Uvalde and the Problem of Evil

Frontpage ^ | June 1, 2022 | Daniel Greenfield

[livius]

What do people who don’t believe in evil do? They blame inanimate objects. Guns.

19 years ago, a middle-aged unemployed taxi driver carrying two milk cartons full of gasoline walked onto a South Korean subway and started a fire that killed 192 people.

That was not a milk carton problem. Nor was it a gasoline problem.

6 years ago, a Muslim terrorist drove a truck into a Bastille Day event in Nice, France killing 86 and wounding over 400 other people. Body parts were being pried out of his wheel wells.

That was not a truck problem.

Across the long stretch of human history, millions of people were killed long before the invention of firearms, in often cruder and far more brutal ways. Back then we lacked CNN, but people generally understood that this was not due to the invention of smithing, but the problem of evil.

The problem with evil is that it requires us to believe in good.

Modern people are unwilling to believe in G-d, and so they believe instead in government. And they are convinced that the god of government can fix everything if we only give it the power.

The trouble is that while people may not believe in evil, evil very much believes in them.

[Kartographer]

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke