Wednesday, September 17, 2008

The Nature of Evil

I've been thinking of evil and of what it is and even if it is. Tonight, I'm toying with the idea that evil isn't inherent. It's not what someone is but it's what someone does. Case in point; most of the fundamentalist Christians i run across are the happiest, most caring people, you would ever hope to come across. They are genuinely good people.

However, when they get into positions of authority they most often pass the most (sorry) God awful policy it's ever been our sorry fortune to witness. Hate against sexual minorities, hate against a woman doing with her own body and life as she chooses, weird ideas about taking government out of our lives in all the ways it can best help people with, and on and on.

These are times in which a large section of our country view the other sections as evil. That's extreme, but extremity in and of itself isn't what's evil. What's evil is acting on that extremity without regard to Jesus' commandment to 'do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.'

Evil is a verb, not a noun.

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