I NEVER COMMIT AN EVIL ACT BUT I COMMIT A COLLECTION OF ACTS ONE OR MORE OF WHICH IS EVIL

What is evil? What is it? What does it do? Are we in danger of calling evil evil too much because of the consequences it has? Yes for most definitions and complaints about evil worry only about the destruction that follows in its wake.

Manichaeism is a religion that said evil is real as in power.

Against that you have the dominant religious and philosophical view that it is real but not real as in a rock. They add to the confusion by saying that evil is an absence of a good that can be there and should be there but is not there. So evil is the absence of good.

There is no such thing as an act. Each act is really a pile of acts summed up. You starve your baby. That involves a lot of acts. It involves a lot of sustaining the harm and repeating the harm. The harm is repeated every second you can the baby food when you give nothing. The starving of the baby is a summary of acts where you do good as in giving the baby water. The lack of food is the problem. Now you have a case where you are condemned as if all that you did could be summed up in you not giving the baby his food.

So let us take the starving bit aside on its own. The evil is in deliberately making sure the dinner for the baby that should be there is not there. But to make good be less good than it can be is still doing some good. Saying evil is absence of good is nonsense and too extreme and is hate.

Incredibly what matters is not just how evil is evil that assessing anything or anybody as evil makes you evil! You cannot point out an evil without trying to do some evil against the evildoer. Love the sinner and hate the sin is not neutral about the sinner but a positive act of hate against the sinner.

The emptiness on your plate is not evil just because you want your dinner. To say it is makes out that we decide and decree what evil is! That is really us inventing evil or claiming that evil is magicked into existence when we want.

Evil is as real as a brick or real as in merely assessing something to fall short of a standard.

In either case, you consider the evil intention of the person, the evil nature of the act and the evil consequences that flow from the act. The act lacks evil though it may do loads of harm if there is no intention to do bad.

So whatever evil is, it involves evilly intending to do evil, it involves an evil act - a good act done maliciously by mistake is evil in what you are trying to do with it and as it is evil you have evil results.

You are responsible for the bad results even though you did not foresee them for you should not have been evil in the first place!

Evil demands a response of total opposition so it risky to say it is not a thing or not real. It softens it.

Evil believed to degrade and enslave the evildoer so evil lies that it is about damaging another. It damages the evil doer.

It must enslave the real good that is around it. For example, at this moment my act is a, b, c, d, e, and f. F alone is evil so given that a condemned act does not exist and it is condemned acts that people sum up as one act this means the acts have to be summed up as evil though they are not and condemned. So one bad apple makes the whole batch fit for condemnation.

There is no evil action on its own. Every action is actions some good and some bad or maybe all good. But they are never all bad for that is impossible.

To condemn evil in people then means you have to become evil yourself.

The fact that an act is not an act but a pile of acts and yet the whole pile can be condemned because of one rotten fruit is clearly affirming that evil is some kind of power and not a mere missing of the mark.  That is why it is taken so seriously that even good has to be condemned when it is involved.