The Origins and Authors of Evil

Sounding of the Bell

(Please remain silent until the tone of the bell can no longer be heard.)

Call to Worship: Barbara Wells

O Spinner, Weaver of our lives, your loom is love. May we who are gathered here be empowered by that love to weave new patterns of truth and justice into a web of life that is strong, beautiful and everlasting.

Chalice Lighting and Response

by Edward Everett Hale

One: I am only one,
All: but still I am one.
One: I cannot do everything,
All: but still I can do something.
One: And because I cannot do everything
All: I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

Reading

from the Book of Genesis

Bible, Old Testament, Standard Revised Version

Genesis, Chapter 2 (7-9; 15-17):

7: then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

8: And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

9: And out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

15: The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

16: And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;

17: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."

Reading

from The Divinity School Address by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838

“…The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie,—for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance,—will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.”

Reading

from Man’s Search for Meaning Victor Frankl

Man’s Search For Meaning (1946, 1959 (trans.)):

“…(T)here is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s ‘nothing butness,’ the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is a pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free.

To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward conditions. As I once put it: ‘As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition…I am a survivor of four …concentration camps…and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.’”

Sermon

The Origins and Authors of Evil

by Jonathan Black

“And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.” Gen1:31

Thus ends the first Judeo-Christian account of the Creation, in the book of Genesis. All that the Creator had made in six days, He saw was good.

So we have to ask ourselves:
How then did evil come into the world, into our lives?

Whether one believes in a divinity or not, the Old and New Testaments, as the Koran and other spiritual testaments, are the repositories of the myths, beliefs, values and history of our world culture. We look to these texts to trace the origins of our ideas and our outlook, of our visions and our values.

On Nov. 22, 1963, I was standing in a small television repair store just north of Journal Square in Jersey City, NJ when I heard over the radio that President Kennedy had been shot. And I knew to a certainty at that moment that he would die, as I think most people did. I also knew that we had passed some kind of milestone or marker: that all of us would remember where we were at the moment we heard the news, and that in the future to come the world would be divided between those who remembered and those who did not.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the day we have come to call 9/11, I had just walked into the business center of the Hilton Hotel in Manchester Airport in England when I saw the South Tower come down. I could not believe my eyes; I just could not believe it!

And at that moment and in those that followed, I had two thoughts: the first, an immediate one, was that this was another milestone, like Kennedy’s assassination, and we would remember exactly what we were doing at the time it happened. That memory would divide us, also, between those who remembered and those who did not.
The second thought was slower in coming. In the following days, I began to think about the nature of evil and realized that the events of 9/11 would call us all to reflect thus.

I was trapped there in Manchester because North American airspace was closed. In the five days before I could return to my family, I filled the time walking up and down the fields and byways around the airport and reflecting, asking, “Why is there evil?”

Why, in Rabbi Kushner’s well-known phrase, do bad things happen to good people? What are the origins of evil and who are its authors?

In 2002, I marked the first anniversary of 9/11 by leading a series of discussions at the Thomas Paine fellowship on the nature of evil; that summer I organized and led a workshop on the topic at UUMAC. Since then I have had many discussions and also opportunities to preach about the nature of evil, as I do here today—as we approach the 3rd anniversary of that day that changed us and our world.

Today, I’d like to relate some of the ideas that have coalesced through these experiences and my reflection upon them.

Our frst reading today marks the place, Genesis verse 2, line 9, where the word “evil” first appears in the Bible.

“And out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

Listen to the text carefully: It’s not the tree of good and evil; it’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Later in Genesis, the recorder recounts the concern that, if a man or a woman were to eat from the tree, he or she would become like God—knowing the difference between good and evil.

The story Genesis is a story of mankind’s fall, an attempt to explain why we are as imperfect as we are.

But it makes no sense unless we accept that,

• Evil exists, other than as an illusion,
• We humans have free will,
  and
• We mere mortals do know the difference between good and evil.

There is an apparent paradox in this Biblical story and in others of good and evil, such as the Book of Job and the account of Abraham and Isaac.

This paradox is summarized in what is called the Theodicy Problem or the Problem of the Justice of God.
It can be stated easily in the form of three axioms, all of which cannot be equally true:

• God is Omnipotent
• God is Good
• Evil Exists

I have to turn aside here from my main discourse for a moment because I know that many of you are made uncomfortable by the “G” word. So I will give you a summer homework assignment. We can restate the theodicy problem without using the “G” word, using good Unitarian Universalist principles, but it presents exactly the same, as yet unresolved, paradox. I know that this can be done, since some of my students have achieved it. So, this is your summer reflection assignment!

