Seeing Evil

Seeing evil is a dangerous thing. If you see evil in something, a thing or phenomenon, you might transfer that sense to seeing evil in someone, a person. If you do that, and you're wrong, you might beat and break down someone who is innocent. So those who want to manage the world may not want you to see evil.

But evil is real. Most of us have seen it, and if we're honest, we recognize that it's real. The truth is that humans are not our worst enemies, but there is an enemy.

Ephesians 6:

12 For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world's rulers of the darkness of this age, and against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Perhaps "the world's rulers of the darkness of this age" could be humans. It could be that some people in power more or less knowingly choose darkness, and are disproportionately able to keep the world in bondage. Generally, evil comes from the spiritual world. The evil that we see on earth from human to human generally descends from supernatural lies and dark spirits. Humans experience generational trauma and are constrained to a large extent by their genes and whatever ideas they have available to them from their culture. Many people who appear evil have less choice in who they are than we may like to think. They may be conduits of evil, but only as those in bondage to it themselves. But like in any scene, everything comes from consciousness. Someone does consciously choose the world to be broken and perverse.

If sometimes humans really are evil, should we use violence against them? We assume that such evil people can't be redeemed by showing them the truth. Seeing evil is dangerous because the evil that appears so clearly before us might turn out to not be the real evil, and in fighting what we think is evil, we end up doing evil ourselves, the work of the spirits who pit humans against each other. Seeing evil does not necessarily require us to act violently against it. And violence itself is evil. Those who are against evil should be against violence, even the violence necessary to fight evil. (The lesser of two evils is always evil, by definition.) Your desire to fight evil might be your love of violence, of evil, mixed with your love of what is good.

(Similar to violence are coercion and manipulation, which are also evil in themselves.)

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One way that helps to keep from the danger of seeing evil is to see evil, but not fear it.

The chief evil is to fail to fully connect with God. A world with no other evils, but without God, might be the worst evil for being so subtle. Perhaps we are all evil -- we are to whatever extent we choose to be enemies of God.

Whatever you see, whatever you point out or hold your attention on, including danger and evil, you see because God exists. Evil really exists, but it is dangerous to forget the bigger picture, of what is good.