decisions, the ones who drop the bombs, the people who make the bombs, the medics who leave people to die, the ones who turn away. It is compartmentalized for a reason, so no one has to take responsibility for their own part in it. This is how evil grows and expands, through separation, in the physical sense, in the intellectual sense and through the spiritual senses.

There is black and white where evil is concerned. Evil itself would love the concept that there is no black or white in it, that is precisely how it justifies itself, that is one reason why people participate in it, it is how people alleviate their conscience. You say that on the highest level we are all one, take it further and it would be that true holiness and evil are one (I say this even though I know you believe that evil does not exist) but true holiness and all that it inhabits, that being, peace and love and empathy and wholeness can never be one with evil separation and darkness and destruction. It is simply not possible. There are opposing sides, it is the nature of the beast.

In my opinion it's the same old "it's them vs. us" mentality that has been installed in people's heads through indoctrination camps err i meant public schools as well as most media . There always has to be a "bad guy", a scapegoat so to speak . Xenophobic behaviour or "an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange" , is it a "flight or fight" situation ?

The christian worldview teaches us that there is a god representing good and a devil representing evil .
"Satan" or "Lucifer" is depicted as a being resembling a humanoid with a goat head .
From a "religious zealot" point of view , the countless victims of wars fought in the name of a "god" can be justified , because the other religion is the "bad" one . The crusades for example .
Some christians think that islam represents evil .
Some muslims think that christianity represents evil .
But why some people cannot see past the label of an institutionalized religion and actually kill each other because of different belief systems is truly beyond my comprehension .

In other religions or beliefs , deities with a human/animal appearance are fairly common .
Egyptian mythology for example features many different deities with a human body but an animal head .
So does Hinduism . Even in greek mythology we can find "hybrids", which many would stigmatize as "satanic", yet it was in greece that thinkers and philosophers came up with the concept as well as the term "democracy" , the form of government which supposedly safeguards the power of the people .
According to the ancient "aliens" theory , earth has possibly been visited by extreterrestrial/extradimensional entities in the past .

"Gaijin" , a japanese word for stranger or foreigner sounds similar to "kaijin" which translates to "roughly humanoid monster " . A related term is "kaiju" which means "strange beast" or "monster" . After the end of WWII , the movie dinosaur monster godzilla (gojira in japanese) was conceived as a metaphor for nuclear weapons . "Gorira" means gorilla and "kojira" means whale . Why does a "gorillawhale" look like a dinosaur ?
Reptilian/saurian space dinosaurs with laser cannons ?
The new "commies" or an actual threat ?

Originally posted by batgirl

It is all well and good to conceptualize and intellectualize the concept of evil. I would agree that psychopaths have an untreatable mental disorder, this has been shown by studies and brain scans that have shown a marked difference in the frontal lobes of their brains and physiological differences as well. And yet, I would add that there is a spiritual component to it as well. It is somthting that you can detect through your spiritual and bodily senses. It can raise the hair on your head, it is an aura of darkness, it can change the features of a face when the mask is removed. Evil is subjective until you are on the other end of it. Then, believe me, you and the perpetrator are not one on any level of the spectrum whatsover. You are dealing with a completely separate entity there. And it does not respond to light or love or reason or sanity. At it's core it is fearless. Yes, it does feed off the fear of others and on a large scale it seeks to separate, to compartmentalize itself.

This is why all those who consiously participate in the compartmentalization of evil are in their part feeding into this destructive energy, even though they may not be themselves, entirely 'bad' people. When you have large atrocities you have many thousands of people making these individual decisions. The bureaucrats, the administrators, the lobbyists, those who make the decisions, the ones who drop the bombs, the people who make the bombs, the medics who leave people to die, the ones who turn away. It is compartmentalized for a reason, so no one has to take responsibility for their own part in it. This is how evil grows and expands, through separation, in the physical sense, in the intellectual sense and through the spiritual senses.

There is black and white where evil is concerned. Evil itself would love the concept that there is no black or white in it, that is precisely how it justifies itself, that is one reason why people participate in it, it is how people alleviate their conscience. You say that on the highest level we are all one, take it further and it would be that true holiness and evil are one (I say this even though I know you believe that evil does not exist) but true holiness and all that it inhabits, that being, peace and love and empathy and wholeness can never be one with evil separation and darkness and destruction. It is simply not possible. There are opposing sides, it is the nature of the beast.

I guess the best we can do is agree to disagree. For me the concepts of good and evil merely exist in the mind of the beholder and that world to me is nothing but different shades of grey.

It is my opinion that the evil you feel is not the inherent evil of the perpetrator, but the fact that the act itself is the complete antithesis of the concept that 'we are all one'. I do completely agree with you in that this view of what is 'evil' grows and expands, through separation, in the physical sense, in the intellectual sense and through the spiritual senses. But it is my view that labelling something as either black or white only furthers the separation we feel toward each other by creating a blockage for any meaningful dialogue which may in fact further the cause of love and light. This is especially true I feel when dealing with a large system in which it is hard to pin down which exact part is furthering this sense of evil. As like you state these people themselves may not necessarily be 'bad', this is exactly how one would begin to dismantle the system. By alleviating their fears caused in part by their view of separation, by allowing them to empathise with those which are on the receiving end of the suffering this particular system is causing.

Obviously when dealing with a frenzied knife wielding psychopath no amount of love and light will stop them, and you will have to take drastic steps to take overcome this threat. But this thread is more about the system than the individual.

