Sam Harris has said, There aren’t a lot of bad people. There are a lot of bad ideas, and bad ideas are worse than bad people, ’cause bad ideas are contagious, bad ideas get good people to do horrible things.
I want to highlight and elaborate on this.
Dusty Smith, of the Cult of Dusty YouTube channel, has claimed that black Christians are Uncle Toms. The argument goes that the Bible was used to justify the slave trade, and by endorsing the Bible, black Christians are endorsing as the word of God the scriptures used to justify the enslavement of their ancestors. It is true that the Bible was used to justify slavery. However, justification is not the same thing as explicitly calling for something.
Here are two long videos on the seven deadly sins: wrath, pride, envy, avarice, gluttony, lust, and sloth. Whether or not these are sins against God, they are moral vices that can ruin lives. The first video introduces them, and the second analyzes them as vices of excess or deficiency.
My Ph.D. dissertation was on what it means for a person to be evil. In other words, what is an evil person? The main purpose behind this was to know how to avoid being evil. The whole dissertation can be read as an eBook or a PDF file.
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