What Is Evil?

Nowadays asking ‘what is evil?’ is a lot like asking ‘what is food?’. Folks in the modern day seem to have lost their sense of what evil actually is, just like they think Twinkies and Doritos are real foods just because they consume them, they think evil is an equally nebulous category based on shifting and subjective preferences.

This is not true at all. Evil has an objective definition and it is that which is against life. When something is struggling for life, and a person is deliberately trying to squash that life, that is evil. If that life-squashing is an enjoyment to that person, well, maybe we could call that evil-doubled.

None of us are innocent of all evil deeds, no doubt. But accountability is a requirement if we are to grow as individuals and as a culture. It should not be a question if a 300 pound adult sitting on a child as a habit while she kicks and screams and he is finding this amusing is abuse or not. If you are watching while this happens and do nothing, you are allowing abuse to happen, which is also a form of abuse. Hurt people go on to hurt people.

Hate the sin, not the sinner. Good advice? I certainly don’t wish to paint everything black or spread hate or seek revenge or tarnish good names, but I am really beyond the continued whitewashing of evil. I’m no saint, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give evil a free pass and a sugar coating to boot.

Just being a good provider does not make a good person. This doesn’t mean throwing the entire character of the man under the bus, it means, learning from his mistakes. It doesn’t mean excusing him because he too was abused, it means facing all the evil and abuse of generations and ending the cycle at last. If he were a truly good man, that’s exactly what he’d be wishing he’d eternally be inspiring his family to do. That’s what it means to be a good person, not fun stories coated in marzipan for the benefit of ‘feeling good.’

Painting the world in rosy tones or blinding neon per your preference still does not mean there’s no rot in the cellar.

We need to get the rot out of this country. And that means we all need to grab a bucket and a scrubber and get to work in our own lives. And that means looking at the rot all around each one of us, the rot we were handed as children without our consent, living in a hostage situation as all children are, and cleaning up the Stockholm syndrome of our own upbringings.