Knowledge, without wisdom, always results in evil.

Orrin doesn't even accept it's knowledge.

So non-knowledge, without (or even with) wisdom, also always results in evil.

What's a body to do?

However, I deny the assertion that secular materialists cannot commit. We are free to find evil anywhere, including in religion.

As it happens, we find it there more than just about anywhere else. It drives the religionists nuts, because they think they're better.

Of course there's evil in religion--men are evil.

Unfortunately, religious certainty is a great evil amplifier.

From your book review:

"But really, it's not so strange; if you accept that evil is real, how can you not accept that good is real?  And if pure reason suggests that these are merely words, just definitions and not realities, but every fiber of your being tells you that they exist and that you can differentiate the one from the other and that one is preferable to the other, then who will not choose to believe and who will not choose good over evil?"

Ignoring for the moment that there is nothing in pure reason to suggest those are just words, how is the rest of that sentence inaccessible to an areligionist?

Jeff:

It's totally accessible, but makes you a religionist. In fact, it seems the rationalist course to faith. Easy enough to disbelieve in God--impossible to believe that human life doesn't matter at all.

Jeff,

It depends on the proposition in question. If I am certain that "love thy neighbor as yourself" is a true religious proposition, then evil is unlikely to result, much less be magnified.

However, if I am certain that "I am a guide to the blind", the likelihood of evil being generated and magnified is great, as you said.

Therefore your statement of religious certainty requires some qualification. As do mine.

No, it doesn't make me a religionist.

It makes me a member of a species that has evolved a social existence. The ability to instinctively distinguish between good and evil in a social context comes with the territory.

All humans, psychopaths aside, possess empathy, and have a sense of the future. Humans are also highly attuned to other's reciprocity violations. In a social environment, those are the critical ingredients for self-organizing morality.

"The ability to instinctively distinguish between good and evil in a social context comes with the territory.

All humans, psychopaths aside . . ."

Well, that defines away the problem nicely, Candide. Just start calling prisons "psychiatric hospitals" and we will have reached Utopia, by definition.

Jeff:

As David suggests, that's the kind of utopianism that the non-JCs are always prey to.

David--nothing I said indicated that only psycopaths commit evil; rather, anyone other than a psycopath can readily identify an instance thereof.

OJ:
To what kind of utopianism was I referring?

Your picture of human nature being communal, social, reciprocal, etc.

Jeff:

But it's also the case that humans will tend to self-organize into groups of Us and Them, which tends to change the whole dynamics of the empathy and reciprocity forces into "Let's get them before they get us, just in case they're planning to get us before we get them."

Nasty, brutish, short(, and clannish).

True, Mike, but only because primitive humans had a hard time recognizing other humans as humans.

I have read, but cannot verify, that among every primitive society, the word for "us" is "the men" or "human" and everybody else is "the other" or "the inhumans."

One of the very few positive things you can say about universalizing religions is that they eroded that sort of barrier.

William Arens had a lot to say about it in "The Man-eating Myth."

The obvious import of Darwinism is that anyone identifiably different from you ethnically is in fact "them". It's to the credit of most Darwinists as moral beings, though their discredit in terms of rational consistency, that they insist different colored moths represent an evolutionary breakthrough but that human race is a social construct. This was the rock upon which Stephen Jay Gould's Darwinian faith foundered.

There's less difference among any two groups of humans than there is between two breeds of Scottish cattle, and nobody mistakes those for different species.

Harry:

Don't look at me to argue that speciation is real. We're all men and they're all cows.

OJ:
You could stand a little consistency yourself. Colored moths did not represent some evolutionary breakthrough in the terms you propose; rather, it was alleged to show natural selection in progress working on inherited variation and resulting in a population changing a particular characteristic over time.

As for Darwinism, it could only show that them is us. There is as much variation within any given ethnic group as there is among ethnic groups.

The interrelationships of primitive groups was not determined by darwinism, which is a process not a thing, but by ignorance.

I wish I had the linguistic skills and the time to trace what I think is the great human social adventure, which is the recognition that them is us, from Gilgamesh, through the first (so far as I can tell) treaty designed to allow trading between enemies at Ebla, and the kula trade to the Treaty of the Steelyard.