This permeates our culture so deeply and yet I don't understand the prevelance of it. I have a basic understanding but I am curious why this is never questioned.

If I stood before any audience on earth and called the human race 'evil', 'unenlightened', or 'sinful' the room would likely erupt with applause. Every one of our major world religions concludes the same basic thing: there is something wrong with humans at thier core. Something that is flawed or missing. It needs saving or enlightening or sometimes destruction.

I realize the harm that humans bring and how it's incomparable to anything any other form of life has ever done. I realize the depths of so called evil and depravity we seem capable of. Things like war, crime, rape, drug abuse and so on. It's peculiar to me why these things are blamed on the entire human race because these things are a peculiar set of behaviors belonging only to this culture and only in the last ten thousand years or so. Where tribal cultures still thrive free of contact with civilization as we know it, they are almsot entirely bereft of such behavior. This is not to say there is no violence at all, but the sort of warfare we practice only comes from extreme population density and resource pressures. This is not to say they are not sometimes selfish or foolish or that they don't comitt things like adultury, they do. They are far from perfect, and the human race to is not perfect. perfection is just a nonsense concept, anything too even will not survive, chaos permeates all of the living community.

If humans were innately evil or flawed, the diference in early humans, who were fully homo sapien as much as we are, and in other cultures who are the same would be completely unexplanable. Sure there have been those with what we call the 'noble savage' theory. People have grapsed that there is something about this culture that makes for profoundly flawed humans.

I don't think humans are anything in the way of evil, or good, nor do I think those words even mean anything. I think the flaw is in the culture we enact and in the result of resource pressures and population density. The human species is as functional as any other animal and I am confused by our obsession with it's failure as a species.

The question I am posing is this: Do you think humans are innately flawed? Is this compared to the rest of the community of life? Is the world flawed? Why do you think so? Don't give me the original sin argument, not because I'm discrediting it because that is not my purpose here, but because I understand that argument well and I do not need it argued again, unless you think your take on it is original.