Bad

This would preclude the idea of "evil" being simply "bad" being taken to the extreme

The statement you made refers to what you think of as "bad". The core of the problem is that people cannot agree on what "bad" is. What people will agree on is that they themselves have an understanding of what "bad" is, even if those understandings are not in agreement.

This is where my idea of evil being the breaking of the Golden Rule comes from. I asked on the Chess Server why we break the Golden Rule, thinking that chess players are pretty smart .. their concensus was that it's broken because people are trying to get some kind of advantage over their fellow human being, getting "one up on your neighbor" -- some sort of hangover from natural selection/survival of the fittest, where organisms within a changing environment compete for scant resources.

But then, if that's true, then does my definition of evil mean that "life itself is evil"? ie. If what life does is break the Golden Rule, and if the breaking of the Golden Rule is evil, then is life evil?

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I don't know what my greatest regret is, I don't regret many of my mistakes, on the whole I view them as learning experiences. The mistakes I do regret are those where I treated others as I wouldn't like to have been treated myself. This was sometimes done innocently, in which case I just wished that I had avoided inflicting myself upon that person (I knew that I should have avoided the interaction usually - somehow) and sometimes deliberately, in which case I regretted that I had been mean. Do you know your biggest regret? I'm not sure any research has been done on the regrets of folk as they near death, it's a tense time after all -- I did a quick Google search and could only find the usual "I wish I had learned to play a musical instrument" or "Seen The Beatles" .. so those hits were focussed on what the individual had not taken an opportunity to experience in their life. I never had any of those regrets that I can recall. My biggest sadness was that I would not be there to help my daughter as she grew up but that wasn't a regret.