Shades Of Evil
It was a time of terror. All people could talk about was the coming disaster that they believed would wipe out all life on the planet. This event had been known to be coming for some time and dire predictions abounded. You couldn't go out into the street without someone telling you to repent, because the world was coming to an end. Attendance in churches was up dramatically as was that in temples and all houses of worship. People were preparing for the worst and expecting it to happen. The date for this event was not 2012, it was the year 1000. You see, this is certainly not the first time that people had thought that the world was going to end on a particular day. As a matter of fact, people in ancient times didn't even have the ability to tie in different tales from all over the world to try and make them agree as we are doing now. Their knowledge was very limited and most everything that they knew was from where they lived. Most couldn't read or write and had to rely on word of mouth and basically they believed more of what they were told than even we do today. Some where along the line they felt that the number 1000 had a special meaning and that meaning was connected to the bible and represented the end of days. Can you imagine how religion was pounded into these people? It was taken a lot more seriously than it is today and a lot more literally The old testament was construed to be a blow by blow description of how things actually happened. Today most believe not all of it is literal, but that all of it conveys important messages to us. Yes there are those that still believe that it is entirely literal and I respect their views, even though I may not agree. I am not a bible expert, far from it, but I have studied world religions academically. The one thing that sort of stares you in the face is that most religions believe in goodness over badness, that is good over evil.
Hitler ShareAlike 3.0 Germany
Himmler Not everyone believes that evil even exists. There are those that believe that evil is just mental illness of one sort or another. Another group believes that evil is the lack of goodness. Are there some people that believe that pure evil exists in the world and that some people who are not mentally ill, commit vicious acts for the pure enjoyment of it? Yes there are and I am one of them. Evil is a concept that has different degrees. I guess an example of evil at its most is Adolph Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, or some of those Nazi and Japanese concentration camp doctors that performed horrible operations on people during experiments and didn't even administer anesthetic, not that it would have made the act any more merit. Lesser extents of evil might be serial killers and such. We could go down the line and maybe say that when you get to the bottom of the evil list, you hit the politicians who take money and favors to overlook dangerous things like faulty medicine. These are usually the guys that launch all those terrible smear campaigns and think nothing of ruining someone's reputation, even if the facts that are stated are false and even if the accusers are the ones doing what they are complaining about. Not everyone will agree with me about different stages of evil, or if they do, they many not agree on what those stages are. Some might say that Tiger Woods was evil because of his numerous affairs which have ruined and disgraced his wife and children. Other might say that Bernie Madoff was evil because he ruined a lot of people and put a lot of charities out of business. There is a lot that one can say about this subject.
Bernard Madoff
Most of us have a conscience and it bothers us to do an evil, or immoral act. We might do it anyway, but we would be sorry afterwards as it weighed heavily on our mind. We are not all built the same however and there are those that have no conscience problems. Not all of these people are evil however. They know right from wrong and won't usually commit an evil act, but if the situation presents itself, they just might fold. An example of this is a good family person and good citizen that goes to the bank and gets too much change for a check and decides to keep it, even though he or she knows that the teller will be short of cash at the end of the day and might even have to make the shortage up out of their own pocket Most people are honest, but there are exceptions. A UPS driver found $5,000 in the street and immediately turned it into the police. As did a person who found money in the wall of a home he has just bought. A question that has been asked since the beginning of time is, could a good person have some evil in them. Is there such a thing as a percentage of evil. Could a person be 95% good and 5% evil? What about occasional evil? The problem is that we are all only human and human nature being what it is, we are subject to temptation. If you are a Christian than you believe that even Christ was tempted by the bible, because it says so in the new testament The difference was that He could resist it and we might not be able to. People are tempted by different things, depending on their nature. Some people are tempted by power and will do anything to attain it. They may perform immoral acts to get ahead in business or government. Some say that a company that sells munitions to both sides in a war is performing an immoral act. Others may do anything just to get elected to a high post. There are those that will do anything to attain wealth and some of them are never satisfied no matter how much they have. This in itself is not evil, but can we consider it evil if they are responsible for keeping sweat shops going that keep people in virtual slavery working night and day to make the clothes that they may be selling? Lastly are those that attempt to have sex with every man or woman they meet evil? Most would think so. I don't think that you would get the same definition of evil from several different people you asked. Could it be that there is a limited amount of evil spread around the world and most of us have a piece of it in us? I hope not. |
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