andrewducker | I don't believe in people

Well, on one level I believe in people. But on another level, what I believe in is very complex combinations of different chemicals that react in a variety of ways to the stimuli around them.

I certainly don't believe in any kind of 'inner essence' that makes a person what they are, nor any kind of spirit (ahem - bearing in mind that I'm still hedging my bets on psi, I still wouldn't count that as any more 'you' than the other bits). This means that I don't think of people as embodying anything in particular. A person is not "a loser" or "cool" or "mean" or "kind-hearted". People perform acts and they have higher/lower likelihoods of performing particular acts in the future. They are fluid, self-contradictory (which, once you discount any central 'self', seems perfectly reasonable). Over time, different parts of the different impulses in them come to the fore, these impulsed being governed by their past, current external stimuli, current chemical makeup, etc.

This, I know, makes me far more forgiving of people than others who believe that a person is evil or annoying or stupid or some other negative attribute. I see people as performing acts which are evil, annoying, stupid, etc. (bearing in mind that those are perceptions too, but for the purpouses of this I can happily leave that to one side).

I know that my refusal to damn someone eternally for having performed acts that I agree are wrong has caused problems with friends in the past, and it undoubtably will do so again in the future. And I understand the problem they have with me. But I can't see the world as being some kind of collection of embodiements of platonic ideals rather than a shifting storm of mutable patterns, and so I can't damn a pattern for being one way at one moment when it may be something quite different the next.