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Have you ever dealt with Evil


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"Evil" is the name that folks give to that which threatens them (that they don't understand.)

Ignorance and fear make it real."

 

Ignorance and fear is what made Charley Manson real? Is that what made the Boston Strangler or the Hillside Strangler "real"? [sneaky]

 

 

Jax...

 

If they ain't seen it to know what it is, perhaps we should envy them. But... I guess I'm glad I have an idea of what it is.

 

m

 

Oh, there are bad people in the world, no doubt.

 

Does it make it easier for you somehow to blame it on something else?

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You may have noticed I stated immediately, "religion aside."

 

I ain't talking "evil" in a religious sense.

 

I've know lots of bad people who would rob a bank and kill on their way out and feel justified. Bad people by legal definition. They might or might not pick up an injured companion in the robbery. One such "bad" fellow murdered a lady - both were alcoholics who had enough booze to kill me, literally - and did sufficient "stuff" that a national detective mag used an article I wrote on it. A bad guy doing a very nasty murder in an alcoholic rage, but not "evil" by my definition. The kid whose "voices" told him to kill his mother? Not even "bad," really, if you heard the circumstances. Certainly not evil.

 

Evil to me is literally the person who has utterly no empathy for anyone else and to whom no action against another person or persons is any different from making a pot of coffee.

 

Believe me, I see a difference and religion has utterly nothing to do with that perspective. From my own perspective, I have no inclination to claim that a "devil" made them do it, but rather it is an artifact of their own defective character. I have no idea whether that defect is nature or nurture - but it's there. It's also quite rare, at least in my own experience.

 

m

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I understand the political joking but guys...

 

If you've never come across people who literally would nail you to a wall and skin you alive if they got attaboys from their buddies, and think no more about it than you'd think about trying out a couple of guitars or amps in a guitar store, you're either lucky or naive.

 

That's not at all a religious sort of comment, btw, but one of experience.

 

m

Im curious as to the circumstances under which you meet these "people"...

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Im curious as to the circumstances under which you meet these "people"...

 

I can't speak for m but in my experience all you have to do is be alive. I first encountered "evil" when I was 10 in grade school. I may not have been able to define it as "evil" at the time but I sensed it. Unless you totally shelter yourself you will encounter true evil. It helps to be able to identify it for one's own well-being.

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Jax...

 

Worse'n that, I think.

 

I know of a cupla older teen girls, for example, whose clothing was soaked in the blood of their robbery/murder victim and it had no more effect on their heads than if it were paint splatters from brushing lawn furniture.

 

m

 

You think blood on clothing is gonna bother someone who has just committed murder?

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Im curious as to the circumstances under which you meet these "people"...

 

Many of us rub elbows with bad people everyday and are not even aware of it.

Out of the kids in my high school class, 5 were convicted of murder before the age of 21...one of them used shotgun to kill a husband and wife living next door because they wouldn't turn the stereo down.

He sat in their apartment listening to the couples baby screaming while he ate the pizza sitting on the table...I knew this guy since 7th grade.

How many times have you watched the news and heard the neighbors of a mass murderer tell the interviewer that the person being arrested was a "good guy, was quite and never bothered anyone, always helped everyone"?

Primitive man had better survival skills then we do today, what we call a "gut feeling" is real...and most of us ignore that intuitive response to danger... I believe most women are more in tune to those feeling then men..we get side tracked with the whole macho thing, we drop our guard..

My dad was in law enforcement for 30 years, as a Marshal he was involved in some well publicized cases in the LA area. If I were to post the details of some of the cases he participated in, this post wouldn't last long.. he saved my bacon more than once warning me about people to stay away from...

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Jax... You nailed it. You'll notice I didn't go into that much detail either.

 

Cookieman... Yeah, actually blood on clothing types of things does bother a lotta folks who've murdered. It's kinda the Macbeth sorta thing. But I'm not talking about splatters. Let's just leave it there.

 

m

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Same here, my father was a cop and he taught me more about reading people than I ever thought possible.

For years I've amazed my wife with my gut feeling about a situation or a person. I call it my "spidey senses" but it's helped us avoid numerous bad situations that she or the kids never recognized.

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Cookieman... Yeah, actually blood on clothing types of things does bother a lotta folks who've murdered. It's kinda the Macbeth sorta thing. But I'm not talking about splatters. Let's just leave it there.

