Word: evil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...conversation does lock onto a subject, there can be fireworks. In the series' best segment, "Apocalypse," about the Flood, British author (and former nun) Karen Armstrong conducts a blistering twin attack. God, she maintains, is "not some nice, cozy daddy in the sky." He is "behaving in an evil way," effectively introducing mankind to the idea of justifiable genocide. Noah, meanwhile, is a "damaged survivor" who says no word about those drowning around him, much less tries to help them. Drinking his troubles away after reaching shore, he is enraged at being seen naked by his son Ham and invokes...
...story of creation, the Book of Genesis long, long ago crumbled under the weight of science, notably Darwin's theory of natural selection. But Genesis isn't just about the beginning of the human race. It is also about the beginning of evil--about how and why sin and suffering entered human experience and stayed there. And here the verdict of science is more ambiguous. In some ways, the Bible's account of evil actually draws strength from the very Darwinism that undermined its account of history...
...amid the material abundance that came with agriculture and grew thereafter could self-indulgence regularly reach grotesque levels. (Sodom and Gomorrah lay in the fertile plains. Their residents sinned amid plenty while Abraham herded his flock in rustic innocence on dryer terrain.) Similarly, anger acquired a new layer of evil with the invention of knives and spears, to say nothing of guns...
Which brings us back to Eden. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge because they have pretensions of divinity. "Your eyes will be opened," the serpent promises, "and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Thus the original sin is often described as a kind of hubris--"the pride which sprang from [our] likeness to God," as one scholar put it. By the lights of evolutionary psychology, an essential human weakness is indeed a tendency to be seduced by our seemingly godlike rationality into thinking we can readily know good and evil; our downfall...
...musical Rent, the same cast of dog-eared guys and Avenue B girls are everywhere. And drag? Never heard of it. Only kidding. RuPaul. Wong Foo. Switch on Good Morning America and there's Lady Chablis, the transvestite from John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. In a cooking segment, no less...