I did not read the whole articles but from few paragraphs I can understand that it is stating about 'problem of evil' that believers face.
Actually this problem is faced only by western religious philosophy which is not wrong but have an incomplete conception of universe.
Eastern philosophy states that God has created this world along with certain rules with which everyone should abide by i.e. 'law of karma'. Anyone who acts or tries to act in such a way as to harm any other living being will have to suffer reactions of his 'sin' either in this life or next life. And when that suffering is perceived it is termed as evil. But actually our acts are evil which come back as life lessons to help us introspect and improve ourselves. And this system given by God is a manifestation of his love else we may all have already be converted to
Sickle wielding terrorists bent on taking each others flesh.
(Of course above is a very brief description, there is much more to it)
The problem of evil is something anyone studying Abrahamic religion encounters. Very few of the "believers" I've met have bothered.
> Eastern philosophy states that . . .
ORLY? Which one?
> Of course above is a very brief description, there is much more to it
I should hope so!
I flagged this thing because it's going to lead to "religious battles," quite literally. And the article itself is full of nonsense. And fear of the natural world!
1) Sanatana Dharma, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism they all have the concept of karma.
2) Yes!, It has lots and lots of description and details behind karma and ourselves.
Good luck coming up with karma-points-based explanations for all the pleasure and suffering in the world. What did the caterpillar do to deserve getting paralyzed and eaten alive by wasp larvae?
You are right caterpillar, and similar beings dont have much choice, whatever they do they are mistly dictated by nature and they have to act accordingly. That is why there is no karma for them. They cannot create any karma or 'sin' BUT they can suffer the reactions of the bad karma they have done in past life (in a species when they actually had the intelligence to differentiate between right and wrong).
A crude example: A man torturing a caterpillar for fun, may have to take birth in a life of caterpillar and endure the same pain, either by a human or different species.
Karma does not require suffering from sin. Karma does not require future lives either. Karmas base is much simpler - what you do has effects. It may be good, it may not be. We don't get to know, but we hope that we do good karma and avoid bad karma.
Not sure this is the slam dunk you suggest. Isn’t this just the free will defence with extra steps? Or, perhaps, Swinburne’s argument that natural evil is a force for maturation and spiritual development.
The basic conception of the argument (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”) still seems valid if a God has created a karmic system.
So I don’t think this is an issue uniquely facing Western perspectives.
Personally, I don’t find the free will defence particularly convincing, either. Do we really have free will? Is free will truly necessary for education/moral goodness? And if so, is god truly capable of evil?
> The basic conception of the argument (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”) still seems valid if a God has created a karmic system.
The difference, as I understand it, is that the free-will argument requires the existence of a creator who is either impotent, malevolent or evil (or some combination of all three).
A karmic-based system requires no creator to exist.
1) not defending anything, just explaining what I know.
2) never heard of Swinburne. Natural evil is force for maturation and ALSO to uphold the principle of justice among all living beings.
3) No evil can harm a living being if he has not already bad stock of karma with him. And also God does not interfere with anyone's free will. If we are living with others then some laws will have to be followed.
Now you will ask that how did evil actually generate because in beginning there was no bad karma. The thing is that even the intention of harming someone and attempts can generate bad karma. Our mindset towardds others must be good.
4) Nah, in eastern philosophy even beginners know this, yeah but in east also very less people actually know about themselves!
5) Yes we have free will. If given two paths with one path we know as thousand times better than other path, Still by our free will we can choose the bad one.
6) Free will is necessary for love i.e. relationship with ourselves and God. Love is morality harming any sentinent being is not.
6) God is capable of evil but he/she(whatever) does not do it.
imagine the accounting of it. It must be truly larger than life!
The author is simply funny in his humanity.
Without an observer nothing exists. What does exist depends on the perspective of the observer.
If you were a lego structure, would it be upsetting to be made into something else?
If you are trying to make the perfect widget, what to do with the previous attempts? What if reuse would allow for faster iterations? If perfection is the goal how hard is the choice?
Old people need to make room for young ones who are always more deserving.
The way we age we are still far from perfection. Nature needs a few more rounds.
The cruel formula is how we got here. Im sure single cell organisms would have loved to be the final iteration but sadly for them that didn't happen. Our challenges are much like theirs. We also think we want a life without challenges eventho we are what we are because of them.
What choice did the wasp have but to infect and inflict suffering upon the caterpillar? For through that suffering a hundred new wasps are given life, whose primary goal is to find other caterpillars and continue the cycle.
The removal of this form of suffering from the existence of the caterpillar would require the extinction (and associated suffering) of every living member of that species of wasp.
How can karma be negative to the wasp that has no choice but to act in the way it does by biological necessity? More generally, how does karma reconcile with any act originating from biology?
If every creature on earth decided to inflict absolutely no harm on any other creature, then the only option would be to eliminate all life from the planet.
Karma suffers from the problem of evil just as much as western religion.
The wasp can choose to start integrating non-caterpillar food sources into its diet, reducing suffering at first while it evolves the necessary digestive system, ultimately minimizing and eliminating suffering.
Wasps are somewhat doomed that they haven't made this choice before. The pit gets deeper and deeper the more you dig. The climb will be longer and harder the later you start.
If fish can learn to breathe air, walk on land, and care for their young, wasps can learn to not eat caterpillars.
It literally is though. Sexual selection, emphasis on selection, is conscious. You choose half the genes of your descendants. Unless there's only one mating option. You also choose where you hang, and what you eat, which drives adaptations to that environment.
You might feel like you have conscious control over the process of acting on your preferences to select the candidate for the randomish splicing of the genes of your partner's parents and your own parents.
Yes! I've consciously decided to learn to like many things in life that I used to hate, because they are good for me. I see no reason to assume animals aren't capable of the same. It just takes time.
Incorrect. The tapeworm can choose where and how in the gut it exists. It can choose how much it leeches from its host. There are always choices to be made that direct our evolution, for you, me, the wasp, and the tapeworm.
Your attitude is fatalistic. You're saying we're all doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors until we die or get lucky. That's a belief. A false one at that.
The tapeworm has no conception that it exists inside a larger creature and that its nutrition is obtained by leeching off its host.
The tapeworm has no choice because it has no ability to comprehend the context of its own existence. A lot of human beings find themselves in the same predicament through no fault of their own.
