Has Evil Gone Out of Style?

Spirituality Column #130
May 5, 2009
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Has Evil Gone Out of Style?
By Bob Walters

Nationally syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts recently took great pains in print to beg the forgiveness of his readers that, despite what a backward idea he knows it is to those whom he evidently considers his intellectual peers, 10 years later he still can find no explanation for the Columbine massacre except to call it an act of evil.

Evil. I’m not sure I can come up with a more easy to understand concept than evil. Love takes work. Forgiveness takes discipline. Faith takes perseverance. Kindness takes sacrifice.

But evil. Evil’s easy. Evil is 100 percent about “me,” to the exclusion of God or others. Our society, our culture, our cult of self-esteem, is ever loosening its grip on the reality of evil.

Pitts’ problem with evil seems to be that it’s a sign of intellectual resignation to actually believe evil exists.

And for way too many people, evil is a small mind’s opinion, not a controlling cosmic fact.

To go back to the basics, God is good and Satan is evil. God exists and Satan exists. There is absolute good and perfection in the divine person of Jesus Christ. Satan is a miserable fact of our existence whose sole aim is to separate us from God and good by means of death and sin.

Why did God allow there to be evil when Genesis 1 and 2 tell us He created a perfect world without sin or – more importantly – death?

Now there is a great question. Maybe it’s because that without evil, there would be no challenge, choice or freedom about loving God, and therefore no true love, no faith, no triumph, nothing to prove and nothing to overcome.

Pitts cowered to mention evil as an acceptable explanation of life’s unexplainable horrors, but I was entertained a few paragraphs later in the same column to find his assertion that “(evil) flies in the face of our innate belief in the perfectibility of human beings.”

Huh? If history, humanity, Christianity, politics, celebrity culture and maybe even our most recent family reunion have taught us anything, wouldn’t we all universally agree that human beings are not perfectible?

Certainly not in this life.

We humans are a magnificent mess and hardly perfectible by our own effort. Evil is our life’s combat. But we have hope of eternal perfection, and the name of that hope – and perfection – is Jesus Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) reads liberal and conservative columnists; liberals make him laugh, and conservatives make him cry.