Word: evilness
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...fighting insurgents in the Iraqi village of Qubah [April 9] appeared to be a routine report on the war - that is, until I saw the pictures of soldiers writing identifying numbers on an Iraqi woman's hand and an Iraqi man's neck. Those pictures not only symbolized an evil from times past but also underscored the direction this war has taken since the day when an Iraqi finger dipped in ink symbolized freedom. David Habecker, ESTES PARK, COLORADO...
Good is a concept that is at the same time is breathlessly simple and infinitely complex. Despite being a word that every toddler knows, we still have so many questions about good. Is good absolute? Can an evil action be good under certain circumstances? Can good exist without evil? Are different actions good for different people? What about the greater good? If we are to be good to our neighbors, who are our neighbors? The complexities pile on until good is no longer a four-letter word—it’s a treatise...
Perhaps the tragedy of mankind isn’t our wars, genocides, carpet-bombings, and shooting rampages, but our incapacity to understand evil without replicating it. Despite the efforts of millions of souls, no evil is ever the last evil. We forget too quickly and the temptation grows in our minds again to remember the taste of that forbidden fruit...
...Evil, at its worst, is ineffable. In the weeks and months to come, yesterday’s cold-blooded shooting rampage at Virginia Tech will be analyzed ad nauseam by every credentialed authority from every conceivable angle. A procession of talking heads will use this tragedy as a heuristic springboard for their pet theories about videogames, adolescent disaffection, race, gun-control, mental illness, religious faith, the endemic violence of the American psyche, you name...
...these logistical questions will never satisfy our insatiable desire to know why. Why would someone do something so terrible? Like Shakespeare’s Iago, the literary embodiment of evil, the Virginia Tech murderer has frustrated our demand for a motive by taking his own life: “Demand me nothing; what you know, you know; from this time forth I will never speak a word.” What we know from yesterday’s massacre is nothing, except the brute, inscrutable fact that evil exists in the world...