That seems so 100% wrong to me. Who are you to say what tapeworms do or don't comprehend? We don't even understand consciousness, yet here you are exclaiming that tapeworms are essentially robots fated to die of extinction.
They are not. They are conscious beings in charge of their lives and evolution like any other being is. They might have less brain cells than us, but you don't know what they are thinking.
Animals do not become thinking beings, by human standards, just because we wish it to be so. I have had cats for most of my life. They are wonderful conscious and sentient beings. But they have limitations. As far as I can tell, they are a type of biological machine. They have a brain that is essentially some very advanced hardware. On that hardware is running very advanced software, that provides the cat with e.g. sensory functions, memory, processing and body control. Which means it can sense, see, feel, react and decide based on stimuli, sensory inputs, memory, programmed reactions, inherent drives, instincts etc. Does that make the cat an automaton? Maybe so, probably so. But it is an automaton, and a learning-adaptive one at that, so advanced that it is conscious and sentient. I think the cat very much feels and experiences that it is alive, feels and makes decisions.
As we observe the natural world, it seems that various types of animals have different levels of "consciousness" and "sentience". I don't think the caterpillar is very conscious and thinking, it is running a smaller program on less hardware, but I think it may be more living than biology in general gives it credit for. I think we have the same functions as described, and more. Including limitations that we don't think about most of the time. As the cat also does not. This "more" is what separates us from animals. We have the same basic system, but we also have more than this. Which, among many things, gives rise to us contemplating what consciousness and sentience is, both in ourselves and in the animal world. And makes us perceive good and evil and have morals. For the cat good and evil is irrelevant. It does not have morals. It has a nature, which is the program running for that type of animal. The nature of the cat is to kill and eat the mouse. Good and evil is not involved. The wasp lays eggs in the caterpillar. Good and evil is not involved. It is nature and it is their programming. Where we humans may be able to use our consciousnes to change our programming to some extent, the animals cannot change their programming. It evolves indirectly over time and generations.
1) You are right wasp, and similar beings dont have much choice, whatever they do they are mistly dictated by nature and they have to act accordingly. That is why there is no karma for them. They cannot create any karma or 'sin' BUT they can suffer the reactions of the bad karma they have done in past life (in a species when they actually had the intelligence to differentiate between right and wrong).
A crude example: A man torturing a caterpillar for fun, may have to take birth in a life of caterpillar and endure the same pain, either by a human or different species.
Karma does not negate biology, karma is a law which acts on 'subtler' platform than gross law of biology. pleaseure and suffering decided according to law of karma is manifested by biology(through chance and probabilities)!
Thanks for such wonderful questions, am open to more.
So in the karmic worldview, creatures that have no free agency are karmically neutral?
If so, how would the hypothetical soul that is born in the form of a caterpillar (or another lifeform with zero free agency) be able to ever gain karma?
Not karmically neutral. They can not produce new reactions but consume older ones.
Once its bad reactions( because of which he had to take a life form with so little consciousness ) are over it can get a new form with more intelligence.
Soul never takes a form, it is distinct from matter. Dull matter takes the form. It only 'directs' matter. After old body is destroyed it gets a new body.
For a way too technical and scientific analysis of eastern philosophy check out 'Atma Paradigm' series(my respect to you if you actually complete that):
3>.
https://m.youtube.com/@TheAtmaParadigm/videos
Good article in giving a strong case for the problem of evil. Even as a Christian I appreciate an honest baring of how torturous life is. No need to whitewash it. My response, in brief, is that this is the price of creatures truly having free will. God could have created all His creatures to be benign Stepford Wives, but He decided to let us have a choice. The choices effect everyone including the innocent. Secondly, there will come a day when righteousness will reign and death, pain, and sorrow will be no more. Finally, God is not detached -- He took on flesh and suffered the horrors Himself. So He knows. He knows more than us.
Maybe your empathy towards caterpillars says more about you than it does the caterpillars. It’s difficult for me to imagine being a caterpillar let alone a paralyzed caterpillar being devoured from within.
Why is there any more or less moral weight to the wasps lifecycle than any other predator along the food chain?
Yes they have free will but it is covered to the extent that it mostly acts mechanically.
In its current life it may not have the intelligence to act morally. But once( before it became a caterpillar ) it had a body of moral sentiment being with power of discrimination. It made bad choices at that time and thus induced suffering in current life.
I'm a strange blend of existentialism and Catholicism where I started with "life is objectively meaningless so we make our own subjective happiness" and suffering was a thing that just was and you dealt with it just like anything else. Suffering is also subjective per person so what may be unbearable for one may be daily baseline for another.
Catholicism has a concept called "redemptive suffering" where your suffering is offered up as a spiritual sacrifice, often for a loved one who has passed away. We usually can't choose not to suffer but we can choose how we respond to it.
Modern Catholicism also has no issues with evolution so generally the "life is infested with parasites and therefore can't be declared good like the Bible says" is a fundamentalist problem to try to explain. Evolution appears to be how life got to its present stage on Earth and we have the history encoded in our DNA. Arguing against that is embracing blind, stubborn faith and ignorance.
>Modern Catholicism also has no issues with evolution so generally the "life is infested with parasites and therefore can't be declared good like the Bible says" is a fundamentalist problem to try to explain. Evolution appears to be how life got to its present stage on Earth and we have the history encoded in our DNA. Arguing against that is embracing blind, stubborn faith and ignorance.
If only most Christians thought like that... I've grown around Christians of all kinds of denominations and I've never met anyone with that mindset, even the Catholic ones. They all took the Bible to the absolute literal and whenever reality didn't agree with their beliefs they always engaged in the most ridiculous and insane mental gymnastics instead of reevaluting their point of views.
I am scientifically minded (so much so that I was atheist for a long time due to biblical literalism) and I also believe God has no reason to lie or mislead us about things like the age of the earth or our side by side evolution with animals. The first 15 chapters of Genesis are Jewish poetry, not a literal account of creation. There are even two creation accounts, one right after the other, which contradict each other!
That no longer being an issue with my faith has helped my mental health immensely. I don't feel the painful cognitive dissonance I used to because the point Genesis is trying to get across is "God made everything and it wasn't hard for him, we can choose to do things he doesn't want us to do, and this tendency can lead to a lot of serious shenanigans. Then God promises stuff to Abraham."
