The Problem With Evil Is That It Never Makes Sense
Evil is a word people use to get other people to stop asking questions.
I have seen plenty of terrible things in my life. But, in every case, even the most horrible things came down to either bad timing or just being thoughtless about what is happening.
I grew up in a Christian home and became an atheist in my late teens and early 20’s after too many important questions piled up with no good answers. I remember one of those questions being about why God didn’t stop evil or take steps to prevent it. It dawned on me recently that maybe God doesn’t prevent it or get involved because he didn’t come up with the idea of evil in the first place.
I remember back in Genesis when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree. It was the Tree of Knowledge [of Good and Evil]. This is when Adam and Eve first learned of the idea of good and evil.
I have been going on long walks lately to think and recently I wondered if maybe the “Great Lie” and oldest trick-in-the-book is the knowledge that good and evil exist in the world. It was only by believing that it did, it became so. The idea of good and evil IS the lie.
Think about how perfectly insidious that idea is just by itself? Without evil, you’d just fess up and say sorry and pay back what damages you’ve done. What else can be done? With evil, we can now place responsibility for our actions outside of ourselves and find that responsibility in each other. The idea of evil basically serves to erode our trust in each other.
Think about it from “evil’s” perspective. It would be vastly easier and more sensible to tell a lie, such as evil existing in the world, press that button, and watch us destroy ourselves until we figure it out or we all start over. What can God do but wait for us to figure it out and be irritated at the devil for springing the lesson on us before we were ready?
It’s ironic that we’ve learned that the devil fell due to pride because it is the height of human arrogance to think that any being would spend an eternity trying to doom us. We barely make time for ourselves and each other yet we think we are worth the time of some “evil”?
The biggest problem with evil is that it never makes sense. Evil doesn’t make sense even within its own origins. Maybe the lesson of our time is to be rational and keep asking questions even when it isn’t convenient.
