About Evil...

Greetings,

I took a quiz on Facebook earlier today that was designed to measure how evil you are. I got 50%, which kind of surprised me at first, but the more I started thinking about it, the more I kind of agree with it. I say kind of, because my aunt commented on the quiz and wondered why I would even take a quiz like that and if I was attracted to evil. That got me thinking, so I decided to write a little bit about evil to kind of flush out my concept of it. Here goes:

I was brought up as a Christian, so naturally, my concept of evil has traditionally been the opposite of God. For a good portion of my life, it was embodied in the character of Satan. Lately, however, since my view of God has changed, so too has my view of evil. These days, I guess I don't really believe in evil. My logic goes like this:

If there is a good and perfect God, who created the Universe and everything in it, then that means that God also created evil - this, to me, disqualifies that god from being either good or perfect. Christians often like to use the idea that God didn't create the evil, he just created every being in the Universe (angels and humans alike) with free will. Lucifer, an angel who became the first sinner, let his pride get the best of him and fell from grace. Then he convinced Adam and Eve to disobey God. This was the beginning of evil, and God punished the rest of mankind for Adam and Eve's disobedience by cursing their descendants to lives of toil and torment. My problem with that line of thinking is this: Scientific data tells us that space and time are interconnected, which means that God must have created time along with everything else in the Universe. If God created time, then He exists outside of time, which, to me, is the only way of really conceptualizing an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent God coexisting with our free-will. It follows, however, that even though this God does not make our decisions for us, He created us with the full knowledge of every decision we will ever make - so ultimately, the existence of evil in the world would have been fully known to God when he created everything, which still leaves Him and Him alone responsible for it. It would be basically like God created all of us as part of a grand experiment to see how many of us would chose to love Him if we didn't have to. If you think I've got it wrong, read the book of Job.

Jesus said the following in Matthew 7:9-11 (NIV): "Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!" Now, in the interest of full-disclosure, I will admit that I am taking this passage out of context. I bring it up, however, because Jesus is using this logic to support the idea of God as a heavenly father.

Now, by that same logic - the logic of the Son of God - which of you parents out there, if you knew that your son or daughter would grow up to be a drug addict, or a thief, or the reincarnation of Hitler himself, would still create that child? If you then, though you are evil, wouldn't create that child, why then would a good and perfect God create those people?

I mentioned Job earlier. Those of you who've read it know that it ends with Job railing at God for the suffering that God has allowed Satan to impose on him. God's answer, in a nutshell, is "Who are you to question me? Where were you when I created the Universe?" This is meant to teach us humility, and that God has a plan for everything that we can not possibly understand. Some of you out there, might interpret what I've written so far to be a critique of God and his plan. It's not. It's a critique of our attempts to understand those things by creating these stories about evil and a devil and even hell.

The fact is, the Universe, our galaxy, our solar system, even our planet, as we know it, is full of events that cause misfortune for its inhabitants. Are those events evil? Well, I guess that depends on your perspective. Is a lion eating a gazelle evil? If you ask the gazelle, it is absolutely evil. If you ask the lion, it's no more evil than you or I eating a steak - which we all know constitutes evil to PETA activists. Even if you take it to that extreme, however, you are then placing a higher value on the life of an animal than the life of a plant. Both are living organisms, how is one more valuable than the other? On a much larger scale, there are countless scenarios in which cosmic events could destroy all of the life on our planet. Black holes, gamma ray bursts, even large metiors - are these evil? To us they might seem so, but there is surely no malicious intent behind these natural phenomina, so how can they be?

Many Buddhists have a very different view, which I am more inclined to agree with. They do not believe in evil, but rather a concept called dukkha, which is usually translated as suffering. The goal of the Buddhists is to eliminate dukkha from their lives, and to not cause dukkha for others. The Buddhist's solution to the problem of dukkha sounds fairly simple: Eliminate desire. To the Buddhist, desire is the root of all suffering. For example, when you are cold, you only suffer from the cold because you desire to be warm. If you can train your body to accept and embrace the cold, you will not suffer from it.

So then, I guess my view is that there is no real evil. There are just unfortunate events that, at best, ruin our day, at worst become unspeakable tragedies. I know it might sound a bit cold and un-empathetic, but the fact is, shit happens. It's what we do with that shit when it happens to us that counts. It doesn't do any good to blame God, or assign some greater meaning to it. It just is what it is. Sometimes, life sucks. And sometimes, another person's behavior is the reason for it sucking. That person is really not any more evil than you are when your behavior adversely affects another organism's life. It's just the nature of things. If there is a god, then this is the way he made the Universe, and if he is a good god, then his creation cannot be evil.

You may start the argumentative comments now.

I am the Reverend Humpy and I have approved this message.