Tag: evil

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Evil, by Gillian

I’m just sitting here gazing blankly at an equally blank page. I can’t seem to get started with this one. The basic problem is, like all of you I try to relate the topic of the week to some personal history, and I have none regarding evil. I can’t say I have ever met, or even had a passing remote acquaintance with, anyone I could ever see as evil.

Sure, I know of people who are frequently described as evil – Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Osama Bin Laden, Charles Manson, Kim Il-sung and now Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussein; on and on and on. I have on not so rare occasions called The Tangerine Tyrant, and all who sail with him, evil. But I do not know any of them personally. Neither, come to that, do I want to. I must have been touched, at least indirectly, by Hitler, but I was too young to connect the dots.

And, just as I write this, it occurs to me that evil, and/or the direct results of it, seem to be creeping ever closer. With madmen on both sides of the Pacific, some kind of horrific confrontation between The U.S. and North Korea looms ever larger. Meanwhile, our country drifts rudderless on international waters with no-one at the helm. Our military, overburdened with the weight of international policy, now abdicated by Trump, in addition to traditional military decisions, flounders. While here at home the evildoers threaten ordinary hard-working law-abiding citizens – the vast majority of us, in fact – with cruel and unusual punishments: worsening working conditions, decreasing environmental protections leading, quite probably, to increased sickness at a time when they are taking away our healthcare. Utter madness. Or evil.

I suspect they are frequently entwined.

And does it matter? It is what these people we choose to call evil do which is evil. Whether the perpetrators are evil themselves, or just crazy, or have a belief system very different from our own, is not important; at least, not unless I need, for my own satisfaction, to judge them. In that case, what it is which causes them to do things which I judge to be evil might be important. I might be robbed of my righteous anger, or seething hatred, of the Orange Ogre if I had to accept that he is mentally ill, or was severely traumatized as a child. Personally, I have no intention of going there. I know, from long experience of trying, that I am incapable of getting inside the heads of those who hold attitudes and beliefs very different from mine. I no longer try. For whatever reason, they are what they are. I cannot change them. All I can do is fight back, not against the person but against the evil that they do. As Edmund Burke so famously said, all it takes for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing.

My second responsibility is to myself; my own sanity. I must not allow anger to take over. It will destroy me. It’s a completely negative emotion with no positive outcome. Buddha said many wise things about anger, as he did about so many things.

You will not be punished for your anger, he says, but by your anger.

He also says,

Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

Someone – other than Buddha but apparently anonymous, maintained,

Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Evil, alas with greater odds than the peace which passes all understanding, will probably be with us and remain with us always. If I fight it every way I can while keeping myself free of the clutches of anger, I will say I have done my job. And, seeing that I have fallen once more into quotations, as I so often do to save further effort of original thought, I will try to keep Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy in mind –

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.

© June 2017

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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Evil, by Ray S

At the table and waiting for our lunches to arrive, my partner asked, “What is the subject for next week’s Telling Your Story? Seems he is always curious about what literary creations result from those Monday afternoons in the “upper room” at the LGBTQ Center.
“It’s EVIL.”
“Okay, but what is it—the subject’s title I mean?”
“Evil is the subject’s title,” was my response, and I’m not sure what to write about it. I’m guessing there will be moralizing and maybe some Judeo-Christian “prophesizing.” Perhaps some references to how well we as humankind have succeeded in messing each other up and the world in general as well. It is hard to know where to begin, so what else is new?
Our food arrived and we began to eat. After his first bite—he had been quiet up to this point—I guessed deep in thought—he looked me in the eye from across the table and said, “Good and Evil are arbitrary.” It is a matter of one’s judgment. End of the discussion.
With this in mind, what had been a daunting subject was reduced to a minimalist one word. EVIL. One can’t discount it, but as my friend said, it is arbitrary. So, “go figure”!
Webster’s dictionary:  Evil; adj. (OE, yfel) 1. Morally bad or wrong; wicked, 2. Harmful; injurious, 3. Unlucky; disastrous. Noun-wickedness; sin 2. Anything that causes harm, pain, etc. Adverb-evilly.
© 20 Jul 2017 
About the Author 
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Evil, by Pat Gourley

So just to be safe I might advise everyone sitting near me around the table to move to a safer space just in case. The reason for this is that I am beginning this piece on EVIL with a biblical quote and I would not want anyone to be smote by a lightning bolt on account of my atheist ass.

“Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.”  James 4:17

Particularly in grades one through eight when I was most intensely in the clutches of the Catholic Church 24/7 it seemed I was steeped in the seemingly endless ways I could sin or do evil. There were two broad categories of sin as I recall, those of “commission” and then those of “omission”. Being a good little Catholic boy I went to confession usually twice a month with the focus of my confessing being almost entirely on my seemingly endless sins of commission. In hindsight it seems that the Church overly focused on actual transgressions rather than on the “omissions”. Or maybe this was a refection of my own internal turmoil generated by the difficulty and shame of confessing to cussing, fighting with siblings or disobeying my parents as opposed to confessing a lack of efforts to help the overseas Catholic Missions save heathen souls with my meager monetary allowance.

To be fair the Church did say that faith alone was not adequate, you need some good works to go along with it. To not perform these acts of goodwill I suppose could be construed as sins of omission. Though I do not remember the emphasis on omissions being nearly as strong as the admonition to keep my hands off of my dick and the resulting emissions.

And of course when I had reached my early adolescent years the thought of confessing to anyone that I was masturbating daily was simply out of the question. That I was thinking about men much older than I when I was engaged in this ‘transgressive commission” was truly beyond the pale, and so began a slow decline into being an agnostic and then a full-blown atheist. I guess playing with oneself is the root of all evil.

To once again quote Ken Wilber’s truthful bromide “no one is wrong 100% of the time” this seems the case for the Catholic Church’s teaching around sins of omission. As I age I realize that I actually commit very few sins but the issue of omission becomes much more relevant and something I am frequently guilty of.

Over the decades I have been attracted to Buddhism primarily the Zen variety. I find their views on good and evil to be a bit more dare I say sophisticated and in line with the complexity that is human behavior. I recently stumbled on a piece written on Good and Evil and posted on the Soka Gakkai International site: http://www.sgi.org/about-us/buddhism-in-daily-life/good-and-evil.html

A short quote from that piece I think has a rather uncomfortable truth to it:

“Every single human being is capable of acts of the most noble good and the basest evil”.

I am also reminded of Thich NhatHanh wonderful poem, Please Call Me By My True Names, and the amazing stanza:

“ I am the twelve year old girl,
refugee on a small boat
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate
My heart not yet capable
Of seeing and loving.”

So for me these days I think I am guilty of sins of omission when I am not actively engaging in resistance hopefully through acts of compassion. This does not necessarily only involve political actions, which can have merit but also present traps of their own. Acting compassionately and politically at the same time is often a challenge.

For me it is a sin of omission to not be out marching and demonstrating and certainly not voting. The sins of omission I currently am guilty of though most often involve rather mundane day-to-day activities.

I need to engage more with some of the homeless I encounter daily maybe give them a few bucks, or call a friend for lunch or reach out to an old buddy trying to contact me on Facebook. Perhaps help an older friend get moved out of his apartment or get off my ass and write something and then just show up at Story Telling to listen to what everyone has to share.

© June 2017

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Evil, by Phillip Hoyle

I hate capitalized words in philosophy and theology. It’s okay if those words stand at the beginning of a sentence, but even then, if it’s a word like evil or truth, I get the jitters. The problem for me goes way back to the days I was paying attention to philosophical matters related to religion. In my early twenties I came to appreciate my childhood and teen years because in church we never said what was called “The Lord’s Prayer.” We knew it because it was in the Bible, but that prayer was not said in unison as an element of weekly liturgy. I grew up in a “free church” tradition congregation. There were no liturgical prayers except a benediction song, “God be with you ’til we meet again.” Our prayers were spontaneous improvisations related to the moment.

At age 22 I took a job in an urban church that met in a modified Gothic building with medieval-looking art glass windows and aped liturgical tradition although it taught the same Free Church approach as the church of my upbringing. Because of my studies I was especially sensitive over the weekly repetition of the Lord’s Prayer, knowing it was archaic and a bad translation. In short, I did not grow up saying weekly what most Christians said, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” I knew evil should be translated the evil one, that mythological ascription to the devil or Satan. I was not interested in such myths and fears. I had never dreamed of such a being and have still not done so. I knew there were enough real moral challenges that dwelt in me as well as in social life. I wasn’t attracted to reifying ancient language as if it were scientific. I felt I was lucky while at the same time I worked to examine the educational effects of weekly saying something one didn’t believe. No wonder people who grew up in those old-fashioned liturgical churches often rejected them. No wonder some of them claimed that religion was itself the origin of all evil in the world.

