A key characteristic of good people is that they benefit others, often at a cost to themselves. For example, let's say there is a very poor woman. She cannot find a job to support herself, so she has to become a prostitute, just to survive. Nearby a man with a kind heart, knowing her plight, offers to give her money to live on, so that she will not have to turn to such a degrading profession. So essentially this good man is incurring a cost to himself, just to help others, all without much tangible benefit to himself. Now contrast this with a bad person. A bad person doesn't care about others, nor about helping them. He doesn't give money to this poor woman, so, the end result is that he ends up with more money than the good man does. This gives the bad man an edge. Now I am not saying that by giving some money to someone else will make or break someone's fortune. But what we can't deny is the principle that bad people always seem to have an edge over the good. And since good people tend to do other good deeds, this really adds up, and the end result is that bad people will eventually win out against the good, everything else bein equal. We need to realize that being a good person is energetically expensive, compared to being a bad person. Which brings me to my next point. I feel that Christianity is a religion that is meant to preserve good people, and give them a fighting chance over bad people. I had previously thought that the gospel was just about making people believe in Jesus Christ, it was only now that I realize that it is the good news that good people bring to other good people that there is a way to triumph over bad people. It feels as though Jesus realized what I described above, and came up with a way for good people to outbreed the bad, or at least to not be outbred by the bad.
Christianity does this by teaching its followers, who tend to be good people, to band together with one another, help one another out, to marry one another, and then have many children. This does not cause bad people and their bad genes to go away, but at least it maintains the good people's good genes in the gene pool. It doesn't improve the gene pool, but it stops it from becoming worse. Without Christianity, evil bad people and their evil genes would have won out a long time ago. (In fact, the advent of Christianity, how it grew, and how it preserved the Europeans for centuries should make a very fine topic for gene-culture co-evolution, a new field of study in biology.) Of course, Christianity started 2000 years ago. Times are different now, we have a diversity of people from all corners of earth, and we understand so many things that our ancestors didn't understand 2000 years ago, so it is not realistic to expect everybody to follow Christianity anymore. Instead, we have a very powerful tool that can preserve good people like what Christianity has done for thousands of years, and that is genetic engineering. Now its in theory possible to find out which genes are responsible for good, ethical behaviors. And if we don't have this knowledge yet, sooner or later we will. Then it's only a matter of us outlawing the genes responsible for evil, selfish, harmful, unethical behaviors. The technology is either already here, or will be here very soon. Another thing we should note, is that we will also be able to designate certain racial groups as naturally more inclined to evil. There is nothing impossible about this, we are only against this idea for political or ideological reasons. We don't want to believe that some races can be naturally evil. We are scared that this might lead to genocide. But this is self-censorship, it is a hurdle to truth. The truth is, there is absolutely nothing impossible about certain people being more inclined towards evil, because evil, just like so many other human traits, is hereditary. Much like beautiful mothers will give birth to beautiful daughters, or brave fathers will give rise to brave sons, evil people give birth to evil children. Once you get past your anxiety and moral panicking, you will see that what I just described is totally possible. Also, you might say, what about the influence of the
Another thing about evil: evil can be explained in biological terms. Evil isn't just a concept found in religion. The very fact that evil as a concept exists is proof that there are evil people. People didn't sit down and say, "Hey, let's create a religion and then add the concept of evil to it". No. Evil humans came first, then religion came second. First there were evil people, and they became the inspiration for the devil in (Abrahamic) religions.
By the way, it's not just good people that Christianity has preserved. It preserves many other good traits. One thing I can think of is selflessness. I personally donate money to causes. This results in less money for myself to spend. Every time I donate my limited money to a charity, I can't help but think, if I kept this money to myself, I would have more money to buy things I like. I look at someone who makes similar amount of money as me, and I can't help but notice they could afford more nice things like snacks and lattes than I do. Now, I am not saying that donating 20 dollars to a charity will make or break someone's fortune. But rather, I wish to draw attention to the principle that selfless people seem to be at a disadvantage, compared to someone who is selfish. Imagine this: If I regularly donate a sizable amount of money to a cause, I might have trouble saving up the money required for a home. Now consider someone who does not donate money. she keeps all her money to herself, never donating to any charity. She will be in a better position to buy a home than I am, everything else being equal. So, by being selfless and generous, I lose out to the less giving, more selfish person. And if I am selfless in multiple areas of life, the aggregate effect is that the selfish, un-giving person will have a huge advantage over me, and will likely be in a better position to raise more offspring than me. Christianity solves this problem. It tells selfless people that they are good people, and should multiply. They should also band together and help one another. So the mechanism I described above for preserving good people, also works for preserving selfless, giving people. This is a very important function Christianity has served for thousands of years. In fact, you can apply this principle to many other good, noble traits. environment? Perhaps you think it's possible for naturally evil people to not manifest as evil. I don't want to get into a huge debate about nature versus nurture, however I just want to say that most of us are sane enough to create the kind of environment where evil, harmful behaviors are discouraged. However, we don't do anything on the gene front. We still let evil, bad people pass on their genes. Now imagine we try to do something about this, such that evil genes really go down in frequency. And then we combine this with an environment that discourages evil. What will happen is we will end up with very, very few, almost zero, instances of the evil, the bad, the harmful, the selfish, the cruel...etc etc manifesting themselves.
This post was edited by JessiWan on Oct 21 2025 10:56pm