Why do people have such faith in humanity?

[Dragunai]

So, you are of the opinion humanity in itself is evil? Bad? Wrong?

Due to how you worded that I will reply in both manners that can be derived from it.

If you meant it in a sarcastic way then, high fives on your observance!

If you meant it in a sincere way then, Yes I do. There is no part of humanity that I believe in. Husbands beating wives, wives cheating on husbands, soldiers raping and murdering the weak and innocent they are meant to protect, governments destroying people and treating them like serial numbers attacked to bank accounts and corporations bleeding you dry of your life (working for them) and money (buying from them)

Support groups like Oxfam are corrupt (as reports have revealed the charity money they raise mostly goes into the pockets of the higher ups in the company) and if we tone it down to a more localized circling:

Friends betray each other for petty reasons, relationships fail due to weak hearts and broken morality and when was the last time you saw someone go out of their way to help a stranger when nothing was to be gained from it?

Hence why my life's motto is - Assume the worst, hope for the best because you can't disappoint a cynic nor deceive a Skeptic.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

Friends betray each other for petty reasons, relationships fail due to weak hearts and broken morality and when was the last time you saw someone go out of their way to help a stranger when nothing was to be gained from it?

Organ donation and giving blood. I see a lot of people down there give blood. You dont get payed in england. It is only done out of the goodness of our hearts. Checkmate. So yesterday my friend. I saw it yesterday. Organ donation is free as well, i had to fill out forms for it and pay to send the letter. Nothing in it for me at all.

Support groups like Oxfam are corrupt (as reports have revealed the charity money they raise mostly goes into the pockets of the higher ups in the company) and if we tone it down to a more localized circling:

Citation. Now. Reliable citation.


http://meteorserver.org/examples/angst/

I introduce the angst meter! Somehow managing to measure the INSANE level of internet angst about how crap everything is. Hazar!

 

[Akytalusia]

because life feeds on life, and the crueler species will prevail. it's the nature of the beast(life). people put faith in themselves and have hope because there's no other option. without hope or faith that there's some good reason for it all, then we would do the sensible thing and destroy the world to end the suffering, not just for us, but for everything that lives here.
but guess what happens to the sensible guy who wants to do that? obviously, he gets eaten. majority rules. follow the crowd or die. so the clueless cruel live blissfuly ignorant happy lives, and the folks who think too much about the true nature of things, suffer or die. and this is the way the world perpetuates ad infinitum.

Untrue. Destroying the world runs counter to everything ANYONE could possibly hold dear. You can win against the cruel. It happens all the time.

the last thing i'm gonna do is try to defend my position on the matter. as i stated, your response is natural and predictable. i answered the question, but that's as far as i'm going with it, lest i were a fool embracing futility.

 

[airrazor7]

Let me teach you the definition of faith. Faith: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

So why do you believe people want you to die? I don't understand what your situation is but believing what believe is...unhealthy. I feel like that it's a pretty serious matter to feel like you an evolutionary dead end. I hope the Escapist moderators, or you, do not find this to be offensive but are you unable to have children? That is the only way I could understand the "evolutionary dead end" bit.

Also, you are meant to be here. If you were not, you would not be here. It is as simple as that. Any details you may attach to that are just negative excuses. Period.

There are people who unintentionally have children and don't want them, however that does not make the child a mistake. It just makes the parents idiots for thinking that sex is disconnected from childbirth. This may not be your situation so I'll stop running on that tangent.

I use to think I was an accident and I thought I had a right to feel that way. That was pointless and stupid on my part. It does not matter how you or I got here. What matters is what we make out of our lives while we are living.

Also, you can't be completely surrounded by "enemies." There must be some friends and family members whom you cherish and who cherish you in return. No one can live a life full of hatred; people like that end up being like Sasuke (sorry for the bad Naruto joke)

I can't speak for anyone else but the reason why I have faith in humanity is because I want people everywhere to become better than who they are today. Good, bad or meh, I believe everyone has the chance to better themselves and in turn make life better for everyone across the globe. There are some things in this world that are currently bad and history is full of bad and horrible situations. However those things happened due to human choices, the decisions of men and women. So just as capable that people are of making bad decisions, they are just as equally capable of making good decisions.

