Our unease with evil

Steven Davi­son is back, with a look at Quak­ers’ unease with evil

If there is some­thing divine or at least quasi-divine about the human, then where does human evil fit in? How could the two coex­ist? I sus­pect that this cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance explains part of our our unease with evil.

Evil

One thought on “Our unease with evil

  1. When I first began to learn about the beliefs of the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends, one that I wel­comed hap­pi­ly was the belief of that of God in every­one. I thrilled to the belief that in the worst of us – ter­ror­ists, vio­lent crim­i­nals, abusers of the worst kind – it takes only the right per­son shar­ing Light with them, and that per­son could reach the Light with­in them, no mat­ter how deeply it was hid­den. Good could always over­come evil. 

    I’d sought that kind of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty all my life, but it col­lid­ed with a real­i­ty in my life. 

    I’ve had brush­es with a few sociopaths. I’ve had two peo­ple close to me who found them­selves mar­ried to a sociopath. The dam­age they do to their vic­tims’ psy­ches and lives is beyond dev­as­tat­ing. They leave destroyed lives in their wake, and when that unfor­tu­nate soul no longer is of use to them, they move on to anoth­er. Their psy­che is rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from ours, so much so that it’s very dif­fi­cult to com­pre­hend. They lack con­science. Any con­science. They under­stand the dif­fer­ence between right and wrong, but the dis­tinc­tion means noth­ing to them. It does not lim­it their behav­ior. There is no reach­ing them with Light. They would see any­one try­ing to reach that of God in them as a gullible fool. For any­one inter­est­ed in learn­ing how they move through the world, I rec­om­mend Martha Stout’s book “The Sociopath Next Door.” In the U.S., sociopaths make up four per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion. One per­son in twenty-five has no conscience. 

    I strug­gle with this. How do I acknowl­edge the exis­tence of these dan­ger­ous preda­tors and take steps to avoid them, while believ­ing that there is that of God in every­one? If sociopaths do hold that of God in them, they have it her­met­i­cal­ly sealed. That’s as close as I can come to believ­ing they do hold Light with­in themselves.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Comments on Quaker Ranter Daily