I’m not sure it’s enough to debunk the notion of evil in an abstract way, as I did in the last article so I’ve decided to finish off this theme of morality, for now at least, by showing you how it easy it would be for you to be evil.
In previous articles I’ve described us all as evil. This article is slightly more offensive than that. Feel free to comment with a flame: it will make a quirky change to the spam the blog usually gets.
As I covered in the last article people who we think are evil don’t believe they are evil. They believe they are good or they are right to the point that they transcend their society’s definition of evil. Stalin, Mao and especially Hitler are examples of this. And is this so wrong?
The knee-jerk reaction is ‘yes!’ because they must be mad or just ridiculously egomaniacal to go that far. Though I explained how an individual inevitably justifies his or her beliefs, I didn’t say how someone can go as far as ordering the bombing of civilians or orchestrating genocides.
Keeping your sanity but still going against what civilisation holds to be right and true
Even though murderous thoughts can occur to us very easily we all know murdering a human being to be the worst of all sins, the number one act of immorality…even though our governments make us think war, the ultimate act of mass murder, is okay and that there are all sorts of external factors which can also make it okay, from capital punishment to racial purification – depending on your society.
Now, reading this as a member of the free first world you know all this and recognise this and, though you’ve read this article and are aware that your conscience may not be as strong as you thought it was, you know that without manipulation you wouldn’t kill anyone.
Fair enough, let’s try something less obvious, shall we?
God loves all of us equally, except for gays.
As I’m sure you’re well aware, gays go to hell. Some of the oldest, longest and most cited books ever written, such as the Bible and the Koran, at least imply as much. God, using case studies, Aristotelian philosophical dialogues and glow-in-the-dark crayon diagrams has shown us that being sexual with your hot same sex next door neighbour, Ashley, is really bad, even if Ashley insists otherwise.
God loves us all immensely, kind of like how a psycho in a maximum security prison might love his ant farm. And just like how Johnny ‘Propane Gas’ Harris needs his ants to prove their love for him by avoiding the water he occasionally floods the colony with, God needs us to prove his love for Him by avoiding all the temptations He places before us so we won’t go to Hell.
Thus He lovingly torments us with His greatest gift to us: free will. We are allowed to do whatever we want – it’s just that we’re built to only want happiness for ourselves and we can only truly find happiness by ignoring our free will and doing only what God wants us to do. Truly He is a clever and insecure creator.
Wishing to avoid the fiery lake or being left behind on judgement day or being made to wait for ages and ages in purgatory, we avoid as much of the cursed gift as possible by having governments and other bodies of authority take care of all that frankly rather taxing free will and free thinking for us.
Many of these governments and smaller bodies of authority around the world try to suppress homosexuality in accordance with His plan, but given they’re not doing a good enough job of it God sends forth strains of AIDS every now and again to remind gay men that if they are going to disobey Him by having anal sex they should at least use condoms, in accordance with the Book of Corinthians.
What this means is that if you’re gay and native African or Middle-Eastern there’s a chance you grew up in a society which deems homosexuality to be evil. These parts of the world contain countries which are so regressive that they actually have official religions.
In Germany, China and Russia it’s deemed evil for individuals to have people killed. Stalin, Mao and Hitler wiped out millions despite growing up in societies which expressly state such actions as evil – because all three men considered their societies’ definitions of evil to be wrong.
In Pakistan and similar countries it’s deemed evil for individuals to be gay. Some gay men and women in countries such as Pakistan are open about their homosexuality despite growing up in societies which expressly state such actions as evil – because these people consider their societies’ definitions of evil to be wrong.
Dictators that start genocides and gays in Islamic states are both coming from the same place in their thinking: ‘my society says this is evil but I don’t believe it is, so I’ll do it anyway’.
You probably find me comparing the thinking of Middle-Eastern homosexuals and Adolf Hitler offensive. And that’s kind of the point. Your belief that homosexuality and murder are utterly different in terms of morality is indicative of the society you live in.
The difficulty of categorising
And suddenly it becomes difficult to categorise what is evil and what isn’t. Forget euthanasia and abortion – we all know those are inherently tricky subjects – and just think of issues which are actually very simple: free speech for all, racial tolerance, homosexual tolerance and equality between the sexes.
These issues should be no-brainers, but take authority figures out of these matters and individuals can become lost.
The reason for this is that, as individuals, when we have no authority figure telling us what is ethical (or we want to ignore some authority figure telling us what is ethical) we fall back on our personal compasses – i.e. the Golden Rule.
‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ or ‘treat others as you would like to be treated’. It’s a great rule in its simplicity – but that doesn’t mean people apply it soundly every time.
This is because our individuality and our personal experiences get in the way. Let’s take racial tolerance as an example. It’s all very well and good thinking about how we’d like to be treated but it becomes increasingly difficult as we try to apply this thinking to people who we perceive as unlike us.
The underlying argument in the minds of the British for a long, long time during the 19th century was ‘I’d want to be treated like this, but then I’m not black. How would I want to be treated if I were black? Well, I’m not so it’s really a moot point.’
Of course, blacks differ from whites in much less than a percent of their genes – so it’s a negligible difference, but human beings have a tendency to search for differences, exaggerate them massively and then categorise them in order to better make sense of reality.
How to be evil
What you should find alarming, especially if you haven’t read the previous two articles, is that evil then is simply a concentration of the ego coupled with free thought. It’s about doing something which satisfies you that happens to be against your society’s moral code, and that’s all.
As with the dictionary.com definition of ‘immoral’, after all, it is: ‘violating moral principles; not conforming to the patterns of conduct usually accepted or established as consistent with principles of personal and social ethics.’
Evil, in the final analysis, is a term of classification and whether one ever buys into it depends on one’s level of egocentricity at any given time.
Check out the other articles in this series: Part 1, Part 2.
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