That's what I have hope for. I wish to believe that as life progresses, people will make better choices.

 

[Dragunai]

Friends betray each other for petty reasons, relationships fail due to weak hearts and broken morality and when was the last time you saw someone go out of their way to help a stranger when nothing was to be gained from it?

Organ donation and giving blood. I see a lot of people down there give blood. You dont get payed in england. It is only done out of the goodness of our hearts. Checkmate. So yesterday my friend. I saw it yesterday. Organ donation is free as well, i had to fill out forms for it and pay to send the letter. Nothing in it for me at all.

Congrats, People giving up their organs, typically when they are already dead or under orders from a form signed by a loved one. I'm sure this unwilling act of selflessness will counter act all the murders I've seen on the news lately where a father / husband went out to the shop to get something then got his head kicked in by a group of Chavs who had no reason to do it other than why not? And subsequently died. What an excellent bastion to human reasoning and perfection those stories are, or the ones where teenage girls are brought into England under promises of modelling contracts only to find their passports gone and men with guns telling them to give their bodies to paying customers.

Blood donations? Fair enough, but if it's such common place, why do they have adverts every so often asking for more as "they are running dangerously low" in hospitals up and down England.

England has a population of roughly 65 million people, if the moral majority were handing out there blood so freely I can assure you they wouldn't be spending money on advertising they didn't need and we wouldn't be dangerously low.

Checkmate?
Nope, just took your Bishop with my rook, your move.

 

[Simeon Ivanov]

Because why not?

 

[KoalaKid]

Because people are awesome.

although the video was fun to watch, I just don't think humanities ability to ride things, throw things, and jump around constitutes as awesomeness, but it doesn't hurt humanities case either. I will give them 3 points for their jumpy, throwy, ridey abilities.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

Friends betray each other for petty reasons, relationships fail due to weak hearts and broken morality and when was the last time you saw someone go out of their way to help a stranger when nothing was to be gained from it?

Organ donation and giving blood. I see a lot of people down there give blood. You dont get payed in england. It is only done out of the goodness of our hearts. Checkmate. So yesterday my friend. I saw it yesterday. Organ donation is free as well, i had to fill out forms for it and pay to send the letter. Nothing in it for me at all.

Congrats, People giving up their organs, typically when they are already dead or under orders from a form signed by a loved one. I'm sure this unwilling act of selflessness will counter act all the murders I've seen on the news lately where a father / husband went out to the shop to get something then got his head kicked in by a group of Chavs who had no reason to do it other than why not? And subsequently died. What an excellent bastion to human reasoning and perfection those stories are, or the ones where teenage girls are brought into England under promises of modelling contracts only to find their passports gone and men with guns telling them to give their bodies to paying customers.

Blood donations? Fair enough, but if it's such common place, why do they have adverts every so often asking for more as "they are running dangerously low" in hospitals up and down England.

England has a population of roughly 65 million people, if the moral majority were handing out there blood so freely I can assure you they wouldn't be spending money on advertising they didn't need and we wouldn't be dangerously low.

Checkmate?
Nope, just took your Bishop with my rook, your move.

I didnt say it was meant to counter act it. You made a statement. A false statement implying that these deeds are hard to come by. I responded saying, and proving, they are not. You keep naming individual cases of suckyness. Ive been mugged. I know people can suck. But you are ignoring all the awesome good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc4HGQHgeFE

this is a bit of good here.

And here

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/teen-sits-tall-after-mystery-donor-funds-back-surgery-2840581.html

And here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-east-wales-13885791

and here

http://www.kjrh.com/dpp/news/local_news/an-anonymous-donation-saves-eight-tps-jobs

Millions of these. These are the first results for "anonymous donations".

Im just saying, theres a lot more good than people give credit for.

Im giving citation. You are not. Also oxfam corrupt? Proof please. Of any kind.