I knew unhealthy activities made up a part of my life. I knew that I was much less than perfect. I also knew perfection wasn’t my goal in life. I simply wanted to live in relationship with many people from all walks of life (to the extent that I understood life at such an early age). I wasn’t judgmental about their decisions and was more interested in my goals than in my disappointments. Also I was not interested to blame my foibles on some external power in the universe. I accepted that all persons, all organizations, all best intentions were also subject to being imperfect, that all visions of perfection were imperfect and ultimately unattainable. I focused on the ethical tradition “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That seemed enough to me. And it still seems adequate. I do sometimes say a quiet prayer silently. Deliver me from mistaken images of evil that will invite me to pound a wedge between me and the vast world of difference such as difference of race, nationality, values, hopes, dreams, commitments, and so much more. I have too much fun meeting life as it presents itself and too little time to fret over my own or another’s evil. I do hope to love my enemies, to serve my communities in hopes of building better opportunities for all people. I do hope for a better world. But deliver me from evil? Too metaphysical for me.

© 26 June 2017

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Depraved by Ricky

          The word depraved
comes to us via the 14th century AD (1325-75 to be less precise).
The Middle English (or was it Middle Earth???) word depraven (Anglo-French)
which in turn was descended from the Latin depravare.  But then who really cares about that.  Does that make me depraved because I don’t
really care from where the word came?
          I sort of enjoy the
obsolete usage of the word, as in; The Republicans keep depraving President
Obama’s efforts, citizenship, and religious faith.  Especially since their real reason for
attacking him (beyond being power hungry) 
is not his politics but his skin color. 
They are afraid of losing the support of Black Republicans who could
vote as a block for a black candidate. 
          The more common
usage of the word falls into three primary categories: 1. to
make morally bad or evil; 2.
to vitiate; and 3. to corrupt.  So here’s the problem with these
definitions.  What is morally bad or
evil?  In Christianity the moral code is
fairly standard among the various sects, but not entirely.  Other religions have other criteria.  In Christianity it is morally wrong to lie
and bare false witness against someone, but does that make homophobe closeted homosexual
preachers “depraved” or just lying hypocrites? If a husband or boyfriend lies
in answering the question, “Sweetheart, do you like this new lamp I bought?” to
avoid hurting the feelings of his loved one OR to avoid an argument over the
lamp, is he depraved for not telling his honest opinion?
          What is
evil?  Most religious people would agree
that the Devil is evil, but what acts does he do that are evil?  Tempting people to violate the moral
code?  If tempting people is evil, then
all people who encourage others who are on a diet to eat something “just this
once” or talk an alcoholic into having just one little drink would be
classified as evil.  I doubt most people
would agree to that.  Is Ted Haggart evil
because (before he was allegedly “cured of his homosexuality”) he “was” a hypocrite?   If the Devil is evil because
he says there is no God, what about parents who declare Santa Clause or the
Easter Bunny real to their children, or people who lie and cheat on their
income taxes? Are they all evil too? 
What about the case of political parties or individual political groups
who lie about and distort the truth about another candidate?  Are they also evil?  If Americans cannot yell “FIRE” in a theater
as a joke without being punished, why can people in political campaigns slander
an opponent with no legal consequence? 
Isn’t slandering a good man “evil”.
          I really don’t
even want to discuss the “to vitiate” and “to corrupt” categories, so I am done
ranting except for one more thought.  If
there is no God or Supreme Being or etc., how can there be a legitimate moral
code to base our laws upon.  Where can a
person go to find a place where his so called “depravities” are his “pursuits
of happiness”.
Origin: 
1325–75; Middle English depraven  (< Anglo-French )
< Latin dēprāvāre  to pervert,corrupt, equivalent to dē- de-  + prāv ( us )crooked + -āre  infinitive suffix

de·prave [dih-preyv] 

verb (used with object), -praved, -prav·ing.
to make morally bad or evil; vitiate;corrupt.
Obsolete . to defame.

vi·ti·ate [vish-ee-eyt] 

verb (used with object), -at·ed, -at·ing.
to impair the quality of; make faulty;spoil.
to impair or weaken the effectiveness of.
to debase; corrupt; pervert.
to make legally defective or invalid;invalidate: to vitiate a claim.

©
5 Dec 2011 

About the Author 

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in
Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach.  Just
prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on
their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my
parents divorced.
When united with my mother and stepfather two years later
in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California,
graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966.  After three tours of duty with the Air Force,
I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until
her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11
terrorist attack.
I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010.   I find writing these memories to be
therapeutic.
My story blog is, TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com.