To be fair to most Christians, they are not apologists and as most atheists will tell you have a very limited understanding of most points of their faith, let alone individual points of contention in the bible. So the only defense mechanism they have is withdrawing to literalism and flail too much to reevaluate. Then there's the ones who are apologists, and most of them online are downright annoying lol
I too am Catholic, and understand the Catholic teaching that, within its domain, science honestly pursued tells scientific truth, e.g., evolution. Science trespasses when it leaves its domain to make assertions about God or the soul. That you encountered so many Catholics bereft of that understanding is sad.
Science is based upon reproducible observations, not assertions.
It isn't restricted to a domain because it can be applied everywhere, by everyone.
It is a way to find effective truth, faith or subjectivity be damned. Whether I believe in radio waves or electricity doesn't enter into it - the cell phone still works.
I don't think what you are saying is in conflict with the parent comment. They said science leaves its domain when making assertions about things which can't be scientifically verified. For instance it would be really difficult to prove God doesn't exist.
The scientific method as a mindset helps us uncover things but only if they can be tested and reproduced, as you said.
A lot of interesting food for thought in this article, but I find the focus on parasites as particularly fucked up or evil puzzling. It seems like an aesthetic distinction, not a categorical one. There are plenty of vertebrate predators that will bring their young still-living prey to "play with" and devour. This seems hardly better, especially since the prey in this case is often much more capable of experiencing fear and suffering than a caterpillar or a snail.
It's also interesting to consider that fear itself is probably an adaptation that helps the propagation of DNA. The fact that animals and humans can experience fear at all tells us that we're not in a kind universe.
A large portion of the issue Mark Twain and others quoted in the article took with parasites was that the prevailing religious explanation of life was that God created it in its current form on purpose and it was good. Therefore something as body horror centric as 75k species of parasitic "caterpillar hawk" wasps is easily rejected as it is clearly not good according to our sensibilities.
Source? Not very familiar with Twain, but fallen creation has been in the Judeo-Christian sphere for a long time. I assumed that's what he would have been influenced by.
Twain was mentioned in the article a couple of times with various works more or less stating "God apparently made everything like this on purpose:
>In Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth (published posthumously in 1939), Satan sends a series of reports from Earth to the archangels Michael and Gabriel. In Letter VI, Satan marshals the evidence to call God a “malevolent lunatic”:
...
>The Christian begins with this straight proposition, this definite proposition, this inflexible and uncompromising proposition: God is all-knowing, and all-powerful.
>This being the case, nothing can happen without his knowing beforehand that it is going to happen; nothing happens without his permission; nothing can happen that he chooses to prevent.
>That is definite enough, isn’t it? It makes the Creator distinctly responsible for everything that happens, doesn’t it? . . . .
>Then, having thus made the Creator responsible for all those pains and diseases and miseries above enumerated, and which he could have prevented, the gifted Christian blandly calls him Our Father!
My fault for not reading the article fully. For the curious reader, C. S. Lewis wrote a great piece on this called, "The Problem of Pain."
"We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
Of course, there's hundreds of more writings on this, but Lewis is always an easy place to start.
No worries, the article is huge. I also agree with Lewis, in that this world is incomplete as we are not fully one with God as we were created to be. So we recognize that lack as pain, and things we do to cope can lead us into further pain. In a world where we must eat every day to be healthy, the pain of hunger drives us to food. One could argue spiritual pain is intended to drive us to God in a similar way.
But the caterpillars are hardly benign entities. They can decimate crops and cause famine, or even destroy entire forests if left unchecked. I'm in total agreement that nature a fucked up system - not pretty in its many machinations. But I struggle to see how parasitism is all that different than other types of predation in this regard.
I don't disagree with you, ecosystems are both delicate and robust in cycles. The focus on parasitism is also because it is believed that there is more parasite life than non-parasite life. From the article:
>Or, as Kevin Lafferty, a marine ecologist for the US Geological Survey puts it, “Parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on Earth.”
>So popular, in fact, that many parasites are themselves prey to their own parasites. In a phenomenon called “hyperparasitism,” parasites are invaded by parasites that are invaded by still more parasites. These Russian dolls of internal flesh-eating have been observed to five levels down, which one article describes as “an endless progression of interspecies abuse”:
Hmm...can/does an ecosystem exist without parasites?
Parasite meaning something taking more out of a system than giving back to it. Fear might not even be experienced or required or involved as with our gut parasites.
I imagine such an ecosystem could exist for a short time, but the prevalence of parasitism also points out how viable it is as a kind of shortcut for life. Perhaps the more terrifying thing to consider is how many species were driven to extinction by parasites that were just a bit too aggressive in how they affected their host, which also would likely result in the parasite's extinction as well.
> Man furnishes no exception to the rule. He seems to add the treachery and deceit that the other animals in the main do not practice, to all the other cruelties that move his life. Man has made himself master of the animal world and he uses his power to serve only his own ends. Man, at least, kills helpless animals for the pleasure of killing, alone. He breeds horses and dogs, and fixes a gala day which is a society occasion when both men and women dress for the event, whereupon they turn loose a puny fox and set on its trail a pack of hounds trained for the chase. The noble men and women, riding at a mad pace, follow over hill and dale until, after hours of effort, the exhausted fox is unable longer to escape them, and with great glee they see it torn to pieces by the hounds.
Darwin making a convincing case for our unbounded "human" capacity of cruelty against other animals. The fact that he is describing the practices of the aristocracy is also very relevant because every human being in the "developed" world today lives like an aristocrat and commits so many atrocities throughout the day that it would be impossible to catalogue them all.
This is why building the "panoptic computronium cathedral"™ is a moral imperative. I can get it all done for a mere $80B so tell all your friends about it. This is a bargain deal for saving the soul of humanity.
> The fact that he is describing the practices of the aristocracy is also very relevant because every human being in the "developed" world today lives like an aristocrat and commits so many atrocities throughout the day that it would be impossible to catalogue them all.
Any example of these atrocities that every human commits every day which are on the same scale and personal involvement as the fox hunting presented as the example of an atrocity?
You ever buy a sandwich with meat in it? How about coffee? Chocolate? Driving a car? Use pesticides to clear your home of termites? Poisons to get rid of rats and other "pests"? Do you use smart phones and other gadgets with rare earth metals? Have you recently walked by a homeless person and what did you do about the situation? Do you have an opinion on Israel's actions in Gaza? Ever been in a car accident? Run over some animals/people because you were going too fast? Do you use makeup tested on animals? The list is endless.