 

[Daaaah Whoosh]

You forget that fighting a war means that thousands, if not millions, of people had to start working together to get the whole thing going. It's not anarchy out there, it's people laying down their lives for other people. And sure, evolution is meant to destroy the worst parts of humanity, but why is that a bad thing? We learn from our mistakes, which means that even the evolutionally challenged have something to put on the table.

 

[Scarim Coral]

If humanity is really bad as you suggest it to be than we would of been wipe out by now. This is also to say why aren?t the entire people in the world killing each other right now? Well ok some people are doing that right now but most of us are not.
Beside if you don't have faith in humanity than whom do you have faith in, yourself or relative etc? Sure the world can be scary but we still exist here and now.

 

[Crispee]

Because I've grown awful fond of living, and if I can't believe in humanity then then the rest of my time on Earth will be very miserable. For me it doesn't get more complex than that.

 

[Navvan]

Before i get started, i just want to say that I don't want this to come across as an emo thread, although I'm not feeling great at the moment, I largely just feel curious as to this:

Why do so many people have such faith in the "good" in humanity?

See, I've studied history alot. I've found that we seem to spend 90% of our time on pointless warfare. Even all those great steps we made; mostly made in the name of war, or in the course of war.

Also, it seems 90% of the people I have met in my life have been murderous bastards. See, I'm not wanted here. I'm not meant to be alive, I'm an evolutionary dead end. I'm faulty, and they hate me because of it, want me dead. That's how evolution works, right? The faulty elements must die before they breed, otherwise it brings in another generation of faulty beings. Such trials in life have made me very resilient, but it's me against most of the people i will ever meet. I don't expect to die a natural death, so I do all I can to improve things for other people like me while I'm still here. It isn't a nice way to live, but I suppose in a way I deserve it.

This evolutionary system is terrifyingly effective, but certainly not nice. Not ethical, not morally right. So why? Why do people have such faith in a species that is as successful as it is because it is cruel?

In my last post I described why you can have some level of faith in humanity. In this post I am going to pursue my own selfish goal of educating the populace on the very basics of popular scientific theories. Today is what is evolution.

First a simple and accepted definition of Evolution
"A change in the inherited traits of a population over time"

This change may be the result of a variety of causes such as Natural selection, genetic drift, or gene flow. But the definition of Evolution is simply describing a observed phenomenon.

What most people think of as evolution is actually Gradual Evolution by Natural Selection.

Natural Selection is another simple concept, that individuals with the most fitness (ability to have the most viable offspring) will pass on their traits in greater proportion to future generations, and thus the abundance of that trait will increase. This means that if Big beaks are good for fitness future populations average beak size will increase.

Gradual Evolution is a bit more complex, but as simply as possible its the idea that evolution happens gradually (as the name implies). That is from one generation to the next you aren't going to see a huge change in the average traits but slow shifts.

Evolution by Punctuated Equilibrium is another form of evolution that states that when evolutionary changes occur, they occur quickly. That is within a relatively few generations a beneficial traits that present themselves will shift to a new equilibrium.

Evolution is considered to be the origin of new species. That is, as a result of these gradual or punctuated shifts in traits two population of what was once the same species will diverge into two new species.

So evolution says nothing of having a goal (its simply an observation) and while natural selection loosely means "Survival of the fittest" that in turn does not mean "Survival of the strongest/brutal/will quickly kill". The biological definition of fitness is the ability to produce viable offspring/propagate ones own genes.

 

[Dragunai]

Friends betray each other for petty reasons, relationships fail due to weak hearts and broken morality and when was the last time you saw someone go out of their way to help a stranger when nothing was to be gained from it?

Organ donation and giving blood. I see a lot of people down there give blood. You dont get payed in england. It is only done out of the goodness of our hearts. Checkmate. So yesterday my friend. I saw it yesterday. Organ donation is free as well, i had to fill out forms for it and pay to send the letter. Nothing in it for me at all.