 

m

 

Not looking for any gore here miles but there are cases of the murderer painting themselves in their victims blood.

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It's neither religious or political.

 

It's a lack of something in one's psychological makeup. It's not an anger as that of Achilles, nor Alexander; it's not hatred such as in some warfare. It's not Bonnie and Clyde nor the behavior of a Machiavellian "prince." Instead it's a Caligula.

 

It's nothing unique to our own cultures. No culture I'm aware of is comfortable with the sociopath, the individual whose mind lacks any sort of conscience. The difference between that, anger and even insanity or diminished intellectual capacity has been recognized, I think, by almost every culture as behavior beyond that with which the "group" might ever find comfort.

 

Killing for reason, or as part of activity legal or illegal, is not part of "evil" by that definition. It's that hurting others or not hurting others is a matter of complete indifference and there is no ethical code within an individual beyond what brings some personal satisfaction in a given set of circumstances - and might not under others.

 

Again, religion per se has nothing to do with it, unless you consider it part of "religion" that every culture I'm aware of has considered such an individual and behavior as "evil" while similar acts by others simply were seen as "bad" and/or "against the law."

 

m

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It's neither religious or political.

 

It's a lack of something in one's psychological makeup. It's not an anger as that of Achilles, nor Alexander; it's not hatred such as in some warfare. It's not Bonnie and Clyde nor the behavior of a Machiavellian "prince." Instead it's a Caligula.

 

It's nothing unique to our own cultures. No culture I'm aware of is comfortable with the sociopath, the individual whose mind lacks any sort of conscience. The difference between that, anger and even insanity or diminished intellectual capacity has been recognized, I think, by almost every culture as behavior beyond that with which the "group" might ever find comfort.

 

Killing for reason, or as part of activity legal or illegal, is not part of "evil" by that definition. It's that hurting others or not hurting others is a matter of complete indifference and there is no ethical code within an individual beyond what brings some personal satisfaction in a given set of circumstances - and might not under others.

 

Again, religion per se has nothing to do with it, unless you consider it part of "religion" that every culture I'm aware of has considered such an individual and behavior as "evil" while similar acts by others simply were seen as "bad" and/or "against the law."

 

m

Interesting you should bring up sociopaths, psycopathy all in light of what is/isnt evil. I thought this was pretty interesting when I ran across it..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui9C6xVpVf0
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OK. Geuss this aint gonna fly.... Basically its a clip of a psychologist comparing the character traits that typify sociopaths with the

"character traits" of a large corporation. Dr.Robert Hare is the name of the psychologist you can look him up on the Youtube.

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A neat thing about Lakota culture in the olden days, as it seems to me, is that they had accommodations for about every sort of personality trait one might imagine within a small village hunter-gatherer culture. There were a number ways things might bend to ensure the greatest number of folks could contribute in their own unique ways to the people.

 

Yet they didn't do well with sociopaths 'cuz at a certain point nobody feels particularly safe around them. If general culture itself isn't sufficient that functional behavior parameters are meaningless to a given individual, that leaves everyone uncomfortable. It's a matter that the wisdom of the community sees that they and others are unsafe when a given person is around, and that the person is not mentally ill as such, but is rather without any conscience or internal inhibitions whatsoever.

 

That ain't "religion," it's not high science, it's common sense.

 

You can mess with terminology, but I think that for practical purposes "evil" works well enough.

 

m

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A neat thing about Lakota culture in the olden days, as it seems to me, is that they had accommodations for about every sort of personality trait one might imagine within a small village hunter-gatherer culture. There were a number ways things might bend to ensure the greatest number of folks could contribute in their own unique ways to the people.

 

Yet they didn't do well with sociopaths 'cuz at a certain point nobody feels particularly safe around them. If general culture itself isn't sufficient that functional behavior parameters are meaningless to a given individual, that leaves everyone uncomfortable. It's a matter that the wisdom of the community sees that they and others are unsafe when a given person is around, and that the person is not mentally ill as such, but is rather without any conscience or internal inhibitions whatsoever.

 

That ain't "religion," it's not high science, it's common sense.

 

You can mess with terminology, but I think that for practical purposes "evil" works well enough.

 

m

This reminds me of accounts of Adolf Eichmann and how mild mannered people said he was in person. A soft spoken mass murderer. I've heard it referred to as the "banality of evil".
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