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Consider the present state of political discourse. Isn't it, at least in part, a discussion about evil and what to do about it? Of course, it also involves thinking about some things as evil and other things as good. But once a political group has decided what they think is evil, the debate is all about what to do about it. Debate over the environment is about what to do to confront the bad effects of successful economies. The debate over wealth and poverty becomes a debate about how to shrink the income gap. The same is true of debates over firearms, border control, the moral status of the unborn, and a plethora of other issues. What price utopia? What a politician has to do is attempt to restrain evil without removing other features of overweighing value. Good governance restrains evil without diminishing other valuable features of human life. Thus, to govern well, one must have a grasp of the nature of human beings. Indeed, any political philosophy begins with answering th...

Dissatisfaction is a mental state induced by not getting what one wants. Desire is also a root of evil. As James puts it, "each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own  desire . Then  desire  when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death" (James 1:14-15). There are at least two proposals on the cultural table for dealing with desires. Neither way works. The first way is to attempt to remove desires from the inside. This is the way of 'enlightenment' - coming to believe a new truth - there are no such things as desires. They appear real, but they are not. Desires are native to persons. We have them and there's no way to rid ourselves of them. Thus, some teach that there are really no persons. If there are no persons, then there is nothing to have a desire. To realize such a truth is to be enlightened. According to the second way, though we cannot remove desire from the inside, we can severely ...

C.S. Lewis knew how deal with human pretentiousness: cut it out by the root. In Lewis' hands our self deceptions are like some hidden terrorist cell who finds itself under the precise assault of special forces. For example, in The Problem of Pain, Lewis unearths some particularly well bunkered little wickednesses: We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts and make the opposite mistake about our virtues--like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his "bad days" and mistakes his rare successes for his normal  Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those hum-drum, old fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with "the system" and which can be dealt with without waiting for the millennium  Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment Prostitutes are in no danger of finding life so satisfactory that they can...

"Lock 'em up!" Punishment, in our culture, conjures up images of a Dickensian, authoritarian and bleak society, one marked by shouting and hitting. While there is no doubt that evil people use punishment as an excuse for cruelty, I'd like to suggest that punishment itself is morally justified. Much as I'd like a world without punishment, I don't think we can have it if that same world has moral evil in it. So, I'd like to go against the grain: punishment is right, not always and not every kind and certainly not with hatred in the heart, but justified in a fundamental way. Actually, I'd like to go a tad further and suggest that punishment is a duty that obliges certain people in certain roles to carry out actions against wrong-doers and that punishment can harm or deprive wrong-doers in certain limited ways. Just ask yourself this: when someone does something wrong, a criminal perhaps, or a naughty child, or a truant student, what is the right re...

Apparently the writer of The Exorcist  had no idea that anyone would find his book scary. He wrote it because he thought a story needed to be told. A real story. You can listen to the entire interview here .

There will be psychology - what was his mental state? Who was caring for him? There will be chemistry - what was he on? Did he abuse? There will be technology - what computer games did he play? How long every day? There will be politics- should we ban guns? There will be sociology - do affluent sons of broken families need help? And there will be biology - what gene causes violence? But an explanation of evil, if it starts anywhere, starts in the deceptive heart of human beings. Jeremiah writes, "t he heart is more deceitful than all else a nd is desperately sick; w ho can understand it?"  There is no legislation that can mitigate hate, no social program to cure heartbreak, no drug to knock out desire and nothing merely human that can make sense of horrendous evil. To trust in flesh is to be cursed as Jeremiah writes: "c ursed is the man who trusts in mankind a nd makes flesh his strength, a nd whose heart turns away from the Lord."  Our worst response to...

What do Christians mean when we talk about the will of God? On the one hand we talk as if God has control of all things, he wills all things. On the other hand we talk about things being against God's will, what we call evil. This sounds like an inconsistency, if not a contradiction. Perhaps we say these things without really thinking about it. It might be okay if there was nothing wrong with the world, no evil, but, as it is, it appears that God doesn't get what he wants. How can God both will evil and yet not want evil?

Although I have already posted on this subject ( here ), I have some further thoughts. In fact, the following thoughts were an earlier attempt to respond to the logical problem of evil. The logical problem of evil is an objection to Christian theism that suggests that the Christian is somehow irrational to hold to the set of beliefs - God is good, God is all-powerful and evil exists. The set of beliefs is said to produce a contradiction.

The challenge for any theistic system, according to the logical problem of moral evil, is how one can account for the apparent contradiction produced by three propositions: God is omnipotent. God is benevolent. There is moral evil in the world. If we accept those propositions then we might be forced to say that if God could remove evil, but does not, then he cannot be good. Alternatively, we might conclude that if God is good, but does not remove evil, then he cannot be omnipotent. A logical contradiction is produced when we compare these two statements: God is either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent.  God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent  Christian theists, when challenged with incoherence, are charged to produce a possible way to solve the contradiction and dismiss the charge. For the following discussion it is important to note what is meant by the above terms within the theological system that is being defended. God is a maximally great being who has the maxim...