Congrats, People giving up their organs, typically when they are already dead or under orders from a form signed by a loved one. I'm sure this unwilling act of selflessness will counter act all the murders I've seen on the news lately where a father / husband went out to the shop to get something then got his head kicked in by a group of Chavs who had no reason to do it other than why not? And subsequently died. What an excellent bastion to human reasoning and perfection those stories are, or the ones where teenage girls are brought into England under promises of modelling contracts only to find their passports gone and men with guns telling them to give their bodies to paying customers.

Blood donations? Fair enough, but if it's such common place, why do they have adverts every so often asking for more as "they are running dangerously low" in hospitals up and down England.

England has a population of roughly 65 million people, if the moral majority were handing out there blood so freely I can assure you they wouldn't be spending money on advertising they didn't need and we wouldn't be dangerously low.

Checkmate?
Nope, just took your Bishop with my rook, your move.

I didnt say it was meant to counter act it. You made a statement. A false statement implying that these deeds are hard to come by. I responded saying, and proving, they are not. You keep naming individual cases of suckyness. Ive been mugged. I know people can suck. But you are ignoring all the awesome good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc4HGQHgeFE

this is a bit of good here.

And here

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/teen-sits-tall-after-mystery-donor-funds-back-surgery-2840581.html

And here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-east-wales-13885791

and here

http://www.kjrh.com/dpp/news/local_news/an-anonymous-donation-saves-eight-tps-jobs

Millions of these. These are the first results for "anonymous donations".

Im just saying, theres a lot more good than people give credit for.

Likewise you are ignoring my perfectly valid points by saying they don't count while yours do.
I am a South African born man, I had to flee my country because the day before I was going to start baby school the bus I was meant to go on got shot up by 2 guys, all the children on board died as did their teacher and the driver.

Innocent, harmless babies who had done nothing to harm the world, murdered for being the wrong skin colour.

Justify that for me with your condescension.

Every time I talk to someone who has just come back from the homeland they tell me stories of women being dragged out their cars and raped in the road, or people murdered for their phone, a crime which pretty much makes the point of "To the criminal your life is worth less than a piece of plastic,"

What about the rest of Africa? How many stories of ethnic cleansing and mindless, bloody murder aren't being credited?

What about all the children last year, this year and all the years before who killed themselves because they were victimized in schools and it just gets called a "terrible tragedy that no one could help them"

Yes, I'm sure the quiet kid who doesn't seem to have any friends and hides in the corner of the courtyard isn't ominous at all is he/she.

What about the inner city kids who have no life? The ones whose best prospect is to join a gang or get rolled every time they leave their house?

So don't post a handful of rich people who had spare money and decided to buy a good feeling at me and call it human kindness.

And your statement of "millions of these" is the only false one around here. Everything I've said is true to some extent or another.

Do you know why you see that on the news? Because it's newsworthy. Do you know why it's newsworthy? Because it's not the standard.

Yes, please post more glaringly obvious statements at me. I'm sure they will eventually mean something. Now move along, I have better things to do than suffer trolls.

 

[Dragunai]

Double post. Please nerf.

 

[RatRace123]

Because I like to look at life away from the internet, and I don't let news of a few hooting dick heads ruin my perception of an entire species of 7 billion people, of which I happen to be a member of.

Hell, even if there were literally only 5 truly good people on the planet, then that would be enough for me to have faith. As long as there's some ounce of good in the world, then there's hope to be had.

 

[concrete89]

Most people only care about a select few people, like family, or perhaps a few friends.
That's not being bad people. They are just not saints. Few other pack animals care about more than just their own pack, and humans are no better.

 

[Not-here-anymore]

Heh. I'm reminded of a conversation I had a long time back when I was asked by a member of my university's Christian Union what I believed in. "I believe in humanity" was my response. The look of shock on the guy's face was priceless. Apparently faith in an omniscient being who may or may not exist is easier to rationalise than faith in the decency of our fellow man.

As for why I believe what I do... I've met enough people to know that some of them are genuinely nice for no other reason than 'because they are'. At least some of us care for each other, and will help those that need it, and that's enough for me.