Theists: how do you account for psychopaths?

[Silver]

I find it strange how I'm so violent and sadistic when playing games. It's not like I'm ever repressing any violent urges in real life. I almost never have any. It does relieve general stress and frustration to beat the shit out of a load of imaginary people though.

In some ways I envy psychopaths. Having an extremely strong conscience is exhausting at times; mine goes beyond what is of any practical use. But then I don't know how exhausting it is to keep up the facade of being "normal", as most psychopaths do if they want to go unnoticed.

That's how you know you're normal, you're not erecting a facade.

People who wear masks of happiness in public, despite the inner turmoil, have at least something in common with psychopaths.

The facade or the mask is something I have never been capable of presenting, which people don't seem to understand. Why lie to the world, just to make them more comfortable? Fuck that.

[The Grand Nudger]

I always figured the value of a game was escapism.  I;m not sure it would be much fun to play a merciless killer on a video game if you were one irl.  Bet those fuckers all play Farmville and Hello Kitty Island Adventure.  

Anecdotal, but.. I used to love fps like counterstrike and cod when I was a teen.  Bore me to tears nowadays.

[Angrboda]

Morality is more than behaving according to somebody else's idea of what is moral. It means having a conscience. A psychopath who doesn't kill in order to avoid being punished is not being moral. Their acts have the appearance of morality, but not the substance. Just imagine a world where everybody was psychopathic. Where would our morals come from then?

[brewer]

Morality is more than behaving according to somebody else's idea of what is moral.  It means having a conscience.  A psychopath who doesn't kill in order to avoid being punished is not being moral.  Their acts have the appearance of morality, but not the substance.  Just imagine a world where everybody was psychopathic.  Where would our morals come from then?

Um.............. a god?

[robvalue]

I always figured the value of a game was escapism.  I;m not sure it would be much fun to play a merciless killer on a video game if you were one irl.  Bet those fuckers all play Farmville and Hello Kitty Island Adventure.  

Anecdotal, but.. I used to love fps like counterstrike and cod when I was a teen.  Bore me to tears nowadays.

Yeah, you're right. I guess it's experimenting with a totally different role, free of real consequences.

[Catholic_Lady]

The best way I can describe being a psychopath is to imagine you're playing a video game. It's a game highly centered around you and your achievements, and the other characters in the game are just cardboard cutouts with no significance. You don't care about them, because they don't matter.

You might "help" one of them, but you'd only do so because you expect there to be a reward in it for you or because they'll help you later in the game. If you can steal from them and get away with it, or even kill them when it's advantageous to you, you'll do it. You're just playing a game, after all. This is how I play games. Sometimes I'm even extremely cruel to other characters, even though there's no point to doing so, just because I find it amusing. I randomly kill "innocent" people just for kicks, because I can easily get away with it.

This is the way I imagine the life of a psychopath to be. They literally cannot care about other people. If they happen to do something we would consider moral and "helpful", it will be entirely because they expect it will benefit them in the long run. In this way, I consider them unable to be moral. I also consider them unable to be immoral, because they aren't going against any conscience or internal code they have when they do something "bad". They are again just doing it because it benefits them in some way, or because they enjoy doing it. Therefor I class them as amoral: outside the scope of morality.

Expecting them to "choose to care" about people, and to act morally simply because it's the right thing to do is expecting the impossible. You might as well say a computer program could choose to really care about people. At best they can be conditioned to act pseudo-morally, which is (I think) the best approach when it's discovered a child is a psychopath. Our laws achieve this in a very rough way, simply by supplying deterrents to doing "bad things".

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PS: The weird thing is that I've often heard religious people describe things so that everyone is a psychopath, and the only reason anyone can do anything "good" is because of the incentive God gives to do so (or his orders). This leads some people to think they'll turn into maniacs if they left their religion, which is very unlikely to be the case.

They have the ability to choose to behave morally even if they don't care or have empathy towards others.

I still fail to see how this has anything to do with morality coming from God.

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Morality is more than behaving according to somebody else's idea of what is moral. It means having a conscience. A psychopath who doesn't kill in order to avoid being punished is not being moral. Their acts have the appearance of morality, but not the substance. Just imagine a world where everybody was psychopathic. Where would our morals come from then?

True, but he's not being immoral, either. Though I guess if he were to secretly wish death on people, that would be immoral, but psychopath means you don't have empathy, not that you necessarily like it when people die or suffer.

[brewer]

They have the ability to choose to behave morally even if they don't care or have empathy towards others.

I still fail to see how this has anything to do with morality coming from God.

I don't think you understand that a psycho/sociopath morals (if you can call it that) are all self centric. In other words, what is best for them is what is best period. So they do make their moral choices, their best moral choices, it just that non of their choices include you (or anyone else) in the thought process.

[Catholic_Lady]

They have the ability to choose to behave morally even if they don't care or have empathy towards others.

I still fail to see how this has anything to do with morality coming from God.

I don't think you understand that a psycho/sociopath morals (if you can call it that) are all self centric. In other words, what is best for them is what is best period. So they do make their moral choices, their best moral choices, it just that non of their choices include you (or anyone else) in the thought process.

Which is why I don't believe morality is subjective.

[brewer]

I don't think you understand that a psycho/sociopath morals (if you can call it that) are all self centric. In other words, what is best for them is what is best period. So they do make their moral choices, their best moral choices, it just that non of their choices include you (or anyone else) in the thought process.

Which is why I don't believe morality is subjective.

What I just described is the essence of subjective. You and the psychos have two different sets. And they ain't never gonna believe yours.

[robvalue]

Sure, you could call a psychopath's code of conduct their morality. It would be at the absolute extreme end of the scale, being pure self-centered pragmatism. So if that is the morality God gave them, then he wants certain people to not take anyone else's feelings or wellbeing into account when making decisions. It would be, as you pointed out, vastly different to almost everyone else's morality.

Now, there could be a pragmatic reason for God to do that, of course. Not one that makes sense to me, since God needing to be pragmatic implies he has actual obstacles to overcome. That in turn implies he either put them there himself or allows others to.

PS: the important point is that someone can't choose to not be a psychopath, any more than we can choose to become a psychopath. I imagine that one could chip away at one's morality over time, or be massively abused or brainwashed, and end up similar to a psychopath. But I expect nothing short of some sort of brain surgery could alter a psychopath.

PPS: I forgot that Drich has no problem with God being a monster, and so allowing Satan to make psycopaths (or whatever he was talking about) is not an issue.