Posted on 01/01/2007 9:10:09 AM PST by ventanax5
I have long been preoccupied by the problem of evil. Not being a philosopher, I have no satisfactory explanation of evil to offer, nor even, indeed, a satisfactory definition of it. For me, evil is rather like poetry was for Doctor Johnson: easier to say what it isn’t than what it is. All I know for certain is that there’s a lot of it about - evil, I mean, not poetry.
Why? Is the heart of man irredeemably evil, or at any rate inclined to evil? What are the conditions in which evil may flourish?
My medical practice, admittedly of a peculiar kind, in a slum and in a prison, convinced me of the prevalence of evil. I was surprised. I had spent a number of years in countries wracked by civil wars and thereby deprived of even minimal social order, precisely the conditions in which one might expect evil to be widely committed, if only because in such situations the worst come to the fore. But nothing prepared me for the sheer malignity, the joy in doing wrong, of so many of my compatriots, when finally I returned home. Every day in my office I would hear of men who tortured women - torture is not too strong a word - or commit the basest acts of intimidation, oppression and violence, with every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment. I would once have taken the opening sentence of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments for a truism:
(Excerpt) Read more at newenglishreview.org ...
I suspect that you have the same problem that many radical muslims have. They tend to think of Christians as single entity. Muslims are no more monolithic than Christians and Jews are.
David Kilcullen ( A counter insurgency specialist) notes that if we insist on seeing an Islamist from Java as the same thing as a Jihadist from Yemen then we are doing the interest aggregation and interest articulation of the Jihadists for them.
The distinction between evil and not evil is the ability to disaggregate them.
Satan is prince of this world, this age, and we are here to decide who we will follow. We have been given "free will" for this test and along with that, a set of instructions on how to defeat Satan, leader of Islam. Don't think because evil is here that there is no God. You will stand before Him one day. Until then, look for truth in all things and you won't find that in many of our Christian churches today.
The men who waded ashore on the beaches at Normandy were not acting in their self-interest. They wanted to save civilization.
If you say that they were acting in their own self-interest because they saw themselves as part of civilization then I say that's a stretch. When you say that, you can't say to a child that he is being "selfish" because all things are selfish. It makes the language clumsy to have to say, "you are not acting in the interest of the greater good".
Except of course for the angelic domain and angelic conflict.
Maybe even less so considering how often they are at each other's throat. But that's the nature of people on the dark side. Gangsters fight other gangsters.
In America, we have lots of different types of Christians and Jews alongside each other but they do not wage war.
The Hutu and the Tutsis have lived near each other for hundreds if not thousands of years.
In that time they have been rivals at times having the occasional tribal war.
No doubt the crowding that high population density places on people living at the subsistence level may have put pressure on the relationship of the two groups.
The author’s above paragraph made me think of the new tribes that are forming in our inner cities, namely the gangs that the illegal drug culture has been financing and incubating.
Small skirmishes happen fairly regularly how long before a true tribal war breaks out in one of our inner cities.
Given that many of these gangs are linked between cities it seem quite possible that a gang war in one city should spread to another or several other cities.
There will always be evil. Without evil we would never have evolved from single cell organisms. But we must always fight it.
Of course the Nazi regime was religious...even hyperreligious. All of its rituals were patterned after classic Norse, Protestant or Catholic religious rituals. The SS was patterned after the Jesuits. The choice of the Swastika was no accident any more than the Church chose the Celtic Cross for Ireland. Every Nazi symbolic choice was driven by religious semiotics. Hitler himself appealed to divine providence as his motivation to power in his speeches. Hitler goal was to BE become the Psychopathic God. He was actively interpretating what he percieved to be God's message.
That tribal skirmishes have broken out in US cities...
The Blood/ Crips feuds of the 80's and then the East/ West Rap Feuds.
I suspect the recent shooting deaths of NFL Players Tank Williams and Darrent Williams are the latest manifestations of it.
Good and Evil are better understood from a Divine perspective available to us through faith in Christ.
Remember that the Adversary seeks to make himself like God. Just like the angels, God has given humans volition as well.
Additionally, after the Garden of Eden, one penalty for Satan was that God placed enmity in the heart of man towards him. Although Satan sought to counterfeit God's place in man's heart with himself, God changed the heart of man to always have enmity towards Satan naturally.
Although Satan might have a plan to counterfeit Paradise, even Satan is unable to prevent man in his volition from sinning. Many people too quickly associate our sin or rebellion from God's will with our identification with Satan. Nothing is further from the truth. Man hates Satan. If we rebel from God, many more rebel from Satan. Even though God might not control our volition by His choosing, likewise even Satan can't keep us from sin. We sin because we like to sin. We might be stupid, but we still have volition.
Love is not a complement to evil. The thought of giving without receiving anything in return is the definition of CHARIS or Grace, ..where we get our word Charity. Good and evil are better understood by understanding the meanings of righteousness and chaos. Faith places our trust in an an object that is non-meritorious of ourselves. All faith is from God.
But it was a fake and pagan. It was made-up. He took the trappings of the ancient Romans and searched for origins of an "Aryan" race. Hitler appealed to racial pride. He appealed to the vanity of the Germans, not to any god.
Quite correct. The major problem is that they had advanced so far in their lack of faith through Christ that they degenerated into further dementia of attacking any faith through Christ.
True, although dead in spirit until believing in God through faith in Christ.
bump for later
Great post.
I didn't mean for my post to imply love is a compliemnt to evil- I meant that through the triqals that evil brings, love grows stronger as it is tested and passes the trials brought on by evils.
also- one more point- While man's heart has an aversion to Satan, our hearts also have a propensity to desire the evil that Satan represents in a deceitful manner as desires (but they are truly evils, and not simply desires).
BS. A fair trade for the WTC would've been the destruction of mecca with nuclear weapons. Anything less means there is no god. Period.
There's no fairness.. Just lame humans acting on their own primitive forces.
The evil of islam means there is no god. Sorry, without the destruction of islam, god simply is useless.
Fake and Pagan to whom?
Certainly not to the Nazis. The Creed of Nazism was preached from pulpits from Braunschweig to Hoffheim. It only becomes pagan and fake in retrospect. It wasn't at the time. While there were Bonhoffers they were few....
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