Our Night Of Sin

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/0NdLP . This is a summary of last night's Drink And Think session at the Crumblin' Cookie, our monthly Philosophy group. I was actually going to film at the session itself, but not everyone felt comfortable with that so here are Sarada and i talking about it. Sin is difficult to believe in outside a religious context, except that it can be understood existentially - specifically, shame can be seen as sinful there. I personally use sin as a helpful fiction, in that i can meditate on how i have done wrong in order to improve my character and also see others as the victim of sin without being judgemental - the key phrase here is "walk a mile in their shoes". Wickedness has a cartoony sound to me, and is sometimes used positively. Rather dodgily, it shares a root with Wicca, so to refer to wickedness has somewhat disturbing anti-pagan connotations. One way of defining it is as deliberately acting in such a way that one believes is wrong on an emotional level, rather than just intellectually - psychopathy would involve merely intellectually believing that to be so. Notoriously, i believe wickedness to be impossible, but we didn't go into that in the discussion. Finally, evil is the deliberate and unjustifiable infliction of pain on beings capable of suffering. Evil can be either natural or moral. During the session, i made the argument that the Singularity would imply that there is no natural evil, but it didn't go down very well or even get understood. Next month: Mathematical Platonism.