Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, almost no one in NA justice systems talks about evil. The causality between life events leading to crime is often ridiculously clear, and choice barely factors into it. Believing in evil is its own kind of privilege. I for one have now seen a lot of criminal cases, and I've only seen sick people and people following the path laid before them. No evil in sight, but the concept's very existence allows fo…
The ideas of free will, consequences and deterrence; morality, punishment and justice; mental illness and life choice determinism; all exist in different planes, different parallel reasoning systems about the world - rational, moral, biological/sociological. You can make linkages between the different metaphors of explication, but mixing and matching is a recipe for inconsistency. Worse, if you think mostly in a diff…
Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
121–130 of 270 posts
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, almost no one in NA justice systems talks about evil. The causality between life events leading to crime is often ridiculously clear, and choice barely factors into it. Believing in evil is its own kind of privilege. I for one have now seen a lot of criminal cases, and I've only seen sick people and people following the path laid before them. No evil in sight, but the concept's very existence allows fo…
Do you consider sociopathy and psychopathy to be sicknesses?
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, almost no one in NA justice systems talks about evil. The causality between life events leading to crime is often ridiculously clear, and choice barely factors into it. Believing in evil is its own kind of privilege. I for one have now seen a lot of criminal cases, and I've only seen sick people and people following the path laid before them. No evil in sight, but the concept's very existence allows fo…
They still choose to continue down that path, or to not seek healing. Maybe it would be difficult to make another choice, but impossible? I find that pretty hard to believe.
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#124Free will is an illusion and thus choices don't exist.
Assuming people can admit and learn from their mistakes means you can focus on rehabilitation and treat them with dignity.
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, almost no one in NA justice systems talks about evil. The causality between life events leading to crime is often ridiculously clear, and choice barely factors into it. Believing in evil is its own kind of privilege. I for one have now seen a lot of criminal cases, and I've only seen sick people and people following the path laid before them. No evil in sight, but the concept's very existence allows fo…
Theres always a choice, and choices have consequences. The kind of people who believe they had no choice are the worst because it shows a total lack of remorse for their selfish decisions. Phrases like “Look what YOU made me do” and “It’s societies fault” are warning signs that they learned nothing and you have a likely repeat offender on your hands.
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, almost no one in NA justice systems talks about evil. The causality between life events leading to crime is often ridiculously clear, and choice barely factors into it. Believing in evil is its own kind of privilege. I for one have now seen a lot of criminal cases, and I've only seen sick people and people following the path laid before them. No evil in sight, but the concept's very existence allows fo…
Theres always a choice, and choices have consequences. The kind of people who believe they had no choice are the worst because it shows a total lack of remorse for their selfish decisions. Phrases like “Look what YOU made me do” and “It’s societies fault” are warning signs that they learned nothing and you have a likely repeat offender on your hands.
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
They still choose to continue down that path, or to not seek healing. Maybe it would be difficult to make another choice, but impossible? I find that pretty hard to believe.
It would be pretty difficult to cut off your own right hand, but impossible? No. It just takes a considerate amount of willpower. This kind of discussion leads down a path where we try to quantify something that's incredibly hard to quantify in a vacuum. The question of willpower is also only relevant when you try to find an appropriate punishment for immoral offenses. And because this is hard, every country on earth…
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an extremely articulate and beautiful perspective. How did you acquire it?
I'm probably gonna get downvotes for appearing to bask in this attention (which I didn't expect). In this case it's based on a heuristic. I can't at all model human will so it seems reasonable to start with it as infinite (since it's so vast and appears virtually limitless, the very reason I can't model it in the first place) and model in the constraints. edit: also, I am a Christian and that probably factors into my…
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#129There's no free will :)
I think there is free will, but like most things in life, it is a privilege not everyone has; many people are constrained by invisible shackles. I would wager that evil still exists, but it requires full awareness of what one is doing when perpetrating it, and so it is more rare than we think. (Of course, this is just an opinion.)
Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is free will, but like most things in life, it is a privilege not everyone has; many people are constrained by invisible shackles. I would wager that evil still exists, but it requires full awareness of what one is doing when perpetrating it, and so it is more rare than we think. (Of course, this is just an opinion.)
I share a similar philosophy... that free will is choosing between the options we recognize given by our immutable past. Who we are is mostly an accumulation of chance events and responses running on autopilot. Most moments don't matter, some nudge us in different directions, others snowball into defining our eulogies. Hard work enables us to leverage chance events (if we recognize them) into some probability of succ…