I do understand where you're coming from, and I respect your fantastic contribution to this thread. But I simply cannot agree with everything you say.

Cheers - 1littlewolf

Originally posted by BoB420
In my opinion it's the same old "it's them vs. us" mentality that has been installed in people's heads through indoctrination camps err i meant public schools as well as most media . There always has to be a "bad guy", a scapegoat so to speak . Xenophobic behaviour or "an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange" , is it a "flight or fight" situation ?

The christian worldview teaches us that there is a god representing good and a devil representing evil .
"Satan" or "Lucifer" is depicted as a being resembling a humanoid with a goat head .
From a "religious zealot" point of view , the countless victims of wars fought in the name of a "god" can be justified , because the other religion is the "bad" one . The crusades for example .
Some christians think that islam represents evil .
Some muslims think that christianity represents evil .
But why some people cannot see past the label of an institutionalized religion and actually kill each other because of different belief systems is truly beyond my comprehension .

In other religions or beliefs , deities with a human/animal appearance are fairly common .
Egyptian mythology for example features many different deities with a human body but an animal head .
So does Hinduism . Even in greek mythology we can find "hybrids", which many would stigmatize as "satanic", yet it was in greece that thinkers and philosophers came up with the concept as well as the term "democracy" , the form of government which supposedly safeguards the power of the people .
According to the ancient "aliens" theory , earth has possibly been visited by extreterrestrial/extradimensional entities in the past .

"Gaijin" , a japanese word for stranger or foreigner sounds similar to "kaijin" which translates to "roughly humanoid monster " . A related term is "kaiju" which means "strange beast" or "monster" . After the end of WWII , the movie dinosaur monster godzilla (gojira in japanese) was conceived as a metaphor for nuclear weapons . "Gorira" means gorilla and "kojira" means whale . Why does a "gorillawhale" look like a dinosaur ?
Reptilian/saurian space dinosaurs with laser cannons ?
The new "commies" or an actual threat ?

Cheers Bob. I think you've captured the message I'm trying to get across quite succinctly and taken it to a level I hadn't quite got to. There's really not much more I can add.

Thanks for your response. I will say that organized religion like say Christianity is an alltogether different entity than Jesus Christ Himself. Whether you believe He was and is a real person or not, the historical record states that He never would have approved the killing in His name (ie.. the crusades) His message was one of love and empathy and compassion mixed with some warnings of what to look out for to protect your own soul. I do think He gets a bad rap because of all the harm that has been done in His name, things that He never would have approved of.

When you are talking about Christians thinking Muslims are evil and Muslims thinking Christians are the enemy etc.., I think that is a bit of a generalization. You are talking about fundamentalists. There are alot of Christians who think that war and hate is abominable and same with muslims. Their are people of these faiths who have not been sucked in by the propaganda that would have them see the other side as 'evil'. There are those who believe in Jesus who don't believe for a moment that the Creator would send people to a fiery furnace of eternal torment because they don't or didn't believe in Him. It is actually an abominable philosophy that would use the fear of eternal torment to bring people to any kind of faith. That is not the fault of Jesus Christ, it is the fault of some veins of organized religions of the fundamentalist kind that twists the Truth of the original message and the knowledge that we have within our souls that knows that kind of fear and hate and judgement of others is toxic to the soul. Many religions have been taken over by toxic philosophies but that doesn't mean everyone has been suckered into believing such things.

I do understand that most people are a mixture of their higher and lower selves if that is the way you want to put it, unfortunatly the culture that we live in here in the west tends to promote narcissisism quite often and that is not good for the soul. The point is there is lot of 'grey' and I realize that. But there is still such a thing as right and wrong, people can argue their view of what 'they' think is right or what 'they' think is wrong but I think that there is a part of alot of people that just knows in their spirit the difference between the two. Kindness is right, being purposefully mean is wrong. Killing or injuring someone in self-defence because you are being attacked by a psycho is not wrong, maliciously murdering your wife to collect life insurance is wrong. Physical, emotional and mental abuse is wrong, now you could say that person is only doing what they were taught because maybe they were abused too, but it is still wrong and it was wrong when it was done to them.

We know the difference, we do, most have a conscience and the conscience is a good thing to have. It is people who use the fact that people have a conscience in order to instill unnecessary fear and guilt in them in order to control them who are 'wrong'. Not everything is gray.

I have read quite a number of near death experiences that people have had and I had a NDE myself once, often it is a fairly similar experience. The person is sucked out of their body and taken to another realm, often but not always, there is a 'life review' in which the person experiences their life over again, but from a different perspective. The person experiences their interactions with people while they were on the earth from the persecptive of the other person, so say you were intentionally mean to someone, you feel the hurt feelings of the person you were mean to, you not only feel it, you become the other person and feel that hurt, same with if you were kind or loving to someone, you feel the love that you created in that other person, in this respect I agree with you that we are interconnected. Though I would not include psychopaths in this.

The intrinsic love that the Creator has for us humans and animals and the earth is beyond measure, I have experienced this myself, the love that the Creator has is so overwhelmingly strong and the amount of value that the Creator has far us is far beyond what can ever be experienced in our own inter-relations with eachother. Take the love you have for your child and times it by a million and maybe you will come close, I know, I have felt just a smidgen of it in times past.

Well I will just say that I have enjoyed corresponding with you, I do respect where you are coming from, in some respects we will have to agree to disagree, and that's OK. All the best.