What about evil? - part 5: stuck in the middle with us

With all the massive diversity in ways of seeing and thinking that have evolved in human societies across time, geography, and cultures and the personality differences we each bring to the table, it is actually remarkable we get any consensus at all about what is and isn't evil. And not surprising that we keep shouting "Evil Doer" at each other. I suppose it is most remarkable that we haven't all killed each other off in a fit of massive self-righteousness. Well, I guess we do keep trying don't we.

Maybe our only hope is for Mother Nature to wipe out enough of us in natural disasters so we're scattered around too much to get at each other effectively. Either that or She's working really hard to evolve us out of our sub-human tendencies to do evil to each other out of anger, egocentricity, animosity, greed, and any number of other internal turbulence that erupts from us. While She's at it, She really needs to evolve us out of our infantile obsessions with demonizing each other over our differences as well

Of course God could weed us out a bit. Or He could ask Mother Nature to do it. Or he could ask the Devil to do it; after all it's more in his job description. There are religious traditions that say God is in charge of punishing evil doers. But then He'd have to listen to an endless litany of all of our yelling about who is and is not evil. That's just way too much of an impossible headache. And I suspect he may have a different take on just who is the one being evil. And all the punishing we do to each other doesn't seem to actually reduce the amount of evil being done.


I imagine God spends most of his time trying to anticipate our bad behavior and prevent it from doing too much harm to others and the planet. And he's probably amazed at how we can mess things up in ways he never saw coming. He no doubt has to daily revise and reconstruct his plans to divert us into more productive habits, interest us in constructive activities, entice us into seeing each other in a benevolent light. And at the end of the day we've just managed to avoid all the right choices and perpetrate more mayhem and destruction.

You might have noticed that I didn't bring God into this discussion of evil. Some of you are probably disappointed that I didn't mention that evil is evil because God has said so. Well, in my experience it's right after saying "God Says" that we start unleashing all hell on each other. It's my personal view that God really wants nothing to do with any of the stuff we say after the "God says" part. In fact, I think that he cringes every time he hears that phrase and mutters, "oh shit, not this again!"

This is the end of the "What is Evil" question - see the next blog for questions of why is evil