RE: WHY IS THERE SO MUCH EVIL IN THE WORLD IF GOD IS GOOD? - A RANDOM RAMBLE FROM PAPA-PEPPER
On one hand you have human nature, descending from hundreds of thousands of years of "evolution". The instinct to hunt and kill is hard to control. On the other hand, you have religion and God, two notions that try to control that instinct and incite goodness in people. But you don't need God to realize the universal value of species self-preservation. In other words, an animal is not inclined to kill its own, unless there's fierce competition and fighting to procreate or defend its turf. On a large scale, when humans were scarcely spread across the globe, that wasn't much of an issue, but with an overpopulated planet, this primal instinct to defend or even conquer breaks the moral compass. And that's why humans kill each other for oil, resources and land, to create more turf and defend it at all cost. Sadly, I think Evil will keep the upper hand in this overcrowded planet, whether God likes it or not.
We can certainly see a lot of evidence for that! Thanks for sharing @drakos.
We like to think that humans are uniquely evil ("An animal is not inclined to kill its own"), but this is not true. Many animals, even primates (gorillas, chimpanzees etc.) kill and sometimes eat their babies:
Why Do Animals Sometimes Kill Their Babies?
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140328-sloth-bear-zoo-infanticide-chimps-bonobos-animals/
Indeed animals exceptionally do that by instinct, whether it's survival or competition, but not as much as humans. Animals do not prep us for wars and gang up against weaker ones of their own. Humans do. They kill each other by the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions. And they don't do is by necessity, but more because of ideology, which led many times to ethnic cleansing and genocides. Our history is bloodied by wars for millennia. Animals do not do that, savages do.
I don't want to turn this into a “yes … but” war (this is, after all, @papa-pepper's blog) but human beings are not uniquely violent.
Ethologists have found that chimpanzees, for example, do "gang up against weaker ones of their own" and do engage in "ethnic cleansing and genocide" (cf. Jane Goodall's decades-long observations).
We humans are too smart and devious for our own good: we are adept at finding ingenious ways to quickly and easily harm large numbers of other humans. Luckily, we also have ways to tone down or channel our evil impulses into productive endeavours that benefit others.