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In the Face of Evil
The word “evil” has become trivialized, particularly in this election season. Just like the words racist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, it is casually thrown around like a ragdoll: who gets to play with it next? When people don’t like other people, or dislike their positions or the way they comb their hair, they just call them evil. Who can argue with evil?
I was going to write on this topic later, but then Doug Watt posted on the horrific practice in China of stealing organs. And the question slapped me in the face: how do we act in the face of true evil? What about other evils, such as abortion and murder? How do we take back the word “evil” so that we demonstrate its power and resilience? Do we even recognize what evil is anymore? Is there anything we can do about the commission of evil in this country or elsewhere in the world? Or must we resign ourselves to wringing our hands, condemning the careless use of the word, and praying for clarity and a strategy for action?
What do you think?
Published in Religion & Philosophy
It’s wrong and dangerous to relegate “evil” only to the most heinous acts and persons . That undermines the understanding that, as Dime pointed out, a habit of minor evils inclines a person toward greater evils. It also dismisses the constant call to self-improvement, without which moral apathy often takes hold. To love oneself or others is not to become blind or careless of failures.
No, iWe, it is not Christian to downplay shame or need of atonement, as Jesus Himself regularly demonstrated while accosting people around Him (as did His first disciples). Of course, it is necessary to balance the two good values of justice and mercy. Likewise, balance is necessary when confronting evils — accosting and ruthlessly destroying the worst evils while remembering our own failures and respecting free will as we address the lesser evils which arise regularly in even the healthiest societies.
We should be careful with the term, but not sparing. More caution is justified when labeling a person, rather than an act. But we label people as evil to identify them as toxic or dangerous persons who should be avoided or negotiated with wariness.
I will continue to label as evil politicians who have spent decades habitually lying, disregarding the rights and words of their opponents, disregarding legal boundaries, and teaching people to hate what is good.
Define good. The definition of evil will follow.
I think the highest priority has to be stopping the evil act. Whether the person is redeemed or not redeemed, it’s important to stop them from their actions. We have plenty of time to debate whether a person is redeemable after we stop him from killing people to steal their organs. Identifying this as “evil” helps to make this a priority, as opposed to simply labeling it “wrong.” It has a practical value in addition to a moral value.
Of course (and I am sure you didn’t mean to imply this), Christians do not believe that atonement is somehow inconsistent with moral growth or improvement. Christianity teaches that once someone become a Christian, and is “redeemed” by the atonement of Christ, his behavior will begin to change-even if in fits and starts–two steps forward, one step back–never reaching perfection in this life. The book of James tells us famously that , “faith without works is dead.”
The struggle with sin is in fact evidence that you are a Christian, that your game-plan now is to please G-d, even if the execution is sometimes lacking. (If you want to see someone without such a struggle, go here).
Cont’d below
Far from “now I have a blank check to sin” mentality, the motivation should be “now that I know this G-d who has done so much to rescue me from my sin and rebellion against him, even sending his own son to die in my place, I WANT to be different, I WANT to please him .” Of course, according to Christian theology, the Christian is never alone again in this struggle, he has someone to “come along side”–a “very present help in time of need”–the third person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit whose task it is to remind us who (and whose) we are.
The Apostle Paul described this struggle between what you want to do and your inability to execute the game plan (at times) in Romans 7:22-25.
Rembrant’s Paul
“So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23 but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.”
Blessings!
Very good comment, Mountie. How do you argue with evil? But when you see it, it’s not negotiable. One has to protect one’s values and one’s reputation.
I saw this film on DVd. It was heartbreaking, devastating. It takes the definition of evil directly, with no doubt. I can’t imagine watching it in the theater.
Yes—it’s quite powerful. I found iWe’s comment in answer to it quite powerful, too. Thanks, C.
I think the terms good and evil serve us best, rather than right and wrong, Mr. C. For example, the people who saved Jews during the Holocaust “did the wrong thing” in terms of German law. But they did the good thing. Maybe I’m being too picky.
What did you find iWe’s response that was powerful?
The reminder that, in one way we are all connected. But we have choices independent of our connection to others to decide if we will commit evil or if we will choose good. We are not fighting an evil that already exists within us, we are making a choice between the evil inclination and the good inclination. It is the capacity to choose that unites us, not fighting an evil that already exists within us. (I expect a knowledgeable Jew out there will correct me if I’m wrong, although the Sabbath is around the corner.)
The moral confusion caused primarily by those on the Left has taken us way beyond the inability to identify and define evil. We have prominent people who tell our graduating Coastguardsmen, for example, that their biggest, lifelong challenge will be combating climate change.
That’s our president… inspiring young guardians of our shores… to battle against CO2 emissions. And it’s called “words of wisdom” by the suck-up media. He’s talking about one of the good and necessary components of our atmosphere which makes life possible! Plant food!
You can’t make this stuff up.
I get your point, but I was using them as synonyms. God defines good/right/righteousness. To disobey God is wrong/evil. I certainly agree that it can be right or good to disobey man’s unjust laws. “Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than men.'” Acts 5:29.
It was certainly right/good for those who disobeyed laws to hide the Jews during the holocaust. Many Christians did that of course (as did many others–all heroes to me). Corrie Ten Boom and her family hid Jews in Holland until they were found out. Her father and sister died in the camps when they were discovered. She survived and told her story. Wiki here. Do you know her story, Susan? GREAT READ! I highly recommend it.
It makes me nuts, too!!! Thanks, WC. Signing off for the Sabbath!
I do know it! But I haven’t read her book. I will order it forthwith!