Theologians from Arias to Augustine through Aquinas to our contemporaries, the religious and the humanists alike, have struggled with this paradox, without apparent resolution. Each proffered “solution” involves the need to modify, to provide, as it were, footnotes to at least one of these axiomatic statements:

Thus
God is Omnipotent (but there are just some things She won’t allow herself to do!)

or
God is Good (but He is forgetful or careless)

or
Evil Exists (but perhaps it’s only an illusion!)

We as, UUs, come from a heritage that has tended to avoid any direct assault on this apparent problem: As Unitarians we tend to say, as my mother did, “We have to take the bad with the good.” We accept that they are both part of the great web of existence. As Universalists we tend to say that even the worst of us will, in the end, be saved, be redeemed, for no one is inherently evil; as the Sermon on the Mount teaches, a good tree cannot bear bad fruit and we are the fruit of a good tree.

One thing that we do seem to agree upon, judging by the remarks of my students and friends, is that evil is associated with human intentions and actions; that it requires human agency. Most UUs tend to regard the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (fire, flood, famine and pestilence) not as evil or as divine retribution for evil acts, but simply as ill fortune, to use Emerson’s term, events even to a degree avoidable; just a part of the natural world.

Let me now turn to the second reading. In this magnificent message, Ralph Waldo Emerson, as Conrad Wright terms him, one of our Prophets, makes three very strong claims:

• That we humans do have an innate sense of the difference between good and evil acts;
• That we, also instinctually, seek to do good, since good acts carry their own reward and bad ones, their own punishment;
  and,
• There is an association between Good and Truth on one hand and, on the other hand, between Evil and Dishonesty.

Further, Emerson, as also did Barbara Wells in our opening words, closely links Truth, as a good, with Justice, another good: Justice that we all thirst for, both for ourselves and for the larger human, now global, society.

So, in the modern era, post 9/11, what are we, as UUs, to make of all of this? How can we deal with questions of good and evil, how can we live good enough lives?

I have always thought that my role as teacher and preacher is not to provide answers but to make sure there are enough good questions to go around. The best way, in my view, of asking questions, perhaps due to my training and life experience as a scientist, is to propose possible answers, hypotheses, and then test them for their truthfulness.

Before proposing such hypotheses for your consideration, let me touch briefly on a related issue: Can knowledge, especially of the material world, which we term science, be evil, in and of itself?

Let me suggest that, since knowledge is only useful when it is true and science is concerned with knowing the truth about existence, about the interdependent web, it cannot be evil, unless one considers the physical creation to be, at its heart, also evil. I think that to brand any science as evil is to make as big a mistake as the Nazi and Stalinist regimes did in calling some science “Jewish science.” Science, if it is well and truthfully done, leads to universal truth, a good, and also to justice, another good. Thus we have learned that we come from the stars and are one human race, with a single common ancestor; that pain can be treated; that diseases can be cured.

The truths of science are not the inventions of scientists but their discoveries. Truths have a life of their own: as Emerson puts it, “Murder will speak out of stone walls.” If facts are really true, then they were true yesterday, are true today and will be true tomorrow. This is the case, and continues to be the case, even for facts as yet undiscovered, since our unawareness of their existence does not render them untrue.

Our suspicions about science, and its handmaiden technology, come not from any intrinsic character of these arts but from how we humans use the knowledge, the truths gained.

Thus, my first hypothesis:

Evil depends upon human agency.

A rabid dog that roams the neighborhood, threatening and frightening us, is not evil, but its owner, who deliberately set him upon us, committed an evil act. Emerson was right: intact, morally complete human beings do know the difference between right and wrong and prefer good to evil acts.

But, just a minute, you might say, How can we tell?, Aren’t there cultural differences?, Doesn’t context matter?

