INTRODUCTION
Discussions about evil often begin with certainty—certainty that evil is obvious, simple, and easily identified. Yet our reactions to evil, and the ways we label people as good or bad, reveal something far more complicated. Much of what we call “moral clarity” is driven less by understanding and more by instinct, fear, and the black-and-white thinking we all carry into adulthood. When morality becomes rigid, it turns easily into condemnation; when condemnation focuses on people rather than actions, hatred quickly follows. This examination explores how our assumptions about evil, morality, and religion shape not only how we judge others but how we expose the darker impulses within ourselves.
THE ARGUMENT
Evil is seen as against justice, love and compassion and so it is a form of destruction. Our response to it is to hate it and get rid of it. The response has nothing to do with making it wrong. The response is down to it being wrong.
People who are very strict morally are accused of black and white thinking.
It is easy to see why.
But a person who thinks two or three actions are black is as guilty of black and white thinking as one who sees nearly everything as a solid sin.
They only differ in their boundaries. The liberal sees the strict one as black for condemning as black for what is not black.
They remain as potentially bad as each other.
Everybody thinks in a black and white way when they are young. It is part of growing up and we see that things are more complicated then we would like to think. That habit does not go away in adulthood. So everybody will be black and white in something. When religion preaches absolute morality it should not be blaming you if you do harm over your black and white thinking. It knows what can happen and still preaches such intolerance.
Love the sinner more when the sin is more? Black-and-white moralising often masks hatred for the person you see as being on the wrong side. Moral evil is talked about as if it were something people do, but the actions are taken to show what they are as people—evil. They become the problem. The hatred for the “evil” person is there whether you admit it or not. Denying it does not make it go away.
Demonising someone and seeing them as evil, even irredeemably evil, is rooted in black-and-white thinking.
A subtle form of that is, "Okay he seems to be better than most people. But I can sense he is up to something. There is something very dark incubating in him".
Black-and-white thinking also appears when you see a person as evil right now and in need of extreme opposition, even if you hope they will change tomorrow. It does not require believing they will never change.
Do not let anyone who is demonising hide behind the distraction, “But if they change, I will embrace them.” The issue is what they are now. Tomorrow does not exist yet. They are “irredeemably evil” now and will remain so until they change—and that could be tonight or never.
If evil were a person, or could become one, you would want to hurt it simply for what it is. This is not just self-defence or protection - though there may be that element. If evil is bad in itself, the issue is not that it threatens you. You would act if it threatens you, yes, but it only threatens because it is bad to begin with. Evil is a potential threat before it even begins. It is primed. If the bad is there, you want rid of it. Evil "sees" you as you see it: as a threat. The core issue is not that evil is dangerous but that evil is what it is. A threat is only the outcome of evil, not its essence.
You inevitably personalise evil. You may claim you don’t, but you do. You cannot truly hate a mere abstraction. You treat evil as if it were a person, though it is just a value judgement, an idea—nothing there to hate. If evil were a person, your response would not change.
Hating a fiction person for being evil or hating personalised evil is a fast track to hating actual people. It may be a substitute for that. If one loves people, one does not direct hate towards a target other than them without thinking of them as what should be the real targets. Hate feeds hate.
It is said to be evil to demonise a person as evil. But if a person has become an instrument of evil and does evil’s work, you will want them hurt and destroyed. You cannot perceive evil without perceiving a person. A person must reveal it to you. Hating theft without hating the thief is impossible. Telling yourself you love the person is self-deception. The hate is strongest when hidden from yourself.
Opposing evil—denying its right to exist—implies that if you could hurt it like a person, degrade it, destroy it, you would. It simply happens not to be a person, but that does not matter. Evil is hated for being pointless, unnecessary, and harmful. Whether evil is a person, a thing, or an abstraction is irrelevant. It is hated for what it is. The harm it causes is only a side effect.
Imagine, impossibly, that you could cause a lightning bolt to strike someone at random. We are talking about intention, not realism. If the lightning must hit either X or Y, and X is “evil,” what then? If they are truly evil, you will have them cremated alive. Admit it. Say it out loud.
So what is the alternative? Treat people kindly and make them happy, as if even the evil they do is good?
Some say Satan, unlike God, accepts you as you are. But this ignores how evil people may cooperate only to fall out over what evil to do. An evil person will oppose certain evils and combat them with other evils. Evil inevitably provokes attacks from other evils. Ignoring the bad person or praising the evil they do, is just another form of evil. It is a no-win situation. Evil breeds evil, and the supposedly good are often merely skilled pretenders.
