Is a human naturally good, bad, or neutral?

(The date and time are dummy values to be updated when the meeting is scheduled.) I invite you to take a minute or so to answer the following questions and explain the reasons for your answers: Is a human naturally good, bad, or neutral? Is the mind a battleground of forces that we can’t control, as the Apostle Paul and Sigmund Freud espouse? Is human nature inherently sinful, as in the Judaic-Christian idea of fallen human nature and as in the Christian idea of original sin? Here is my view of this topic. The hypothetical sinful nature to which our mind is subject is nothing more than the automatic unit of the mind doing what it has learned well to do over the prior years of our life. (I explain the automatic unit in Human Life* in chapter 3 on the mind. The automatic unit of your mind operates with parallel processing of sensory inputs and motor outputs, as it is doing right now as you sit or stand while reading this webpage. The automatic unit operates unconsciously since it operates with parallel processing. The automatic unit does all of the work of thinking while being managed by the volitional unit, which operates consciously and, hence, serially in directing our attention. All of our skills — perceptual, cognitive, motor — are learned by the automatic unit, thereby enabling our mind to execute the skills unconsciously and quickly on an ongoing basis. In the absence of this capability, our mind would be unable to manage our body and keep us from getting harmed by the numerous threats that we face.) We necessarily begin life completely egoistic so that we will have a chance of surviving. As we mature, we gain knowledge and skills, and we learn from our parents to be cooperative and altruistic. As we proceed through life as adults, this is what interpersonal relations are essentially about: realizing the tradeoff of balancing egoism and altruism in the context of human mortality. More generally, our biological nature is, of necessity,…