Of course, you would be right, but there are simple guides. Unless we are sociopaths, and thus, morally incomplete, we have no difficulty in discerning the extremes of good and evil, and as for the gray middle, we could do worse than practice what Leon Kass calls the “wisdom of repugnance.” In the ‘60s, the kids—and some of us were kids then!—said “If it feels good, just do it!” Cass, a well-regarded contemporary ethicist, chair of the Presinte’s Committee on Bioethics, teaches, “If it seems repugnant, don’t do it!” I think that that covers the gray middle very well! In his suggestion, Kass echoes the powerful message of Rabbi Hillel, who nearly two millennia ago taught, as the essence of Torah, “That which is hateful to you, do not do onto others.”

A second hypothesis:

Evil exists; it is not a deniable illusion.

The English Book of Common Prayer teaches:

“We have done things we should not have done; we have left undone things we should have done; there is no health in us.”

Even in the very best of situations, even in the most just society, with the most thoughtful, moral, introspective citizens, even in such a Utopia, evil would exist, if only because of the law of unintended consequences. And the real world we live in comes nowhere close to this ideal. As I speak, war rages or smolders in more than thirty places across the world, although none of us would want war waged on us personally. Today, this very day, in the US and elsewhere, even close to us here, children are suffering and dying because grownups, who should know better, are behaving badly; many without giving thought to possible consequences of their conduct.

How can we cope with such a grim reality, other than by falling into depression and despair?

A clue to a way forward, is offered by Victor Frankl, in our third reading. Frankl grew up in the rich and sophisticated culture of early 20th cen. Vienna, gained an education in psychology and founded a loving family, only to be thrust into the inferno of the holocaust, through which he, almost alone amongst his many relations and friends, passed safely. He survived to promote the so-called third school of psychotherapy, the optimistic logotherapeutic approach, which eschews the pessimistic retrospective views of Freud, Jung and Adler, instead looking ahead, and asking, given what we are and where we find ourselves, what can we do?

Frankl taught that we all, as humans, live with a “tragic triad”: pain, guilt and the certain knowledge of our death. And he observed, from his experiences in the concentration camps, that our lives are contingent, dependent in their important features on the acts of others and on the working of the physical creation, in ways we are powerless to predict or avoid. From this he drew a profound insight: no matter how dire our circumstances, how evil our individual situation, we can still choose. And the ultimate choice we can make is to, in his words, “take a stand toward conditions.” That is, we cannot control what happens to us but we can control how we, as moral free agents, respond. Frankl observed, as Emerson earlier asserted, that the laws of nature are self acting: he noted that those who continued to choose, to take a stand toward conditions, to behave as morally as humanly possible, were more likely to survive the camps than those who gave up all hope and surrendered their freedom of will.

How should we as UUs “take a stand toward conditions”? We have two guides:

First, we have our seven covenantal principles, those things which most of us agree on most of the time. While these are neither a creedal statement nor a dogmatic guide to life, they, together, are principles worth promoting and affirming, no matter how dire our condition.

Second, it is possible to make our lives ones of evangelism and prophesy: This is not the duty of priests or ministers but of all believers, or as we would say, of all searchers—for revelation, the path to knowledge of the unknown and belief in the unknowable, is open to all and we can evangelize by the simple but incredibly difficult practice of living our beliefs in the everyday world. Wherever and whenever we are involved in simple acts of kindness or charity or the grander work of political and social witness and action, we all stand as shining examples of the power of the search, of the ability of a continuing free and responsible search for truth and meaning to effect transformation, both in individuals and communities.

A third hypothesis:

Acts are evil but people are not.

In defense of this hypothesis, I need do no more than cite our first UU covenantal principle:

“We …affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

All we ask, to be able to judge acts but not people, is that the doers be complete as moral individuals. As for the incomplete: we do not judge them or their acts. Thus, we isolate sociopaths from society; we do not punish the acts of the morally defective, those who cannot distinguish between right and wrong; and we lovingly guide children as their “intuition of moral sentiment” emerges and matures.

This in turn suggests a further hypothesis:

The ultimate evil act is the failure to honor individuality.

It seems to be no simple coincidence that many of the great evils of the 20th century had their roots in collectivist regimes, whether of the right or of the left. Hannah Arendt, in her monumental study of totalitarianism, noted three common steps in the creation (and eventual destruction) of enemies of the State:

First, the civil individual is destroyed by subsuming people into groups;

Then, the juridical individual is destroyed by removing the rights of the group;

Finally, the moral individual is destroyed by imposing impossible moral choices, choices all of whose outcomes are repugnant.

