Why Is There Evil in the World?
Evil is not IN the world. People are exercising their free will by performing actions we call “evil” because they harm other people. When all of humankind matures to live with love and compassion, we will find that we called evil disappears.
What Is Evil?
We regard some act or person as evil when that person causes others mental or physical suffering, including murder, mass killing, ethnic cleansing, genocide, enslavement, kidnapping, torture, rape, destroying a person’s spirit, and inducing fear. Volcanoes are not evil. Tigers are not evil. Even viruses and bacteria that kill people are not evil. They all cause suffering, but they have no intent to do harm. Evil is only in what people do to each other.
We regard actions as evil when someone chooses to cause others to suffer. We do not regard as evil a toddler’s destructive act because the child is not making free-will choices as an adult does. Before sentencing in a trial, a judge determines whether the perpetrators are capable of understanding their actions, regardless of the offense, because we assume a person unable to make free-will choices cannot be held accountable for their actions. Such a person’s actions that harm others are not deemed evil. We do not regard as evil the action of causing a car accident that results in injury or death. The accident didn’t result from a free-will choice to cause injury or death.
As a result, the answer to “What is evil?” is that we regard evil as the free-will choice to cause suffering.
What People Regard as Evil Differs Among Cultures
What we regard as evil differs dramatically among ages and cultures. The people and activities we judge as evil depend on the mores of the group we belong to. More than 5,000 brides in India are killed each year because their dowries are judged to be insufficient. The families don’t see the murders as evil. In Nigeria, the Yoruba people once saw as evil the birth of twins because they believed it meant the woman had engaged in sex with two men around the time of conception. The God of the Old Testament ordered 160 killing sprees with around 2.8 million deaths. Satan, on the other hand, was responsible for only 10 deaths.
We do not call the God of the Old Testament evil, but we do call the Satan figure evil. What people regard as evil is very much dependent on their belief systems.
What is Evil? When People Use Free Will to Harm Others, That Is Evil
When people use their free will to perform acts that harm others, we regard the free-will choice as evil if it violates society’s mores. Evil is not built into the fabric of the world. People choose to do evil things. The question is not “Why is there evil in the world?” The question is “Why do people choose to perform actions that harm other people?”
To Eradicate Evil, We Must Change Society
The answer to “Why is there evil in the world” is that evil exists because people feel they are separate from others in ways that result in treating others as undesirable or errant. If we are to eradicate the actions we regard as evil, we must help all people grow to be loving, compassionate, other-centered, sensitive to others, and unwilling to harm others physically or psychologically. For that to happen, the false sense of separation among people must fall away. We are not separate; we are one Mind with each other in Our Universal Intelligence. Only the shell we take on to act in Earth School is separate from other people’s shells. We, the Souls taking on separate bodies, are one Mind. When people come to realize that truth, there will be no more activities or people we would call evil.
[Hillary Mayell, “Thousands of Women Killed for Family ‘Honor,’” National Geographic online, February 12, 2002, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2002/02/thousands-of-women-killed-for-family-honor.
Jill Patterson, “How Evil Is a Socially Constructed Concept: Evil Across Societies,” The Manitoban online, February 9, 2021, http://www.themanitoban.com/2012/10/how-evil-is-a-socially-constructed-concept-evil-across-societies/12309.
