Giving the Devil His Due

I've been thinking a lot about the nature of evil, lately.

Or to be more precise, the origin of it, since the nature of evil can best be termed as... well, evil.

Much of it has to do with an encounter I had at work recently; a conversation that has left me feeling somewhat discomfitted ever since. It was a conversation filled with good intention, based on the assumption that we were operating on the same wavelength. We were not.

I should say here that this is going to be more of series of essays over the next few days, rather than single blog encapsulating the major components and getting to the point quickly. That's because when I'm writing, I never get to the point quickly. In fact, to be more precise, I rarely have a point. But there are nuances to the experience that bear exploring as they bring a much richer depth to the conversation, for the sake of fostering dialogue about where, exactly, evil truly resides.

To begin, I think it would be fair to state that the very word, 'evil', has distinctly religious connotations. To term something as 'evil' implies a lack of gradations: evil is not 'bad', 'rotten', 'corrupted', though all of these things are certainly components of it. But just as we would not say that we have a car if, for example, we had before us a chassis with no motor, 3 wheels missing and the fourth lacking a tire. It is the sum of the compnents of the automobile coming together in a finished product that allows us to designate it as a singular item, a car, despite the fact that it is made up of many thousands of parts.

If we can accept that as a workable- if imperfect, analogy, then the word evil is a singular form of all that is wrong, stagnant, twisted and perverse. Evil is ultimate. One is not 'slightly evil', just as no woman can ever be 'a little bit pregnant'. Of course, the current administration and George W. Bush in particluar are coming very close to accomplishing just that (not the 'a little bit pregnant part'). But that's for another blog. It exists as nothing other than itself, and as such represents something greater than ourselves (by 'greater' I mean beyond what we could ever reach as human beings). That is why dialogue about it has tended to remain within the discussion quorums of religion, spirituality and theology- though this is not without exceptions that need not be mentioned here yet.

But if we have accepted the proposition that evil is both ultimate and singular, it brings up the question that started this blog: what is the origin of evil? Moreover, how is it embodied, and in what ways does it manifest itself?

Christians will be quick to answer 'Satan': evil personified, the very antithesis of Christ who, to his believers, is the ultimate goodness.

So here we bring the counterbalance to the question of evil: the ultimate in goodness. Fine. So if 'the devil made me do it' is a viable excuse, then by extension any good that we do allows us the boast 'Jesus made me do it'. I hear the former quite often. I hear the latter almost never.
Why? One is a convenient excuse, while the other does not let us take credit for our actions. But while that may prove true for some, I think something else lurks beneath the waters of this uncertain oceans, and I hope to plumb its depths a bit over the next few essays.

So I'll will leave this blog with what would be described by a high school english teacher as 'my thesis statement', which is: while evil may be an 'ultimate', it is by no means omnipotent. What we often ascribe to 'Satan', are merely the shortcomings of our own.