Are people truly evil in nature

I agree that this is a good debate! We definitely disagree on many points, But we're both willing to flesh out our definitions and abstain from personal attacks. Let us continue I understand that the definition of evil seems clear to you conceptually. I'm not even saying that our different definitions would necessarily make us unable to identify evil. It can be tempting, When experiencing your own clarity, To say that everyone basically understand what we mean. The problem is that when we do this, We leave room for conflation. Imagine a person who has been told that we basically know what evil is. This person might get the impression that he/she always knows when they see evil. Now if this person was to desire an evil act, They might think the act is not evil because somebody told them that we basically know what evil is. You make that argument that since The Bible is a really old book, That the content must convey greater truth. This is a non sequitur. There is no logical entailment between the age of something and it's factualness. We can only judge the content based on the merit of what it says alone. This is the whole problem with using The Bible to define the word evil. I think you misunderstood my questions about god. What I'm saying is that even if God existed, We have no reason to believe that his opinion would somehow be more truthful than anyone else's. This crumbles the core justification for your argument. Now for the fun part. So I reject the idea that we must only look at normal childhoods. That is moving the goalpost. Your argument is that people are evil by nature. There is no such thing as a normal childhood. Every childhood is different with some variables overlapping. If a child was born inherently evil and has to be taught good behaviors as you say, Then it logically follows that a child that is not taught at all would grow to be an evil adult. This can be dismissed reductio ad absurdum. There can be adults demonstrated to have live with little or no adult intervention who then grew up to live decent lives. We can use the same logic to dismiss the notion that teaching a child to be good will necessarily save them from evil. There are examples of people who are raised in good homes (sometimes Christian homes) who end up being morally depraved. Finally, What about the middle ground? It can be demonstrated that some actions can be morally neutral. They neither benefit nor harm anybody. In closing, I would like to point out that your last statement was a mischaracterization of my argument. I didn't say that a child was born with instincts that cause them to do all the bad things they do. I said that they are born with basic instincts that are purely for survival. This instincts do not exclusively produce immoral actions. They produce survival driven actions that can fall anywhere on the moral spectrum. You were only representing one part of the whole. I then went on to say, That children learn the implications of their actions over time and this forms their moral belief system. This system can be good or bad and can come from many sources. But this is not even close to being evil by nature. If I missed any key points, Please let me know for the sake of completeness.