What is Evil?

During the course of the 20th century socialist and communist regimes brutally murdered tens of millions of men, women, and children in their maddened attempts at building the ideal society free from evil, especially the ‘evils’ caused by Jehovah God, Original Sin, the two created sexes, the procreative traditional family, ethical restraints, property ownership, and other Christian based institutions.  As with the “God is dead” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, they had stopped looking to heaven for their hopes and rewards, and declaring themselves “good” god-men had become the very essence and face of evil.

No One Escapes Evil

Whether it is environmental evil resulting from hurricanes, floods, fires, tsunamis or earthquakes; physical evil resulting from loss of limbs, cancer, or some other debilitating condition; or moral evil, that is sin, not one of us has ever escaped the torment and suffering inflicted upon us.  Today however, with Jehovah God mainly dead in the hearts of modern Westerners and Americans and with little or no restraints upon the depraved sin nature of men who declare themselves good (sinless), not since the 20th century has the existence of evil and madness been as apparent as in our largely neo-pagan century.

Why Evil?

The dilemma expressed by the ancient Greek nature philosopher Epicurus is repeated by millions of neo-pagan Westerners and Americans today:

“Omnipotence could, Benevolence would have prevented evil.”

If God exists, then why must we die when we crave immortality? Why does he permit the worst of our kind to overpower, enslave and torment others of our kind? Why does He permit the sexually perverted to gratify themselves at the expense of babies and children? Why does He permit tyranny, war, genocide, disease, and all the other evils that plague our race?

In every age, the natural mind unaided by Divine Revelation has tried in vain to solve this problem.

Divine Revelation tells us that sin, the willful rejection of the Holy God, an attempt to annihilate Him if possible, is the origin of all three types of evil. Sin began with Lucifer, then spread to Adam and Eve through abuse of free will resulting in the loss of the supernatural gift of grace, a gift from God men were meant to have that would have allowed them to live in perfect control of their emotions and without suffering the loss of their reason. But since the fall, Adam’s descendants are conceived and born, not in a state of grace as men were originally meant to be, but in a state of sin, a defective state of being deprived of supernatural grace while remaining destined by God for the supernatural state.

But with Jehovah God dead in their hearts, for many people, including vast numbers of Christians living in sin in our self-gratifying neo-pagan century, escape tied to blame of ‘other’ (scapegoating) and vengeance is the response to suffering.

Escape From Suffering/Evil

The Buddha concluded that suffering is caused by thirst for immortality, therefore evil is inherent in the very fact of existence. Thus, by our desire to continue our personal existence we remain enmeshed in the suffering involved by our conscious awareness of and desire for life. To escape suffering we must deny ‘self’ (soul/spirit) if we are to live devoid of all desire to exist or we shall pay for it by reincarnation in another body in which we will relive our suffering. Only by rejecting our desire for existence can we attain to Nirvana.

As the key to Buddha’s system is denial of ‘self’ it becomes necessary to take God away, for if there is no God it logically follows there is no source for ‘self’ – soul or inner person. If man is not God’s spiritual image-bearer then he is less than nothing, a conclusion Buddha reached long before Jesus Christ walked this earth:

“Six centuries before Jesus Christ, the Buddha already knew that if God does not exist, then the human self cannot exist either (so) he deconstructed the Hindu idea of the soul (in order that your) sense of self is an illusion. Reality is non-self…You don’t exist.” Liberation from suffering, the Buddha taught, “is realizing the unreality of your existence.” (The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi, P. 6)

Atomists such as Epicurus and his Western and American evolutionary materialist contemporaries seek the same end but start from the opposite extreme. For them, desire of immortality and its’ corollary, fear of death, is anesthetized through self-indulgence: immersion in drugs, alcohol, sex, parties, plastic surgery, endless rounds of entertainment, body-building, accumulation of things and status, and other temporal pleasures. Self-indulgence is the supreme good. If it feels good, then do it!

With Nietzsche we see another form of escape: defiance, revolt, and negation, that is, scoffing, mocking, ridiculing, doubting, and endless destructive criticism spewed forth like acid upon Divine Truths, ethics and virtues. Nietzsche declares God dead and Christianity a slave morality that cultivates cringing virtues such as self-sacrifice, self-restraint, charity, humility and compassion. To counter this great ‘evil’ we must cultivate an amoral ‘master morality’ and a ‘race of supermen,’ psychopaths and legions of moral imbeciles who will send the despised and weak to the wall. We must crush whatever and whoever causes us to suffer without the least concern for other people. We will crush them with defiance, transgression, sophistry, terror and brute force.

This was the philosophy of Berlin and Moscow which regarded other nations and other people as worthy only to be slaves, sterilized, lobotomized, tormented, used for human experimentation, and sent to the wall, meaning liquidated in some fashion. Together Berlin and Moscow murdered millions of men, women, and children.

The three-fold attitude in common with all of these natural or pagan systems is that suffering, not sin, is the supreme evil, thus the only means of dealing with suffering is escape of any kind and complete as possible making peace the absence of suffering. But because the human condition (pride, will to power, defiance, prejudice, covetousness, lust, envy, vengeance) is responsible for moral evils, the natural man never finds peace though he looks for it everywhere.

But if man is not fallen and individual suffering is the supreme evil why should a Christian have to suffer from hearing his pastor preach on sin if it makes him feel bad? Or why should a rebellious, defiant, spiteful teenager have to endure the word ‘no’? Since proud, selfish people suffer by not having what they covet when they desire it, why shouldn’t they take what they need?  Why should Biden, Democrats and GOP ‘elites’ have to suffer the restraints placed on them by the Constitution, Christianity and Conservatives? Since man is born good why should pedophiles and pederasts have to suffer the protective stance of parents who stand between them and the babies, children and teens their perverse appetites crave? Likewise, why should ‘gays’ not have marriage if it will alleviate their suffering? 

Escaping Death

 If death will be knocking on your door very quickly unless you receive an organ donation, then why not send some child to the wall in order that you can have its organs? Wesley J. Smith reports on this latest evil:

“The first case of a child being trafficked to Britain in order to have their organs harvested has been uncovered. The unnamed girl was brought to the UK from Somalia with the intention of removing her organs and selling them to those desperate for a transplant. Child protection charities warned that the case was unlikely to be an isolated incident as traffickers were likely to have smuggled a group of children into the country.” (Officials Discover Child Trafficked from Somalia to UK to Harvest Her Organs, Smith, Life News, Oct. 20, 2013)

Wesley asks recipients if their own death is really worse than having a child killed or maimed that they might temporarily escape death? To escape their own suffering some will clearly say yes. Since their own suffering is supreme the child should be sacrificed on their behalf.

But if that isn’t evil, asked Wesley, what is?

The answer depends on whether you are an authentic, repentant Christian, faithful Jew or an unrepentant natural man or natural Christian.

© Linda Kimball