by Ellend Heath

Created on: October 01, 2007

There has been a long running debate on the origin of evil in this world. Why on earth does good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people? Where does this injustice come from? Many people have proscribed that things happen due to "bad luck," bad timing, and some Divine punishment. These things are not true, and I will outline below.

Manichism is a pre-Christian belief that would spill over into Christian thought. In its summation we could state there is an eternal battle between good and evil. These two sides (which is remarkably similar to the concept of the Force on Star Wars) battle it out, with the battleground being the planet Earth. The Ancient Theologian St. Augustine came up with the realization that evil ultimately comes from God. Punishments are just a way of turning people back to God- there is a Divine reason for everything. In modern times, people blame everything under the sun for evil acts, the White House caused Katrina, poverty bred terrorism and rich nations cultivate crop failures for economic reasons. We blame every evil on everything except one simple thing- freewill.

Within the Christian framework, God is not the author of evil. He gave people the choice to love or reject him, because within a loving relationship there must be a choice to reject the initiator. That being said, there must be a fundamental understanding that God does not make things happen to provoke people into His sphere of influence. Bad things occur because the world is not as it should be. A loving Divine Being would not allow tsunamis to hit in order to make people love Him. Conversely, like a phoenix rising from the ash heap, good can arise out of ill intentions. There needs to be a powerful force that causes things to go awry that is in utter rebellion against a Good Being. This force is commonly referred to as 'sin' and is personified in the being known as Lucifer. I would suggest that evil comes about through a rebellion and that Lucifer so desperately wants to destroy humans, while God wants to save them. A cataclysmic battle has been waged for a long-time and freewill gives the opportunity for evil to enter. There must always be an option for rejection, in order for there to be true love. Thus out of love, not Divine purpose, there remains the option for intense evil.

As NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman would say, the world is flat. The flatness of the world and the interconnectivity of the globe amplifies the fact that there are so many issues within the broader world. People in Europe would know very little about the famines throughout the developing world, because of the lack of communications. However, in this digital era, there are an array of avenues that allow an individual to witness the famine, wars and evil within the world. Perhaps there has been a great deal of evil in the world, but the mass media amplifies the situation and reveal a lot of the tragedies that occur in real-time.

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