My father is preaching on sin and the devil during Lent. For anti-theists and their bigotted allies, this is no surprise, but it will be to the people sitting in the pews. Since the Enlightenment, discussion of sin, as well as "Satan and all evil spirits who roam throughout the world, seeking the ruin of souls," has waned. A rather odd phenomena, given that while much of our Christian theology relies on faith, the one indisputable, self-evident fact is that positive evil certainly exists.
All the skits about preaching hellfire and damnation, usually featured on networks with very low ratings, look quaint and ignorant. Such topics get very little airtime in today's churches, along with demonology, Lucifer himself, and what spiritual warfare means. Even if we take it to an entirely human level, discussions on sin have fallen by the wayside for years. We'd rather be therapeutic than judgmental, so we try to explain wickedness away with modern terminology.
There is no doubt that neurosis, disordered passions and egoism are part of the reason why people do bad things. Perhaps some of these were wrongly diagnosed in the past due to our lack of scientific understanding. But the fact remains that with all of our modern tools and methods, we still can't seem to solve a primeval reality that exists in every human being: the desire to act selfishly, to mock the virtuous path, even to throttle innocence and goodness.
Indeed, modern solutions to these problems have often had inhuman results. From the best minds of the 19th century sprang all the horrors of the 20th, many of which live on today: eugenics gave us both the Aryan fantasy and the inferno of Buchenwald; dismissing all religion and free enterprise gave us secret police and gulags; and the will to power, wealth, or health created a culture of narcissism that degrades all of our lives behind a mirage of "freedom."
Evil exists.
The willful choice to gain by calumny and collusion exists as well - you can watch it live everyday. But if our ideological cures to date have not solved this perennial problem while simultaneously creating situations worse than the disease, then it behooves us to search for a solution that simultaneously recognizes the need for personal conviction as well as a grand structure with the authority to affirm virtues and condemn vices.
Are there any suggestions?
I won't fill in the blank with the obvious - my opinion on these matters has been clear for years. Yet it is an exquisite paradox that in ages past, the true, good, and beautiful led many an agnostic soul to his Creator. Now, we need a fourth - not in the literal sense, since evil is not a transcendental but rather an accident allowed to exist conditionally until its final defeat at the end of time - if only because it may inspire a mirrored reaction in our souls to stem this dark tide.
From recognizing our own failings, we may strive to enhance our good habits; from the realization that organizations exist solely for profiting from human suffering, we may in turn try to combat these by celebrating and protecting human dignity. This infers hierarchy, meritocracy, core documents as well as endless commentary cited often at our designated meeting places.
But there is a twist to all this, an inevitable realization that threatens to break and crush any who chance upon it. Put simply, goodness for goodness sake isn't compelling. Even the most selfless martyrs and saints were hustling for the eternal reward of "well done my good and faithful servant," spoken by the Almighty.
How can we expect people to settle for anything less?
There is still the mirror analogy. Organization demands an organizer, even a team - are we really expected to believe that evil has no director or board charting the course from below, given its prevalence and coordination in the world? And how could we defeat such dark powers, except by invoking principalities of the light to aid us in battle?
Again, are there any suggestions?
