St. Hilda St. Patrick Episcopal Church

Sin and evil are not synonymous. Neither is one a more serious copy of the other. They are different categories.

People are not evil. That is hard to believe when we read or watch stories unfold which represent horrific crimes of cruelty, total insensitivity and disregard for all human values.

I have noticed though, that when we call such people evil, it does help us distance ourselves from the criminal. He (most often a he) is not like us, he is different from us because he is evil. That kind of thinking protects us from the unbearable thought that in so many ways this person is not much different from the rest of us. We thus assign cause to an unfathomable entity, (evil) as if that is the only explanation required. That person though, is a product of our culture, and a member of our society.

So does evil exist? I believe it does, but not as some free floating entity. Evil comes into being when a few of us get together and share our resentments, anger, greed or desire for revenge. These, our sins, when shared begin to take on the sinister shape and character of evil. Like a tornado, as the necessary conditions for the formation of a tornado increase, the winds organize themselves into that deadly circular patten, and suddenly a fully operational tornado comes into being, touching down and reiking havoc, bringing suffering nd death in its path. Similarly the group that comes together to exchange their dissatisfactions soon provide the conditions for evil to begin to organize. Once that happens then there comes into being a force greater than the sum of all the individual sins of the people who came together. Gangs, racist groups, political power groups, Enrons of the world, might all be seen as organized systems which generate horrific potential. One can point to individuals as their cause, but its in the willing collusion and personal, violent justification that creates the conditions for evil to take on reality.

The effect of evil is then to consume all the human values it comes into contact with, including the humanity of the very people involved. The most glaring example is the Nazis of Germany, who began as an organization of damaged and angry men, but the result was the growth of a monstrous evil that consumed the world. The perpetrators were among the first to loose their humanity. They were consumed by the flames they had themselves ignited. This is always the way.

Thoughts on the difference between Culture and Society.

I fancy we muddle these up. If you were to take the laws of our society, together with the statements and declarations of the Constitution as representative of the values of our society, then you would see that the values espoused, emphasize respect for the individual, the rights of the individual, safeguard of liberties, justice for all and other significant and altruistic ideas.

On the other hand if you were to take a series of popular magazines and from their advertisements assess the values of the people addressed, you would find a very different set of values. The most obvious is a desperate concern with the self, its image, selfgratification and self preservation. Sex, greed and fear would dominate the motivators.

Compare these two sets of values and you realize there is a huge discrepancy between values espoused by our society and those values dominating our culture. We speak of the sectarian war in Iraq with superior shakes of our heads, but closer to home our culture had declared war on our society and we are enmeshed in what amounts to a civil war between the two.