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I think the best part of Thursday's class was our attempt to define evil. Is it really something we can define? Can we really capture the essence of something so dark and abstract in mere human words? Honestly, I think the closest we can get is to scratch the surface with some examples and attributes. One thing I did want to mention, though, is how someone said evil is demonstrated in Parable - by the pyro users. I don't think it's the drug addicts themselves that are evil. They're driven to do things that we may call evil by a substance that alters their brain's chemical functions. I think it's unfair to say that the users themselves are evil - they're trapped ina vicious cycle of evil themselves, if you think about it. Slaves to a substance. So that brings about a question for me: if evil in the book is sybolized by drugs/drug usage/drug-induced acts, where exactly is the "evil"? Are the drugs evil? Or is it like Bingqing proposed, that humans are born evil and are shaped by their environments, and drugs just facilitate the evil's prevalence?

Otherwise, I think we should go back to day one of the class and do a word-association thing with evil as we did with evolution - first three words that pop into our heads when we hear the word "evil" and see how our subconscious defines it, seeing as we can't seem to define it when we think about it on purpose.