The soul of humanity can be saved for a mere $80B with the help of the "panoptic computronium cathedral"™ so tell all your friends about it. A better humanity is possible for a very cheap investment, all that's needed is some hardware and software that will enable governing the world with mathematics.
> You ever buy a sandwich with meat in it? How about coffee? Chocolate? Driving a car? Use pesticides to clear your home of termites? Poisons to get rid of rats and other "pests"? Do you use smart phones and other gadgets with rare earth metals? Have you recently walked by a homeless person and what did you do about the situation? Do you have an opinion on Israel's actions in Gaza? Ever been in a car accident? Run over some animals/people because you were going too fast? Do you use makeup tested on animals?
Do you think that any of those examples are in the category of "taking pleasure and directly taking part in seeing a live animals torn to bits"?
It has nothing to do with your subjective experience and everything to do with the fact that wanton use of resources, animals, and people for selfish purposes is fundamentally immoral and atrocious. The fact that the aggregate effect ends up being a crime against nature is why these atrocities are innumerable. By simply existing and opting into the system you are complicit in its operation and propagation.
You don't have to see a live animal torn to bits to be implicated in the unethical farming and slaughter of animals, all you have to do is spend a dollar to support the system that makes it all possible.
> It has nothing to do with your subjective experience and everything to do with the fact that wanton use of resources, animals, and people for selfish purposes is fundamentally immoral and atrocious.
I'm trying to clarify your position here: Do you think that eating a creature, farmed, raised and killed in accordance with current legislation, is the same level of atrocity as laughing with pleasure as a live animal is torn apart, just for the joy of the audience?
Because, TBH, if you argue that those two are the same in level and intensity of "evilness", then you are, in all fairness, not playing with a full deck.
If you argue that they are not, then your original comment is off the mark.
Oh so you're doing me a favor? That's great but the only favor I need from you is to tell your friends about the panoptic computronium cathedral. Thanks again for being so helpful but I just need money to save humanity and don't need anyone to clarify my position because it is pretty clear if you have an IQ high enough to understand it.
No? The problem of evil is applicable to any religion that claims that an omnipotent and omniscient creator of the world exists, which many strands of Hinduism do.
The doctrine of karma is a good attempt but it still doesn't solve it. In fact, I think it was a scholar from Jainism, a religion that does believe in Karma, who raised this a version of this the problem of evil against theistic schools of Indian philosophy in mediaeval times, independently from the Greek philosopher who first raised it.
> No? The problem of evil is applicable to any religion that claims that an omnipotent and omniscient creator of the world exists, which many strands of Hinduism do.
It's mostly the religions descending from the Abrahamic belief system that holds the concept of evil as a central belief and holds the concept of an ultimate evil personified as a central belief, and offers itself as the only way to escape punishment for all evils.
As I understand it[1], the concept of "evil" cannot exist in any belief system that is built around the concept of a reincarnation which depends on the way the person lived their life.
If you believe, as most orthodox Hinduism strands do, that you are reincarnated and move up or down the ladder of greatness (ants vs humans, poverty vs wealth, etc) depending on how you lived, then there is no such thing as "evil".
You simply get what's required to ensure balance. IOW, "you always get what you give" is not a punishment at all for doing "evil" things, because "you always get what you give" doesn't require the concept of evil or good to simply return what you doled out when you are reincarnated.
Think of it as balance - each act you do (consider good/evil on a scale from 1-10 with 1 being evil) will eventually balance out some other act you do or did in a previous incarnation, and if not, will be balanced out by some future act in a future incarnation.
[1] I'm an atheist, and as such much more aware of what and how different religions supply a "belief system" than followers of those religions themselves.
If everything zeroing out means there is no evil, wouldn't that also mean that there is no good? I can accept the "get what you give" concept (Jesus said similar things about mercy and forgiveness) but is not the end goal to reach enlightenment and escape the cycle of reincarnation? Is that why it zeros out, because your soul annihilates upon enlightenment?
I haven't looked into Hinduism too much myself but it's hard for me to not conceptualize "moving toward enlightenment" as good and "moving away from enlightenment" as evil. Possibly because I don't know the context for what the end state of the universe is supposed to be in Hindu tradition.
> If everything zeroing out means there is no evil, wouldn't that also mean that there is no good?
As far as I understand the reincarnation philosophy, then, yes, there is no concept of good, because you can't have a concept of "good" without having the other end of the scale of "evil".
> I haven't looked into Hinduism too much myself but it's hard for me to not conceptualize "moving toward enlightenment" as good and "moving away from enlightenment" as evil.
I'm not a Hindu so I can't get into the weeds about this. What I remember from reading the religious texts (decades ago), such as the Bhagvhad Gita(sp?) is that "you do what you do, it will come back to you if it hasn't already".
All the religious systems that incoporates reincarnation, that I am aware of, does include the concept of evil in some way.
It seems your post contradicts itself? First quote "... that you are reincarnated and move up or down the ladder of greatness ... depending on how you lived, then there is no such thing as "evil"." Second quote: "... balance - each act you do (consider good/evil on a scale from 1-10 with 1 being evil)".
So the system with no evil uses a scale based on good/evil? Also, what are the bad things you can do in a life-action-value system, where there is no evil? Seems to be cruel if your karma gets subtracted because one does a 'less good' but still good thing? And would such a system or the karma subtraction not constitute evil in itself?
> So the system with no evil uses a scale based on good/evil?
I don't see the contradiction, because I asked the reader to consider it in simplistic terms - terms they already understand.
The system doesn't use a scale of good and evil, its simply "you get what you deserve".
Whether the reader thinks that fox hunting[1] is good/evil/neutral is irrelevant if they are reincarnated as a fox in their next life!
So, yeah, you and I could, and would, classify some stuff on the scale of good/evil that you (and I) use, but because the scale is irrelevant, what purpose does the scale serve in a reincarnation-based belief system?
If any act, $FOO, that a being does is done back to them (under the reincarnation belief system), does it matter if $FOO is "Killed for pleasure, not food" or "sacrificed much for some other beings benefit"?
I guess what I am saying is, if the concept of evil and good is literally irrelevant to the workings of the belief system, then that belief system simply doesn't have the concept of evil (or good).
[1] Using an example from a thread below. You can pick your own example.
Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps what this really shows is that a reincarnation system, where you can be reincarnated as an animal or thing that has no mental concept of good or evil, does not make sense. Because such a system cannot bring enlightenment, as your karma situation is basically unknowable - unless you would have an overview of the system and the chain of reincarnations, which does not seem to happen. And therefore whether your situation was a result of good or evil becomes irrelevant. But in a reincarnation system, where we only have reincarnation as humans, with a purpose of progress, the concept of good and evil can make sense (?). Even whether we completely understand the system or not.
"... if the concept of evil and good is literally irrelevant to the workings of the belief system, then that belief system simply doesn't have the concept of evil (or good)." In a real sense yes, but the actors in the system may still be under the belief that good and evil exists. That actually may touch a sore point in some religions, that claims to have explanatory powers and maybe also salvation powers. But at the same time, it seems not to allow learning about and approaching a subject or concept such as good and evil, from a point of incomplete understanding.
I think the whole thing ie. this entire interesting debate, shows that our understanding is incomplete. The concepts or beliefs we have in this area does not hold under analysis and scrutiny. And yet there seems to be something there that ignites curiosity.
Not just a philosopher of Jainism, there were many many philosophers from different strands of eastern philosophy(Sanatana Dharma, Jainism, Buddhism) and that too with many details.
There's a lot of writing here, but the philosophical method is more or less one of dismissing things that FEEL absurd to the writer. If you allow yourself to do that, you might as well write a much shorter piece.
The cosmos may be designed in such a way that our entire universe is dedicated to the production of a certain kind of moral experience which makes us delicious to beings in an enclosing master universe. We may be souls in a pickle jar on a cosmic supermarket shelf.
I think it's far more likely that no one set this system up and we are merely living out the consequences of physical laws, but I can't rule out that a God of some kind set it all up for some reason that is Rational Unto Himself.
Rational unto himself? The last line of the article reads:
"Imagine a teenage fan of gross-out movies—whose all-time favorite movie scene was the chestburster segment in Alien—got access to a video game in which he could create simulated worlds populated with millions of species, many of them sentient, for his sick entertainment.
Would that world look significantly different than our own?"
A bit grim. Most polytheistic religions are an attempt to deal with the problem that the world isn't that tightly organized and has much built-in conflict.
With what's been learned about AI in the last few years, philosophy and theology need to go back into the shop for an overhaul. Stuff which used to be pure speculation is becoming industrial strength technology.
- Much of what humans think of as intelligence comes from scaling up some rather simple operations. How could brains evolve? Mostly by scaleup. Biology told us how similar nervous system components are across species, but not why bigger worked better. Now we are seeing that quantity, all by itself, yields smarter.
- A lot of stuff that was thought to be uniquely human - isn't.
- Munge enough data with some random inputs and creativity comes out.
- Optimizing gets really effective in high-dimensional spaces.
I love your pickle jar analogy, as it really underlines the fact that we are trapped in our reality, the slowly decaying echo of the big bang. We can't get outside of that no matter how hard we try. We might as well be pickles banging against the glass :)
Odd that suffering should be equated with evil. It seems an almost universal aspect of so many secular philosophies to elevate reduction of suffering over achievement or joy. Then again, maybe this is just a left leaning political view, which just happens to be associated with atheism in our day.
Modern society doesn't really have room for a definite description of "evil" but suffering is visible and experienced by all. Reduction of suffering is considered good because suffering is considered evil, even if there isn't any spiritual or philosophical thought given to it these days.
nature says eat or be eaten(or die). now that we are on top of the food chain, it's useful, for mental health and societal reasons, not not want to rip every one's throat out, even thou every other species (including us) continues to do so. You tend to steer and veer towards what you look at. The good news is we get to choose what we look at... the bad news is we (statistically) choose wrong. Race car drivers don't look at the wall when they drive, because when they do, they tend to hit it. stop looking at the wall guys ...
Islam solves this very simply: evil (as in people doing bad things) is an unavoidable consequence of free will; you couldn't have both a world with no evil and a world with free will. Animals doing nasty stuff to each other is just nature, there's no good or evil about it, because animals don't have free will, they just follow their instincts. Calling the actions of a parasite evil just because it makes one feel icky has no basis in theology.
How sad, empty and futile it is to look at the world as it truly is. “Meaningless! Meaningless! A chasing after the wind.”
Follow the Ancient Greeks and revel in the glory of youth and the honour of deeds? Man is mortal, and whatever his accomplishments, the best to hope for is memory.
Follow the concepts of Buddhism and hope for an ultimate dissolution of the self (Nirvana) or adopt Hinduism's practices for divine union and accounting (Moksha)?
Or embrace nihilism. We are but patterns on the edge of Chaos. Passing complexity as negative entropy is slowly absorbed?
The Christian answer, which is not for everyone, is that the sin of Adam was such a profoundly impacting event, that all of creation has been subsequently cursed. So devastating was the affect of this one seemingly trivial sin, that all humans are forever condemned without hope. So destructive is sin, that the only resolution was the suffering, humiliation and eventual death of God himself (in the form of his son). Death and suffering entered the world, and now cats torture mice.
Of course Christianity provides hope for the believer. The believer is in a transient state of suffering in a broken sinful world. The righteous judge will return to create a new heaven and a new earth. Temporary suffering will all be forgotten in the context of eternity.
I don’t know if I have ever come across the writings of a more miserable person. He talks about suffering an existential crisis for 30 years and it really comes across in his writings. Poor bastard. I hope he can get help.
The only reason why you are not in a similar panic mode is because your hormones are evolved to keep you way above the baseline appropriate for the circumstances.
Does such panic over things we have no control benefit anyone? Who is better off shitting themselves in terror over the elephant in the room rather than just making distance and leaving it alone?
I don't find the "we're in a simulation" argument convincing: Moore's law of exponential growth is bending into the S-curve dictated to all initially exponentially growing physical systems, and thus we will never have arbitrarily deeply nested simulations with atomic granularity on a planetary scale, to say nothing of a galactic or universal scale. Even more, were there containing universes with physical laws and resources sufficient to such simulations, the idea that the operators were teenage boys bored into cruelty is anthropomorphism at its most absurd.
If you think parasitical behaviour is wrong or if you think killing other creatures is wrong but also think that you have to get your hands dirty, then yeah, this place is a mess.
But, if that is your sense (re killing, parasitical behaviour) perhaps your lesson here is to learn not do those actions that you abhor. Don't act like an Ichneumonidæ, if that is not what you are. You should act coherently according to your sense of right and wrong (not some external view of good and evil). Ie don't be a hypocrite to yourself or try not to be. Simples.
Eg If you think it is wrong to kill animals for food, when there is fruit or produce that does not harm available, but you like the taste of a burger and eat what you think is the wrong thing anyway, you own that. You need to resolve the question in yourself - either meat eating is fine really or it is not and you shouldn't do it. It can't be both. Acting in a dissonant way according to one's own terms is wrong for you. Your job is to resolve the dissonance. Judge yourself.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadActually this problem is faced only by western religious philosophy which is not wrong but have an incomplete conception of universe.
Eastern philosophy states that God has created this world along with certain rules with which everyone should abide by i.e. 'law of karma'. Anyone who acts or tries to act in such a way as to harm any other living being will have to suffer reactions of his 'sin' either in this life or next life. And when that suffering is perceived it is termed as evil. But actually our acts are evil which come back as life lessons to help us introspect and improve ourselves. And this system given by God is a manifestation of his love else we may all have already be converted to Sickle wielding terrorists bent on taking each others flesh.
(Of course above is a very brief description, there is much more to it)
The problem of evil is something anyone studying Abrahamic religion encounters. Very few of the "believers" I've met have bothered.
> Eastern philosophy states that . . .
ORLY? Which one?
> Of course above is a very brief description, there is much more to it
I should hope so!
I flagged this thing because it's going to lead to "religious battles," quite literally. And the article itself is full of nonsense. And fear of the natural world!
I don't believe this explanation, but reincarnation usually comes along with karma in a package.
A crude example: A man torturing a caterpillar for fun, may have to take birth in a life of caterpillar and endure the same pain, either by a human or different species.
Thanks for the good question, am open to more.
The basic conception of the argument (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”) still seems valid if a God has created a karmic system.
So I don’t think this is an issue uniquely facing Western perspectives.
Personally, I don’t find the free will defence particularly convincing, either. Do we really have free will? Is free will truly necessary for education/moral goodness? And if so, is god truly capable of evil?
The difference, as I understand it, is that the free-will argument requires the existence of a creator who is either impotent, malevolent or evil (or some combination of all three).
A karmic-based system requires no creator to exist.
Now you will ask that how did evil actually generate because in beginning there was no bad karma. The thing is that even the intention of harming someone and attempts can generate bad karma. Our mindset towardds others must be good.
4) Nah, in eastern philosophy even beginners know this, yeah but in east also very less people actually know about themselves!
5) Yes we have free will. If given two paths with one path we know as thousand times better than other path, Still by our free will we can choose the bad one. 6) Free will is necessary for love i.e. relationship with ourselves and God. Love is morality harming any sentinent being is not. 6) God is capable of evil but he/she(whatever) does not do it.
The author is simply funny in his humanity.
Without an observer nothing exists. What does exist depends on the perspective of the observer.
If you were a lego structure, would it be upsetting to be made into something else?
If you are trying to make the perfect widget, what to do with the previous attempts? What if reuse would allow for faster iterations? If perfection is the goal how hard is the choice?
Old people need to make room for young ones who are always more deserving.
The way we age we are still far from perfection. Nature needs a few more rounds.
The cruel formula is how we got here. Im sure single cell organisms would have loved to be the final iteration but sadly for them that didn't happen. Our challenges are much like theirs. We also think we want a life without challenges eventho we are what we are because of them.
Nice article tho, keep trying :)
The removal of this form of suffering from the existence of the caterpillar would require the extinction (and associated suffering) of every living member of that species of wasp.
How can karma be negative to the wasp that has no choice but to act in the way it does by biological necessity? More generally, how does karma reconcile with any act originating from biology?
If every creature on earth decided to inflict absolutely no harm on any other creature, then the only option would be to eliminate all life from the planet.
Karma suffers from the problem of evil just as much as western religion.
Wasps are somewhat doomed that they haven't made this choice before. The pit gets deeper and deeper the more you dig. The climb will be longer and harder the later you start.
If fish can learn to breathe air, walk on land, and care for their young, wasps can learn to not eat caterpillars.
Did you choose your preferences, though?
That just describes sexual selection in general. Of course you think with your big head when choosing a mate, not the small one that's easily fooled.
You make it sound like choosing good genes for your offspring is evil or something.
The wasp has a choice like a tapeworm can choose to exist outside of the gut.. that is, it doesn't have any choice at all.
Your attitude is fatalistic. You're saying we're all doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors until we die or get lucky. That's a belief. A false one at that.
The tapeworm has no choice because it has no ability to comprehend the context of its own existence. A lot of human beings find themselves in the same predicament through no fault of their own.
They are not. They are conscious beings in charge of their lives and evolution like any other being is. They might have less brain cells than us, but you don't know what they are thinking.
As we observe the natural world, it seems that various types of animals have different levels of "consciousness" and "sentience". I don't think the caterpillar is very conscious and thinking, it is running a smaller program on less hardware, but I think it may be more living than biology in general gives it credit for. I think we have the same functions as described, and more. Including limitations that we don't think about most of the time. As the cat also does not. This "more" is what separates us from animals. We have the same basic system, but we also have more than this. Which, among many things, gives rise to us contemplating what consciousness and sentience is, both in ourselves and in the animal world. And makes us perceive good and evil and have morals. For the cat good and evil is irrelevant. It does not have morals. It has a nature, which is the program running for that type of animal. The nature of the cat is to kill and eat the mouse. Good and evil is not involved. The wasp lays eggs in the caterpillar. Good and evil is not involved. It is nature and it is their programming. Where we humans may be able to use our consciousnes to change our programming to some extent, the animals cannot change their programming. It evolves indirectly over time and generations.
A crude example: A man torturing a caterpillar for fun, may have to take birth in a life of caterpillar and endure the same pain, either by a human or different species.
Karma does not negate biology, karma is a law which acts on 'subtler' platform than gross law of biology. pleaseure and suffering decided according to law of karma is manifested by biology(through chance and probabilities)!
Thanks for such wonderful questions, am open to more.
Once its bad reactions( because of which he had to take a life form with so little consciousness ) are over it can get a new form with more intelligence.
Soul never takes a form, it is distinct from matter. Dull matter takes the form. It only 'directs' matter. After old body is destroyed it gets a new body.
