Religion says each person knows:
-they let evil in
- they keep it there
- that some evil is there without exactly being invited
- there is the danger of potential evil
- much evil in them is subconscious
- there is the threat from how deceptive evil is for it can make you think you are doing one well-planned wrong and find out it was like it was up to something worse [Religion blames the human heart and/or demons for this “deception.” It supports our argument that when you identify something as evil you on some level want an evil to be there]
- evil is personalised by us and we fear it like it is as good as some kind of intelligence
- evil will always be bigger than stronger than them and they lie to themselves that they can keep it out by good intentions - logic and experience refute that! Their good intention is not that special!
One thing these all lead to, is people being prone because they are bad - to see bad in others. They want to see the bad in them for it is scary if you think the evil is in you only.
If evil is a lack or a good that is in the wrong place and time it is going to be able to hide its true face. It can look like mere dishonesty and be actually worse, malign. You help it with its cosmetic. Perhaps you only want the old lady's money because you want her deprived of it and not because you want it for the finer things. It has to wear a mask to protect itself.
The mist evil hides in seeps into religion. Let us look at one worrying religious ideology, Christianity.
Christianity tends to avoid being too clear about evil and offers "examples" such as adultery, euthanasia and abortion.
Now the Church says that such acts are not just grave evils but intrinsic ones. Meaning?
An intrinsic evil is something that you must never do. It is not necessarily that important. An example is if you break the command of the Bible not to tell white lies ever.
A crime such as murdering a baby for fun is both intrinsically evil and gravely evil.
That theorising is useless in the real world. You can invest the white lie with a radical hatred of God. You can do it to say, "F--k you and I wish you would just die if you could." So it might look slight but hide a very serious ill-will. And if God is really in control of life and death he could be saving the baby in a way you cannot see so even if it is an attempt at a grave evil it might not be.
Why people want religion to regulate people's behaviour is odd for all they will get is a morality that is too much about intentions, intentions that will probably never be detected.
We are talking elective abortion. Christians say that aborting a healthy baby at 12 weeks is as wrong as aborting a healthy one a couple of week prior to the birth. But they say a person still has an excuse for failing to see that the early abortion is as bad as the later one. They hold that only a deeply corrupt conscience would agree with late-term abortion. This in fact makes no sense. It shows they are waffling and like pro-choice people do not really think early abortion is murder.
The following argument is rife. "When we sin against God we aim for good results. We assume before we rebel what good we expect from it." One example is that if a woman feels she should murder her newborn, it is not about seeing killing as good but about thinking of the freedom she will have with the child gone. Perhaps the planet is better off without the child’s carbon print. In this scheme, she virtually thinks that she is doing the child a needed but unpleasant favour too. She does not see herself as good enough to be her or his mother. Perhaps the pregnancy will bring her harm. She thinks of all this to resist her feeling that she should not kill.
Is the teaching saying she actually means well? Or if not then as good as?
Whatever. In either case distinguishing between good and bad intentions is arbitrary at worst and not very useful at best. Even if it is not arbitrary it is a waste of time. Are those who frown on abortion going to sort of reward her for at least she had noble intentions? If they say they are non-judgmental that means they praise her good intentions while they say they do not ignore the evil she has done. They claim it is like constructive criticism. They know fine well that going down that road is merely admitting they don't really care about the unborn babies. If we only look at the good side of what a person does, they will do bad freely and without fear.
One more thing. Is the teaching that she knows she is evil and plotting evil and needs a distraction to carry it out?
She may think on some level that her taking responsibility for the child by ending its life to spare it something is good. She thinks the evil is less horrible, a lot less. So the punishment or disapproval if any that awaits will need to be milder too. Her next crime will be committed a lot more easily. She has become a person who is good at lying to herself to the degree where she can kill her baby. So it will be a near-miracle if she does not do something else as bad.
Shockingly this is saying that she knows it is evil but has to distract herself from that and look at the benefits to have the abortion.
It is hard to see how you can call her action that bad if all she is doing is looking away.
Also, we all have distractions and we all lose focus. So why say she looked away on purpose? Surely non-judgemental persons would say that abortion is wrong but anybody having one or providing one is simply misguided? That would be effectively saying nobody involved in abortion should be suspected of evil. Maybe they just care about the harm done by the “sin” not the “sin” itself?
It is hard to see how a Devil or an evil force or whatever could be satisfied with her when she has to use a gimmick to do harm.
If God exists then he sees the whole picture. No matter what we look at we never see it all. He alone is the expert on what an evil is doing and on what exactly it is.
The prayer, “May God forgive you”, is probably one of the most popular prayers in the world. Jesus puts it this way, “Forgive us – you and me – our sins”. He stuck it in the Lord’s Prayer. Think of how flippant it is. It would be different if you could see the evil as God sees it. But you see an approximation of it not it. You see something in a mist. Flippant forgiveness is just a way of condoning evil while denying you do so. It is a way of failing to care enough. Oppose Christianity for teaching that you can slaughter all the babies in the world cruelly and that a sorry fixes your salvation and now you are for Paradise forever. Real forgiving is and needs a prolonged process. The person would need centuries. The person would need to have a sufficient idea of the suffering caused to each INDIVIDUAL child and work through that.
We conclude that religion uses words like evil, immorality and sin, and there is no coherence there. It is all smoke and mirrors. Assuming evil is possible at all, to see evil is to be evil. Religion offers superficial and cheap divine mercy to the "wicked". It is an insult to the victims.