UNDERSTANDING EVIL AND ITS FACES IN THE "LIGHT" OF FAITH

Evil is hard to define and believers talk about suffering and destruction but these are what evil does.  They don't tell us what evil means.  To mistake the symptoms for the disease means the disease will thrive.

One huge symptom is how evil is never satisfied and keeps looking for more and more and more.  If religion offers weak or ineffective treatments for it and cannot diagnose it correctly then it is a disgrace.  Interestingly, as evil has to hide behind things it is going to hide how it eats into everything and has no intention of stopping.  Religion looks like another way evil achieves this deception.

The argument that you need to believe in an all-loving creator God to take evil seriously amounts to saying, "Evil is that which sort of tells you not to do it.  And it tells you nothing unless there is a God to tell you to be good rather than evil."  This is a lying confused circle and a word salad.  But it is what religion is doing.  It turns evil into a message.  That seems hopeless. That seems unhelpful.

Religion is a lot more fuzzy about evil and therefore good than it wants you to see.  It is definitely evil of it to pose as a solution and a help if you are trying to be good and weed out any evil inside you.

It is better to have no doctor than one who is useless.  You don't need the false hope, not a speck of it.

Religion has free will as a gift from God that we abuse and harm others with.  That way God is declared innocent of making a faulty universe. We ruined it.  There is pride is saying that your evil is a Pandora's box that can end the unimaginable perfection of creation like Adam and Eve. And furthermore that it can infect the whole creation.  Some gift then that depends on pride!  Humility that is exaggerated, "O my sins are horrendous" when they are not is itself pride.  Who do you think you are if you and your sins matter that much?  Who are you to tell others what to think evil is when you are evil yourself?

Anyway evil in people is divided into four different types.  You can have more than one at the same time.

Stupid. Demonic. Instrumental. Idealistic.

Stupid evil refers to people who do harm by not being careful enough when they can do better. Now there is a lack of reflection. But the question is, is morality that clear? If it is not or if it is in only half of situations then the absence of forethought is excusable. It is luck that shows then in many cases that what the person did needed more thought. It is not fair to wait to see the outcome and then call it stupid. By luck a person who is too uninformed or not doing enough research can still do something that looks stupid and can end up being the best after all.

Demonic evil is understood as doing evil for its own sake. In other words, evil is done just because it is evil. Many say it is not relevant to humankind for too few go down the devilish road. Satan using torture devices on you in Hell would be seen as demonic evil. Many feel that it is human beings who are the real ones to fear and they challenge the notion that demonic evil is uncommon or unusual.  As evil needs to avoid being attacked it will try to look justified or better than it is.  So unless you are clairvoyant and can see into somebody's heart you cannot surmise that evil is absent from them.  Demonic evil could be behind the other types.  It might for example lead to you doing stupid evil without you seeing its role.  Plus demonic evil might masquerade as the other types.  For example, a demonic person might hide how they do evil for the fun of it by acting as if they are doing it for a reason or as if they think they are forced to do it to bring about some good.

Instrumental evil is using evil as an instrument not for its own sake but to bring about something. You see it as evil but also as something that can be exploited if circumstances permit.  If evil has fuzzy boundaries you will end up using what seems evil to you and you will hope that it is not really evil.  With that logic if you do it once you will soon be doing it all the time.  The revulsion you feel about using evil will be destroyed.

Idealistic evil is when you have good goals and wield even evil and evil things to try and bring them about. You see the evil as a good thing for it is directed towards something good. You tell yourself the evil is justified and so it is not truly evil when the full picture is looked at.  Again this is going to happen too much as well if you use the evil and tell yourself that it might not be really evil.

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