Evil

2 Pages 428 Words

Evil: Kinds of evil in our lives


Step outside. Now look around you. Do you see or hear anything evil out there today? I did this, and I didn’t find anything that I would consider evil. Then, I sat down on my porch while my dad went out to start his truck. After a bit, gasoline consumed the area around me. The smell of gasoline has now occupied my porch and moving about the atmosphere. I realized that pollution is evil.
Evil is everywhere around us. Pollution is just one example. There are more examples like pollution that most people don’t think of as evil, such as smoking. Evil is a messy project, defying simplistic solutions, or so we think. There is no single, universally satisfying answer to this dark reality.
Often the only evil we observe is the result of sinful choices. But we have to remember that some evil we cannot observe. Pollution is an evil that burns holes in the ozone layer. We know there is a hole in the atmosphere but we do not observe pollution as being evil, we observe it as a fact of life. Along with pollution comes smoking. Smoking is definitely an evil, a very bad evil that effects us greatly, and it pollutes the air. Smoking is the number one women’s cancer killer. The evil in smoking is killing you, and it also kills the nonsmokers around you.
Often when tragedy strikes, when evil rears its ugly head, people are found complaining. To complain is to express frustration, to acknowledge ignorance, to announce hurt. Some of the question that arises are, “Why would God allow such and such to happen? How can this be fair?” Nobody has the right answers to these questions. Maybe God wanted to put obstacles in our lives, maybe he wanted to test us to see what our strengths and weaknesses were. Well, obviously, many Americans have failed the smoking test. But are these complaints wrong? It depends on the attitude of the person who makes them. In one sense, yes. If the person ma...