You cannot condemn evil without a share of it appearing in yourself. You cannot condemn the evil in someone without awakening evil in you.
Religion covers up what your view and treatment of evil reveal about you. It tells you it has the cure for evil and that you must be a soldier against it. It reassures you that you are not evil, that its prayers, rites and Jesus’ blood have immunised you or cleansed you. True, religion says we are all sinners—but when you diagnose evil and act against it, you are told you are not sinning but doing God’s work.
Religion says we wrecked God’s good creation, not God. Without conclusive proof this is clearly just another projection—shifting our own evil onto others. You cannot blame all humankind just to preserve belief in a moral God.
Free will is said to mean choosing in accordance with your true nature. Calvinist Christianity argues that if we do nothing but sin, we still have free will, because sinners naturally sin. Our actions simply express what we are. Sins do not make us sinners any more than barking makes a dog a dog.
Here problems arise.
This suggests that when we do good, we are faking it. Evil attracts war with other evils, so any apparent good becomes a selfish manoeuvre against scarier evils, like violence. This view ensures that if we are not evil, we will soon become so. We absorb poison. We are told we are simply bad.
If you reject that and claim our true nature is basically good, then the evil we do must be some kind of error or disorder—not really “us.” In that case, sinners should go to Heaven more, not less, the more they sin. And sin itself barely makes sense.
Either way, evil cannot be seen clearly, contrary to Jesus’ teaching about removing the speck from your brother’s eye. What you assess is more about you than about evil. Both positions discourage actually diagnosing evil or resisting it. No wonder people prefer preaching against evil to doing anything to stop it. If the preaching is what matters, it soon becomes black and white in order to get a hearing and to make an attention seeking impact.
Black-and-white thinking is dangerous. To affirm evil is to affirm black. To define evil as whatever is wrong for me, as the relativist does, is to create it. To define evil as what I perceive as wrong, as the non-relativist does, is also to create it.
I'd warn that the notion that people do evil or are evil would impact on God. And so would their inherent tendency to black and white thinking. The impact is down to how people are supposedly designed that way by God and thus they mirror what he must be like himself! That leads to a toxic loop - God and the darkness feed off each other.
FINALLY
Human moral judgment is far less rational and far more instinctive than we like to believe. Psychology shows that black-and-white thinking—also known as splitting—begins in childhood as a basic way of organising the world. Although it becomes more nuanced with maturity, traces of this dualistic mindset persist in adulthood, shaping how we see right and wrong. When this lingering tendency mixes with moral judgment, it easily hardens into demonisation. Social psychology and conflict studies consistently show that viewing people in strictly good-or-evil terms fuels hostility and escalates division.
Part of the reason demonisation arises so naturally is that humans are wired to personalise harm or personify evil. Cognitive science demonstrates that people instinctively attribute intention, agency, and even personhood to abstract forces. As a result, “evil” is not experienced as a mere concept but as something embodied—someone acting as the face of a larger, threatening presence. This framing amplifies fear and encourages violence, because the person being judged becomes not only harmful in themselves but a representative of something even worse.
Moral absolutism further deepens this pattern. When morality is treated as rigid and absolute, judgments often shift from condemning actions to condemning people as fundamentally bad. Studies on authoritarian and fundamentalist moral reasoning show how quickly this leads to dehumanisation. Once someone is labelled essentially evil, hostility becomes easier to justify. More dangerous still is the label that is never spoken—the silent, unacknowledged condemnation that shapes behaviour while remaining invisible, and therefore unchallenged.
Religious explanations can intensify these dynamics in another way. When suffering is framed as part of a divine plan, individuals may experience guilt, shame, or profound demoralisation, believing they have failed spiritually or morally. Trauma psychology and research on religious coping confirm the damaging emotional effects of such interpretations. Similarly, the claim that people should never fear evil or danger contradicts the basic reality of human biology. Fear is a necessary survival mechanism; suppressing it is neither healthy nor realistic.
Finally, much of the harshness with which people judge “evil” in others arises from projection. Psychology long ago demonstrated that individuals frequently displace their own unwanted traits—including moral shortcomings—onto those around them. When projection, absolutism, and the personalisation of evil combine, moral clarity becomes moral distortion.
Understanding these psychological tendencies is essential. Without recognising how our minds naturally create villains, exaggerate threats, and mask our own flaws, we cannot hope to judge evil—or each other—fairly.