What's evil, and why?

Question

What's your personal defintion of evil? Please feel free to address any form of evil, within any context, you want. Whether or not your definition pertains to personal character or qualifying the nature of a given action, does not matter to me. I would just like at least one of your defintions of evil and the reasoning behind your definition. But please be as broad in the forms of evil you give comment upon as you want. If you do not believe in evil, please feel free to comment.

Thanks.

*definition.

Answer 1

Evil can be defined as selfishness, but if we're going to assume evil should be a word of big impact, we assume that it's undo selfishness. As in, one is selfish in such a way that hurts others, and more specifically it hurts others in a way far in excess what it does to benefit that individual.

Really, all things "Evil" are just a series of conflicts of interest.

Answer 2

Evil is as hard to grasp as the concept of good--and the only way to really address the question is by comparisons. You take an action by a person, and judge the result--if it results in intense suffering, and is caused by deliberate action, and that action is chosen because the person wanted this to happen(or acted out of hate), then that action can be considered evil; example, the Holocaust, where six to ten million people were killed, because they were Jews, gypsies, gay, disabled...The killing fields in Cambodia and the Hutu-Tutsi massacres also fit in with this.
Any action that is deliberately done that causes suffering for no reason except because someone else is 'different' is evil by its very nature.
Evil has many shadings--some are major and monstrous, like the Holocaust, some less so--but still evil. To deliberately defraud a person, or to steal from that person, is evil, for it takes from the other part of his/her livelihood.
Wars are evil--still sometimes one cannot avoid war. Still, it's an extreme answer to national conflicts, and should be only a last resort.
WWII was such a war--to stop Adolf Hitler, to stop a man from achieving world domination--and the proof of the necessity of this war came after, during the Nuremberg trials...the body of evidence of coldhearted plans for mass murder on a scale unheard of in history proved that this war was necessary, despite the terrible cost of soldiers dying on battlefields so far away from home.
Lesser evils involve day to day things, choices of ethics: do I lie on my resume? Do I perjure myself in court? Do I steal someone's idea? Or even simple things like, do I spead a bad rumor about someone?
For most of us, it's these 'little' evils that can add up and mark a life.

Answer 3

Is "it" (action, depiction, thought, words, whatever) entirely self-centered, with no thought to hurting others? It's evil. Is it about uplifting and helping? It's good. Is it about sacrifice for the benefit of others? It's good. Is it about destroying, hurting or murdering? It's evil.

And yes, I do believe "the Devil" is a real being; and I believe that Christ will come to conquer the great deceiver, the great liar.

Answer 4

A very simple answer, and they are always best, is that anything that harms another person is evil. Of course, we are all "sinful and unclean" by nature, so we all have done and likely will continue to do things that hurt others. So, in that respect, we are, at times, evil.

Answer 5

Evil is the revaluation by the weak (the decadent, those whose will to power fails them) of the good of the strong (the healthy) - it is a condemnation of all that springs from the will to power, and, as this world *is* the will to power, a condemnation of "this world" in favor of a "beyond", a "hereafter", a "heaven"... For those of us who know Helljoy, however, it is an honorary badge, a swearword we use with PRIDE.

Answer 6

As darkness is the absence of light, so evil is the absence of good. For example, the absence of love is indifference, more evil than hatred, which is more like a perversion of love. What is good? is another question, though.

Answer 7

The epitome of evil to me.. is anything that is committed with malevolent intent towards an innocent, defenseless child.

Answer 8

i do not know whether you believe or not, like me i am really believe in god so i do believe in evil, evilly is comes from devil bible called it satan. why sometime we heard some voice to encourage us to do bad things is because of evil. so it had god mean had evil either. for me this is fact.

Answer 9

Pea soup.....and the reason is because if you rearrange the letters in "evil"....they spell "vile".

Therefore I must assume that pea soup is "evil" in disguise!!

Answer 10

EACH PERSON HAS THERE OWN OPINION ON THAT ONE, FOR EXAMPLE- IF YOU STOLE A LOAF OF BREAD TO FEED YOUR HUNGRY FAMILY, AND SOMEONE ELSE STEALS A MILLION DOLLARS - IT IS STILL A CRIME - BUT YOU WOULD STILL GET DIFFERENT OPINIONS - I GUESS ALOT OF IT HAS TO DO WITH HOW WE ARE RAISED AND PERSONNAL EXPERIENCES - MLA