Quote Originally Posted by joscobo View Post
I'm not trying to start an argument at all here. But as a former devout Christian. And to prove devout. I drove the church bus to pick up the children for service and anyone else needing a ride for Sunday and Wednesday night services. I drove it on Thursdays for the kids service. I was active in the church and believed the earth was 6,000 years old and the Bible was the word of god. I thought that was the ultimate truth.
But that didn't hold up to anything scrutiny and I abandoned that for what I consider to be reason.
I know many other Atheists who followed more of less the same path. I think most people who will change, if, educated to something else that makes more sense or proves to be a better philosophy or idea.
As far as the propensity to kill being ingrained in human nature I think Howard Zinn had an interesting theory. Murder through war is the domain of those in leadership. They have to go to great lengths to demonized their object of war in order to get citizens to go out and murder some other group they, otherwise, don't have a beef with. Think about all the propaganda about the japanese to lower their status of humanity so GI's and the nation wouldn't mind killing them in droves. But without that sort of effort it's difficult to get the average human to kill.
Again I'm just trying to throw out an alternate view on what thebigspendur posited.
The problem is if you look at this country for instance, how many people are murdered each year. Very often for no reason at all other than heat of the moment or just because the murderer doesn't care. I was in law Enforcement so I know. There are plenty of people out there who would kill you in a heart beat if there was something in it for them.

You see my theory is that these people are like the lion's on the prowl on the African savannah. When they are not hungry they walk among the Zebra and they are the best of friends and unlike humans the Zebra sense it. Once the Lions are on a hunt the Zebra sense that too. These violent people are the same. They walk among us and may seem the friendliest people in the world but when the go into kill mode we're just like the Zebra just that we don't sense it and while the Lions do it for food these people do it more for profit and sport.

The fact is as species become more complex they also become more violent. Humans are probably the most violent with Chimps a close second. With other species its usually a food, social thing that has a reason peculiar to that species.

I don't want to sound like Rambo here but he's right it doesn't take much for a human to kill. Experiments have been done to verify that. With the average human as long as they can claim someone in authority says its OK they will do it.