During the course of the 20th century socialist and communist regimes brutally murdered somewhere between 160,000,000-200,000,000 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, monogamous marriage, the two created sexes, and ethical restraints and cultural taboos. As with the “God is dead” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, they had stopped looking to heaven for their hopes and rewards, and declaring themselves “good” 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 escapes it, and today with Jesus Christ (John 1) mainly dead in the hearts of modern Westerners and Americans and with little or no restraints upon the depraved sin nature of men, not since the 20th century has the existence of evil and madness been as apparent as in our largely neo-pagan century.
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 and 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 our Lord Jesus Christ, the Physician of our souls, dead in their hearts, for many people, including vast numbers of natural Christians living in sin in our self-gratifying neo-pagan century, escape tied to blame of other is the response to suffering.
For example, 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/spirit. 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 them. We will crush them with defiance, transgression, sophistry, brute force, and .terroristic psychological manipulation
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, covetousness, lust, envy, etc) 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–the source and essence of todays cult of woke victims–is the supreme evil, why should selfish narcissists suffer from not having their personal pronouns used to identify him/her/it? Or why should Drag Queens suffer by not being allowed to roll around on a stage, spreading their legs in invitation to children? Likewise, why should immoral Democrat and GOP ‘elites’ have to suffer restraints placed on them by the Constitution, orthodox Christianity, and Conservatives? Furthermore, why should pedophiles and pederasts have to suffer from lack of access to babies, children, and teens because of the protective stance of parents? And 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 orthodox, repentant Christian, faithful Jew or an unrepentant natural man, natural Christian, Luciferian, or Satanist.
2023© Linda Kimball
Originally published in 2020, this is an updated version.
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The culture of lies cannot call itself evil. To them, evil is whatever is proclaimed as truth, and good is whatever lie is unquestioned.
On a personal level, good is whatever feels good to them, and evil is whatever inhibits it. Back in the seventies, the slogan for “gays” was ” anything goes”, meaning that morality didn’t apply to them. Nowadays that’s come to mean that morality doesn’t apply anywhere.
The people of the lie will go on excusing their own evils while making up lies about the “evils” of others to heap reproaches on them. They are detestable reprobates who can’t/won’t tell the truth.
You suggest that self indulgence and rebellion are separate “means” of alleviating suffering (evil). I disagree. These are, at the least, hand in glove. They always appear together. Indeed, you seem to want to parse the single issue into multiple sources to avoid the obvious: humanity is fallen and has a sin problem caused by separation from God. One can endlessly delve into different philosophies to rationalize away this truth. I contend that man and Satan have worked together to provide an enormous number of alternatives to the single viable path: God the Son, Jesus Christ.
Perhaps your spirit of criticism would be alleviated by a thorough reading of the article. Long before the ‘sins’ of which you accuse me is this:
“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 and 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 our Lord Jesus Christ, the Physician of our souls, dead in their hearts, for many people, including vast numbers of natural Christians living in sin in our self-gratifying neo-pagan century, escape tied to blame of other is the response to suffering.”