Human Nature

[Belacqua]

I don’t have an issue bringing up politics in a discussion of human nature, but it’s tangential at best. That’s not what Bel is doing. As you said in the OP, this falls under psychology, not politics. If Bel wants to continue bitching about the US political landscape, he’s free to do so, but this isn’t the thread for it.

I actually considered splitting the thread, but that’s a whole lotta work.

Boru

I believe this discussion has largely run its course in any case.  Most atheists here seem as critical of human nature as I have become.

Perhaps I should concentrate on secular humanism, which is still a possibly redeeming perspective, as @AFTT47 suggested early on.

As I said earlier, politics is where human nature shows itself in an obvious way, and where we debate what we want to do with it. 

If you don't want to do politics, we could certainly discuss religion, because for many centuries religion was the framework through which Western people analyzed human nature. 

Dante is the obvious example. Nobody ever parsed human weaknesses and their cures more than he did. 

A more recent example is C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. You have to read Dante before you read this one, but it is a more modern version, explaining just what it is about human nature that keeps us turning toward what is false and selfish. 

The best analysis of why political parties interfere with progress is surely Simone Weil's On the Abolition of All Political Parties. Here she makes a persuasive case that by aligning ourselves with a party, instead of just focussing on the truth, we turn ourselves away from the truth. It's true she writes from a Christian perspective, but because she was a philosopher, the God she writes about is entirely different from the God that we argue against on this forum. For her (as for Plato and most philosophers) God is simply the true and the good. And since you also feel that at least some parties turn people away from the truth, this is a profitable thing to read. 

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/...al-parties

What secular sources would you recommend?