All totalitarian, collectivist states eventually fail because of the moral resiliency of individuals and of the human race. The Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulags failed to render people such as Frankl amoral. Our UU societal concern for diversity, natural rights and fair treatment of minorities, makes us, each and all, everyday campaigners for freedom and civil liberties.

However, it is in the first step that our peril lays. Many of us, even in a congregation of the liberally religious, such as this, find it all too easy to group people by a supposed common feature and then to attribute to the group a pejorative but unprovable quality. Thus, while we reflexively reject anti-gay or anti-Semitic slogans, some of us feel no discomfort in saying “Republicans favor tax cuts for the rich” and “Democrats are weak on national defense,” conveniently overlooking our inability to define clearly ‘republican,’ ‘democrat,’ ‘favor,’ ‘weak,’ ‘tax cut,’ ‘rich’ or ‘national defense.’ Such statements make about as much sense as, and are as pejorative or, one might even say, as hateful, as saying “Purple people pollute.” Just think about that!
Labeling, and the acceptance of labeling; the use of a single characteristic to define a group of people and, thus, by inference, to promote it as their most important common characteristic, while neglecting the inherent worth and dignity of each individual, is a small, often unnoticed or unintended, evil act which may mark the top of the proverbial slippery slope. And such labeling often assumes a physical form: tracking in schools, handicapped license plates, yellow stars of David and pink triangles.

Which leads to a last hypothesis:

There are more small moral choices than large ones.

We would like to think that situations requiring moral choice arrive in a big parade, just in front of the brass band. And some of them do, there’s no question! But far more important are the day-to-day, minute-by-minute choices that the contingencies of existence offer us. Water flowing over rock, over the millennia, does not move it but wears it away.

It is sometimes said that ethical behavior is what we do when no one is watching. By this is meant, ethical behavior, making good moral choices, is universal and is driven by our Emersonian moral sentiment and regulated by the natural law that instantly ennobles or contracts us. We, as UUs, are fortunate that our shared values are everyday ones, ones that, if we have internalized them and pay attention to the still, small voice of conscience, we can hew to, to a greater or lesser degree, in every passing moment.

It is easy, however, in the haste and bustle of life, for that small voice to be drowned out; for us to become, even if only for a moment, morally deaf. Then we act, or fail to act, thoughtlessly, perhaps unintentionally, and the result, as Frankl points out, is guilt.

So,
What are the origins of evil?

Our free will, our ability to choose.
For to be free to choose provides the opportunity for making bad choices.

Who are the authors of evil?
We are.

Only we can rewrite the book of history, producing better future editions, by going forward with our own lives, while listening to and heeding our own better natures.

We have none to blame but ourselves if we are less good than we can be and if the world we leave to our children is less just than we wish it to be.

Blessed be.

I need to make a few comments before the closing words. We are living in a time of war. There is both good and bad news about this war. The bad news is that it continues. But his should come as no surprise to us because this is a war that did not start in September three years ago, but started actually in 632 of the present era and has been raging, off and on, now for nearly 1400 years. The good news is that it is drawing to a close. This war, the longest war in human history, will not be over in our time or in the time of our children or perhaps in that of their grandchildren, but it is near its end. All of the characteristics we see today, the rise of fundamentalism, the rise of orthodoxy, on both sides, the use of soft targets, the increase of suicide as a tactic, are all characteristics of the very last stages of human warfare: we have seen this again and again in history. It means that this unhappy chapter, this 1400-year episode, is drawing to a close. The wave of modernism, which brought the Renaissance and the Reformation in Europe, which swept away the dictatorships of South and Central America, is even now lapping on the shores of the Middle East. I will give you just one hopeful example of this: until 1965 it was illegal to give instruction in any subject to a female in Saudi Arabia. In 1965 girls and women there were permitted to go to school for the first time and today the majority of college students in Saudi Arabia are women. And a recent poll revealed that, despite the fact that the women of Saudi Arabia still cannot legally drive automobiles, 1/4 of them now admit to knowing how to do it! So be hopeful!

Thus, I enlist your help: we are powerful as a community and we are going to bring the end of the war closer, by singing, as closing words, #167, Nothing But Peace is Enough:

Benediction

From Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet), adapted:

And one of the elders of the city said, Speak to us of Good and Evil.
And he answered:
Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
You are good when you are one with yourself.
Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.
You are good when you strive to give of yourself.
Yet you are not evil when you seek to gain for yourself.
You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.

Blessed be—depart in peace.