Where does evil come from? If you remove God and the devil from the equation, it seems like a simple answer. Evil comes from men. Hitler was evil. Stalin was evil. In my world view, those who kill innocent people in the pursuit of power are evil. It seems pretty obvious and conservatives are probably wondering why I would spend the time to write down such a trivial conclusion.
Evil is not viewed in the same way by all. I believe people with a liberal worldview have a much different concept of evil. Liberals believe people are blank slates that are easily manipulated. That is why they are so gung-ho on government regulation and central control. They believe the wise liberals can build a better world by being a better sheep herder. It also explains why Barack Obama thinks he can negotiate with the likes of Iran. To liberals, rogue nations are challenges that require smart diplomacy as if crazy mullahs are waiting to be herded into the coral of civilized nations.
It’s not that liberals don’t believe evil exists. They do. Liberals have a different vision of evil. They transfer evil from people to their weapons. Guns are evil. Nuclear weapons are evil. Liberals think that if we remove the evil weapons from some, the rest will follow (like sheep). Gun laws remove guns from law abiding citizens. To a liberal, everyone is dangerous with a gun in their hand because the person isn’t the problem. The gun is. They have the same view about nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are evil in all nations. Liberals call for the United States to unilaterally disarm as an example to the world and they see no difference between a nuclear Israel and a nuclear Iran.
A modern liberal view of evil is so out-of-whack with the real world that it is scary. Do criminals change their evil ways because the victims became easier targets? Because of their concept of evil, far-left liberals would leave us defenseless in a world were evil preys on the weak.
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I would agree with your conclusion that the liberal worldview does not correspond to reality. But I would extend the discussion by examining what is meant by calling something “evil” in the first place. Often the term “wrong” is used interchangeably with the term “evil”, by which is meant divergence from an accepted standard. In that sense saying that murder is wrong is just like saying 1+1=3. The latter violates the laws of mathematics and the former violates the laws of morality. These two items obviously differ in their consequences and seriousness, but they illustrate the point. In your posting above you don’t formally define evil, but rather identify certain groups of people as being evil. When you use the term “evil” do you mean something that runs askew of your personal preferences (subjective judgement) or are you appealing to some standard of behavior that applies to all people in all times and places (objective judgement)? If you refer to your personal preferences then presumably a person could legitimately say that Hitler was not evil and you would respect that. Oddly enough, the Nazis didn’t actually break any German laws during the Holocaust. They changed the laws to allow them to redefine Jews as sub-human and therefore subject to extermination like so many rats, as Nazi propaganda often portrayed the Jews. This is why the Nazis were charged with “crimes against humanity” and not violation of any particular German laws. But if evil is to have any universal meaning and consequence then it must appeal to an objective standard of some sort. In your writing I assume you aren’t simply appealing to your own personal tastes but rather to something that carries with it universality and incumbency. How would you define “evil”? I’m not looking for examples of those things you would consider evil but an essential definition of what it is. How do you know evil when you see it?
Patrick (an avowed conservative)
Evil is like pornography. I know it when I see it.
To me, evil fills the void where humanity should reside. Slavery was evil because it treated other humans as property. Nazi where evil because they treated humans as worthless. Islamic terrorist think nothing of the humanity when they fly planes into buildings. Evil exists in the hearts of those that set all humanity aside for their own advance.
So are wars evil? I would say a war against evil is not evil. It is far worse to sit back in the face of evil and let it exists as the Germans did in the 1930s.