Semantics of Evil?

Question

Evil appears to have been 'explained away and relegated' under the terms of such things as Mental Illness, Terrorism, Drugs, Bad childhood/ upbringing, Politics, etc, etc.

Do you agree and what does this say about us? Have people stopped believing in Evil per se?

Answer 1

I'm anti semantic. I don't like words.

Answer 2

The stigma of evil is in everyone of us, could come in any form as you have said. On the contrary, people nowadays are permitting evilness to be the righteous element in their life style.
Mental illness people are considered to be those with an open mind for any kind of religion! Here anything goes.

Answer 3

Evil is the `effect`, it is not a measurable commodity, Evil does not exist beyond our ability to name it. What accounts for the evils committed by Tsunamis and Hurricanes? Act of God, or just tough ****? "There is no good or bad , but thinking makes it so". William Shakespeare.

Answer 4

The problem with labelling something evil is that it removes all compassion. You can treat and maybe cure a person with a disease, you can rehabilitate a person off drugs, and redeam a mistake. But when something is evil, there is only one thing to do, destroy it.

Being quick to destroy something that can be saved is a great evil in itself.

Answer 5

No. People have become educated and they understand human nature better. Do you want to go back to the days when women were accused of witchcraft and burned alive when they were just harmless people with personality problems?
People still do evil things but we are beginning to understand why.

Answer 6

Evil doesn't exist unless it is manifested by someone. The things that you mentioned are the things that can make evil appear in people.

Answer 7

Evil isn't a thing. It can't be isolated. Using those terms you mentioned allows us to really look at the real causes instead of just white washing (black washing?) it as evil and sweeping it under the rug.

Answer 8

i think we should all have our free thoughts, but i also think that the exclusion of a divine entity has fortified our assumption that we are self-righteous creatures, but we are not, we are inherently sinnful. as long as sin exists, evil will exist. and if you get rid of all those attributes you've listed under the evil category, there will be some other kind of evil that manifests to plague mankind.

Answer 9

The road that leads to Hell is a wide road.Jesus tells us to strive to enter through the narrow door.Have you noticed that violent criminals are given the best of lawyers,but mum and dad offenders are hit with a brick? How is it that some people like Hitler escaped assassinatiion and other people like Stalin died peacefuly in their sleep?

Answer 10

People can still be hurt by demons. (But prayer and fasting and being a member of the Church secure protection against them.)

Someone said (I mean wrote) that the greatest victory of satan in the 20th century was to persuade the Western society at large that he doesn't exist.

Answer 11

I believe the concept of "evil" to be a purely human construct, and as such, has whatever meaning the speaker/writer chooses to ascribe to it. Such endlessly maleable words cease to have any real meaning to those, like myself, that worship truth, logic and reason over human constructs like love, god and evil.

Is it evil to stomp the life out of a kitten that was abandoned by its mother? Most would say so. But what if you happen upon said kitten whilst stumbling through a post-apocolyptic world in which each day is a struggle to find enough calories to sustain your own life? Most would then have a different answer. What does that mean? It means morals/ethics are situational, not hard-and-fast. We're told Sadam Hussein is "evil", yet to him, he was just doing whatever it takes to further his goals, just as the U.S. Cavalry did when it slaughtered thousands of native American women and children in the name of westward expansion and the so-called "Manifest Destiny" (just another example of humans using their invented mythologies to justify their secular desires for resources).

Follow what you believe to be the right path, and don't subscribe to anyone else's definitions of right and wrong, good or evil, as those words are defined only by the person using them at the time, and most likely, to further their own agenda. And for those of you that believe we need religion to keep us on the right path, please get yourself a one-way ticket to Iraq and join the legions of fools killing ea other in the name of their own particular flavor of mythology - maybe in time the lambs that choose these mythologies over the reasoning power evolution bestowed upon them will take themselves and ea other out of the gene pool to leave the rest of us, that don't reject things like logic and reason, to clean up the mess you've left for us.