2>. 'Frequently unanswered questions' https://www.amazon.in/Frequently-Unanswered-Questions-Chaita...
For a way too technical and scientific analysis of eastern philosophy check out 'Atma Paradigm' series(my respect to you if you actually complete that): 3>. https://m.youtube.com/@TheAtmaParadigm/videos
High quality articles on various controversial scenarios in terms of karma https://www.thespiritualscientist.com/?s=Karma________
Why is there any more or less moral weight to the wasps lifecycle than any other predator along the food chain?
In its current life it may not have the intelligence to act morally. But once( before it became a caterpillar ) it had a body of moral sentiment being with power of discrimination. It made bad choices at that time and thus induced suffering in current life.
Catholicism has a concept called "redemptive suffering" where your suffering is offered up as a spiritual sacrifice, often for a loved one who has passed away. We usually can't choose not to suffer but we can choose how we respond to it.
Modern Catholicism also has no issues with evolution so generally the "life is infested with parasites and therefore can't be declared good like the Bible says" is a fundamentalist problem to try to explain. Evolution appears to be how life got to its present stage on Earth and we have the history encoded in our DNA. Arguing against that is embracing blind, stubborn faith and ignorance.
If only most Christians thought like that... I've grown around Christians of all kinds of denominations and I've never met anyone with that mindset, even the Catholic ones. They all took the Bible to the absolute literal and whenever reality didn't agree with their beliefs they always engaged in the most ridiculous and insane mental gymnastics instead of reevaluting their point of views.
That no longer being an issue with my faith has helped my mental health immensely. I don't feel the painful cognitive dissonance I used to because the point Genesis is trying to get across is "God made everything and it wasn't hard for him, we can choose to do things he doesn't want us to do, and this tendency can lead to a lot of serious shenanigans. Then God promises stuff to Abraham."
To be fair to most Christians, they are not apologists and as most atheists will tell you have a very limited understanding of most points of their faith, let alone individual points of contention in the bible. So the only defense mechanism they have is withdrawing to literalism and flail too much to reevaluate. Then there's the ones who are apologists, and most of them online are downright annoying lol
It isn't restricted to a domain because it can be applied everywhere, by everyone.
It is a way to find effective truth, faith or subjectivity be damned. Whether I believe in radio waves or electricity doesn't enter into it - the cell phone still works.
The scientific method as a mindset helps us uncover things but only if they can be tested and reproduced, as you said.
It's also interesting to consider that fear itself is probably an adaptation that helps the propagation of DNA. The fact that animals and humans can experience fear at all tells us that we're not in a kind universe.
>In Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth (published posthumously in 1939), Satan sends a series of reports from Earth to the archangels Michael and Gabriel. In Letter VI, Satan marshals the evidence to call God a “malevolent lunatic”:
...
>The Christian begins with this straight proposition, this definite proposition, this inflexible and uncompromising proposition: God is all-knowing, and all-powerful.
>This being the case, nothing can happen without his knowing beforehand that it is going to happen; nothing happens without his permission; nothing can happen that he chooses to prevent.
>That is definite enough, isn’t it? It makes the Creator distinctly responsible for everything that happens, doesn’t it? . . . .
>Then, having thus made the Creator responsible for all those pains and diseases and miseries above enumerated, and which he could have prevented, the gifted Christian blandly calls him Our Father!
"We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
Of course, there's hundreds of more writings on this, but Lewis is always an easy place to start.
>Or, as Kevin Lafferty, a marine ecologist for the US Geological Survey puts it, “Parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on Earth.”
>So popular, in fact, that many parasites are themselves prey to their own parasites. In a phenomenon called “hyperparasitism,” parasites are invaded by parasites that are invaded by still more parasites. These Russian dolls of internal flesh-eating have been observed to five levels down, which one article describes as “an endless progression of interspecies abuse”:
Parasite meaning something taking more out of a system than giving back to it. Fear might not even be experienced or required or involved as with our gut parasites.
Life isn't a happy numbers game by any means.
Darwin making a convincing case for our unbounded "human" capacity of cruelty against other animals. The fact that he is describing the practices of the aristocracy is also very relevant because every human being in the "developed" world today lives like an aristocrat and commits so many atrocities throughout the day that it would be impossible to catalogue them all.
This is why building the "panoptic computronium cathedral"™ is a moral imperative. I can get it all done for a mere $80B so tell all your friends about it. This is a bargain deal for saving the soul of humanity.
Any example of these atrocities that every human commits every day which are on the same scale and personal involvement as the fox hunting presented as the example of an atrocity?
The soul of humanity can be saved for a mere $80B with the help of the "panoptic computronium cathedral"™ so tell all your friends about it. A better humanity is possible for a very cheap investment, all that's needed is some hardware and software that will enable governing the world with mathematics.
Do you think that any of those examples are in the category of "taking pleasure and directly taking part in seeing a live animals torn to bits"?
You don't have to see a live animal torn to bits to be implicated in the unethical farming and slaughter of animals, all you have to do is spend a dollar to support the system that makes it all possible.
I'm trying to clarify your position here: Do you think that eating a creature, farmed, raised and killed in accordance with current legislation, is the same level of atrocity as laughing with pleasure as a live animal is torn apart, just for the joy of the audience?
Because, TBH, if you argue that those two are the same in level and intensity of "evilness", then you are, in all fairness, not playing with a full deck.
If you argue that they are not, then your original comment is off the mark.
The doctrine of karma is a good attempt but it still doesn't solve it. In fact, I think it was a scholar from Jainism, a religion that does believe in Karma, who raised this a version of this the problem of evil against theistic schools of Indian philosophy in mediaeval times, independently from the Greek philosopher who first raised it.
It's mostly the religions descending from the Abrahamic belief system that holds the concept of evil as a central belief and holds the concept of an ultimate evil personified as a central belief, and offers itself as the only way to escape punishment for all evils.
As I understand it[1], the concept of "evil" cannot exist in any belief system that is built around the concept of a reincarnation which depends on the way the person lived their life.
If you believe, as most orthodox Hinduism strands do, that you are reincarnated and move up or down the ladder of greatness (ants vs humans, poverty vs wealth, etc) depending on how you lived, then there is no such thing as "evil".
You simply get what's required to ensure balance. IOW, "you always get what you give" is not a punishment at all for doing "evil" things, because "you always get what you give" doesn't require the concept of evil or good to simply return what you doled out when you are reincarnated.
