What, if anything, do you consider----evil?--Al

-- Al Schroeder (al.schroeder@nashville.com), January 08, 2001

Answers

The usual: racism, murder, any harmful intent torwards children. I know people who come from horrible backgrounds who would never hurt a soul. I believe in some Skinner therios and genetics, but those things don't take away our free will.

-- AJ (joijoijoi@hotmail.com), January 09, 2001.

I think evil includes small lapses. I think it makes us more comfortable to imagine that evil is something you can only do on purpose -- shoving people into a gas chamber, stealing from widows and orphans. But I think most of us do evil things, often just because we don't care enough to take notice of the effects of our actions.

In my workplace there are several employees who are not well-regarded by management, and it's easy for me and my co-workers to blame every failure and missed deadline on them. Management doesn't doubt the blame cast on the scapegoats, the scapegoats time here is limited by management's already existing dislike of them, and we pile on them when we need to. Voila, evil.

I read King Leopold's War, a history of the slaughter of the local people in the Belgian Congo during the rubber boom of the early decades of the 20th century. The colonial overseers killed about 20 million people in 30 years, and hacked off perhaps as many hands (it was the Belgian overlords who taught African rebels the trick of human mutilation, much like the English brought scalping to the New World). But each colonial overseers saw himself as a pawn in a huge game, as having to be harsh with his local charges so that they would meet the rubber quotas. The overseers usually protested that they had not killed or beaten or mutilated anyone -- even if they stood a few feet away from the local drafted militia and ordered them to commit the atrocities -- because each wanted to believe he was a decent man. Many of these folks had nice little families and nice little houses in Belgium with picket fences.

Each of us feels like a pawn, and the evil we do is nearly always small in comparison with someone else's -- there are only a few Stalins and Hitlers. But I think evil starts closer to the ground than slaughtering a town.

-- Tom Dean (tsd@ogk.com), January 09, 2001.

songs from boy bands/celine dion/britney spears and the likes.

-- sonicsundae (sonicsundae@yahoo.com), January 11, 2001.

To me evil and amoral seem to be synonyms, yet to harm anyone or cause them mental pain intentionally is evil. Wanton neglect of those who are helpless, whether by disability or babyhood, I think are also evil.

-- Denver doug (ionoi@webtv.net), January 12, 2001.

The fact that someone in GM authorized Pontiac to put the Aztek into production.

-- Tricia Bassett (tmb1022@juno.com), April 29, 2001.

I believe man is evil. Nothing in the world was made evil. but because of the way mankind is, we have created all the evil that will ever exist.

-- Joselyn Mormile (Blossombabe823@aol.com), December 22, 2001.

the terrorist acts of Sept. 11 (natch.) But especially the eyes of Mohammed Atta. I've never seen such a void in all my life. How can the parents NOT be blamed for raising a monster such as this?

-- anderwillow (anderwillow@aol.com), May 04, 2002.

WHAT IS EVIL?

Man is the design of evil, we have the able to walk among people and yet we abhorrence them, we smile we laugh and we can very much do it? Is it genes you could say that, is it family? It is nature way? We don’t have the answer however looking at man you can say, we make things happen for the way we feel, do with as man and woman feel threaten subconsciously by the different elements different focus around us, from the day we started evaluating the change in other diet “preasoric man” we started to think, the first action we showed towards other man kind was the fighting off any other species. We believe evil is not us, however if it came to it man would kill for we all have it in us, it’s just like the manuals we consider them basic, however they can smell and hear things that we can’t ‘man that is’, they smell hate, fare etc. Evil is all forms. You can look and say, we live amongst other species and diversity of people yet we are so apart, we kill million of species a year and other own people. We train boys and girls how to think self and above all how to kill. Man is evil, for if I can’t feel it think it I can do it. It’s the silence law of man.

-- PREE (HB210870@NTU.AC.UK), January 22, 2003.