This is unclear to me. Are you saying the evil inclination in people is a learned behavior?
The problem is that we cannot confront evil in the most egregious examples of evil, such as abortion, euthanasia, or the post I wrote on the forced harvesting of human organs in China. This filters down to confronting evil in much smaller instances.
Evil is the absence of good. Good depends upon reason. Evil depends upon rationalization. When we treat people as objects it is much easier to turn a blind eye to evil. Whether it is to savage an individual in a news story or in the comments section of a post. Evil asks us to embrace the sin as well as the sinner. Evil is to use the word fetus rather than human being. God asks us to embrace the sinner and provide a path to redemption. That does not mean God asks us to embrace the act.
Really poignant question and very good responses. I never used the term, I was a modern, above that sort of thing but when I saw Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos up close and got to know the people around them I used it for the first time. Since then I’ve seen it many times, but there is a difference between sinful people, all of us, our bad harmful actions which we have all committed, and real evil. That doesn’t mean I could define it, design a check list, I couldn’t but we know it when we see it. Indifference to the consequences to others of our behavior is always there, so is power and it often comes in a collective form so that normal people can bury their accountability in the indifference of a mob. And the folks we come to call evil do not recognize that they are evil, they always think they are performing some service, benefiting some abstraction called man or the poor or el pueblo.
Exactly.
But you’ll notice we only do this to ‘evil’ that we can ignore and steamroll over to get our own way.
A lot of people thought the Soviet Union was evil, but not many of them argued that this meant there was no point negotiating with it.
I accept that we are all sinners. I do not accept that this makes us all partially evil. And in political discussions, I am very careful not to use the word evil lightly. At the moment, it is reserved for Harry Reid and Maxine Waters. I am open to other nominations, but those are the two about whom I am sure.
Obama is not evil (to me) – merely stupid, narcissistic and deluded. Hillary borders on evil. If I knew for sure that she actually understands that the policies she pursues will cause poverty, misery, and civilizational degeneration, and she pursues them anyway out of her lust for power and money, then I would say she is evil. But who can know what goes on in that mind? Since nothing she says can be trusted, we never get a glimpse into her soul, so to condemn her as evil is speculative. She might actually believe this nonsense, as so many Democrats do.
I think that makes you Catholic. ;-)
Seriously, God made creation good — very good. But, sin came into the world.
We are made to be saints; it’s our free choices which allow us to do good or evil.
For those interested in the subject, I recommend The People of the Lie, by the late Scott M. Peck, MD (psychiatry). From his own case studies, he chronicles his observations of behaviors he could only describe as “evil” in certain individual. He also covers the phenomenon of evil overtaking a group (Germany in WWII being a classic example).
Just don’t read this book at night unless you can sleep with the lights on.
Nope. Agnostic to the core. But the same answers given by religion are pretty easy to derive from simple reasoning and observation. Sometimes I almost think that religions might have been invented by people, who engaged in simple reasoning and observation, rather than by getting their beliefs from prophets and burning bushes.
Well where’s the fun in that?
Last year I was attending a Unitarian Universalist curch service (long story) and the minister discussed evil (this was after the Charleston Church shootings). He discussed Solzhenitsyn, but not this quote particularly. Somehow he managed to get Solz. exactly backwards. The minister’s point was that we “good people” (and this guy clearly sees himself as one of the good people) don’t do enough finger pointing at evil.
Whatever is happening with the left, it seems to be getting past the moral relativism it held to so fervently in prior decades.
You have a point about self-improvement. But I also think there is going to be a pull, at a minimum rhetorically, towards talking about the most evil. If we call it “heinous,” then I suspect in public discourse it will replace the word evil and we’ll be having the same discussion with a different word.
It’s part of the discussion here. The OP was started in response to another thread, one about the Chinese removing the organs of living people against their will. My failings are independent of those responsible for the Chinese program. That kind of butchery doesn’t excuse my faults, but at the same time, it doesn’t prevent me from saying that what’s happening is appalling and vastly worse than my problems. Surely, we can try to do what is righteous without being self-righteous.
I think the fact that evil can be graded as major and minor weighs more heavily to me than who possesses evil, whether major or minor.
There are thoughts, words and deeds which spring from evil, but we ought not confuse the branch with the root.
C.S. Lewis wrote what is known as his Space Trilogy: The last of those, “That Hideous Strength” was to me so clear a depiction of true evil it was most uncomfortable to read.
There’s a totality implied in “evil”. The language used in theological discussions is a bit different, but it still hits pretty hard.
This discussion reminds me of when we had the children at church answer some of the catechism questions.
Q. Who made you?
A. God.
Q. What else did God make?
A. God made all things.
Oohs and aahs from the parents when they hear their children answer these questions. These are the easy parts of theology. Discussions of sin get more interesting.
Q. How sinful are you by nature?
A. I am corrupt in every part of my being.
Silence. The parents realize this is on a different level from the drawings going up on the refrigerator.
We don’t stop there, of course. It’s just that we must understand our sin in order to repent of it and receive redemption.
People need to tell stories to communicate. Job is now commonly accepted by devout Jews and Christians as the story made up by a clever Rabi to illustrate a point. It is read and still debated.
The corruption from the colleges was most powerful in the writing and English departments. From there it has infected our pop culture. Now monsters are misunderstood instead of evil. Thank G-d for comic books villains.
Thus far, we have agnostics, Buddhism and Jews and Christians debating about evil. I find it fascinating that we all agree that there is evil and gravely harming another human being is evil. Most of the debate thus far is about shame and redemption rather than any real disagreement about evil actions.