Think of it as balance - each act you do (consider good/evil on a scale from 1-10 with 1 being evil) will eventually balance out some other act you do or did in a previous incarnation, and if not, will be balanced out by some future act in a future incarnation.
[1] I'm an atheist, and as such much more aware of what and how different religions supply a "belief system" than followers of those religions themselves.
I haven't looked into Hinduism too much myself but it's hard for me to not conceptualize "moving toward enlightenment" as good and "moving away from enlightenment" as evil. Possibly because I don't know the context for what the end state of the universe is supposed to be in Hindu tradition.
As far as I understand the reincarnation philosophy, then, yes, there is no concept of good, because you can't have a concept of "good" without having the other end of the scale of "evil".
> I haven't looked into Hinduism too much myself but it's hard for me to not conceptualize "moving toward enlightenment" as good and "moving away from enlightenment" as evil.
I'm not a Hindu so I can't get into the weeds about this. What I remember from reading the religious texts (decades ago), such as the Bhagvhad Gita(sp?) is that "you do what you do, it will come back to you if it hasn't already".
It seems your post contradicts itself? First quote "... that you are reincarnated and move up or down the ladder of greatness ... depending on how you lived, then there is no such thing as "evil"." Second quote: "... balance - each act you do (consider good/evil on a scale from 1-10 with 1 being evil)".
So the system with no evil uses a scale based on good/evil? Also, what are the bad things you can do in a life-action-value system, where there is no evil? Seems to be cruel if your karma gets subtracted because one does a 'less good' but still good thing? And would such a system or the karma subtraction not constitute evil in itself?
I don't see the contradiction, because I asked the reader to consider it in simplistic terms - terms they already understand.
The system doesn't use a scale of good and evil, its simply "you get what you deserve".
Whether the reader thinks that fox hunting[1] is good/evil/neutral is irrelevant if they are reincarnated as a fox in their next life!
So, yeah, you and I could, and would, classify some stuff on the scale of good/evil that you (and I) use, but because the scale is irrelevant, what purpose does the scale serve in a reincarnation-based belief system?
If any act, $FOO, that a being does is done back to them (under the reincarnation belief system), does it matter if $FOO is "Killed for pleasure, not food" or "sacrificed much for some other beings benefit"?
I guess what I am saying is, if the concept of evil and good is literally irrelevant to the workings of the belief system, then that belief system simply doesn't have the concept of evil (or good).
[1] Using an example from a thread below. You can pick your own example.
"... if the concept of evil and good is literally irrelevant to the workings of the belief system, then that belief system simply doesn't have the concept of evil (or good)." In a real sense yes, but the actors in the system may still be under the belief that good and evil exists. That actually may touch a sore point in some religions, that claims to have explanatory powers and maybe also salvation powers. But at the same time, it seems not to allow learning about and approaching a subject or concept such as good and evil, from a point of incomplete understanding.
I think the whole thing ie. this entire interesting debate, shows that our understanding is incomplete. The concepts or beliefs we have in this area does not hold under analysis and scrutiny. And yet there seems to be something there that ignites curiosity.
The cosmos may be designed in such a way that our entire universe is dedicated to the production of a certain kind of moral experience which makes us delicious to beings in an enclosing master universe. We may be souls in a pickle jar on a cosmic supermarket shelf.
I think it's far more likely that no one set this system up and we are merely living out the consequences of physical laws, but I can't rule out that a God of some kind set it all up for some reason that is Rational Unto Himself.
"Imagine a teenage fan of gross-out movies—whose all-time favorite movie scene was the chestburster segment in Alien—got access to a video game in which he could create simulated worlds populated with millions of species, many of them sentient, for his sick entertainment.
Would that world look significantly different than our own?"
A bit grim. Most polytheistic religions are an attempt to deal with the problem that the world isn't that tightly organized and has much built-in conflict.
With what's been learned about AI in the last few years, philosophy and theology need to go back into the shop for an overhaul. Stuff which used to be pure speculation is becoming industrial strength technology.
- Much of what humans think of as intelligence comes from scaling up some rather simple operations. How could brains evolve? Mostly by scaleup. Biology told us how similar nervous system components are across species, but not why bigger worked better. Now we are seeing that quantity, all by itself, yields smarter.
- A lot of stuff that was thought to be uniquely human - isn't.
- Munge enough data with some random inputs and creativity comes out.
- Optimizing gets really effective in high-dimensional spaces.
- Free will and randomness are closely related.
Follow the Ancient Greeks and revel in the glory of youth and the honour of deeds? Man is mortal, and whatever his accomplishments, the best to hope for is memory.
Follow the concepts of Buddhism and hope for an ultimate dissolution of the self (Nirvana) or adopt Hinduism's practices for divine union and accounting (Moksha)?
Or embrace nihilism. We are but patterns on the edge of Chaos. Passing complexity as negative entropy is slowly absorbed?
The Christian answer, which is not for everyone, is that the sin of Adam was such a profoundly impacting event, that all of creation has been subsequently cursed. So devastating was the affect of this one seemingly trivial sin, that all humans are forever condemned without hope. So destructive is sin, that the only resolution was the suffering, humiliation and eventual death of God himself (in the form of his son). Death and suffering entered the world, and now cats torture mice.
Of course Christianity provides hope for the believer. The believer is in a transient state of suffering in a broken sinful world. The righteous judge will return to create a new heaven and a new earth. Temporary suffering will all be forgotten in the context of eternity.
No one said you have to pick just one; maybe they were always parts of a bigger picture.
Whereas our understanding of sentience is limited and we have not got ideas how consciousness works.
But, if that is your sense (re killing, parasitical behaviour) perhaps your lesson here is to learn not do those actions that you abhor. Don't act like an Ichneumonidæ, if that is not what you are. You should act coherently according to your sense of right and wrong (not some external view of good and evil). Ie don't be a hypocrite to yourself or try not to be. Simples.
Eg If you think it is wrong to kill animals for food, when there is fruit or produce that does not harm available, but you like the taste of a burger and eat what you think is the wrong thing anyway, you own that. You need to resolve the question in yourself - either meat eating is fine really or it is not and you shouldn't do it. It can't be both. Acting in a dissonant way according to one's own terms is wrong for you. Your job is to resolve the dissonance. Judge yourself.