Remdies for Evil

Can we eliminate evil? No, because there are too many sources for it. However, there are things that we can do about evil. Evil is to some degree subject to interpretation. Before you decide that something is evil, it might help to examine that so-called evil first. Politics is a good example of this. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President, one half of the country used this fact to leave the Union. To the South, Lincoln was a "Black Republican." Today, the South is virtually all Republican. Go figure! When you find the subject of evil being discussed there is a good chance that somebody's death is involved. Around the United States men who favor sex with children are being ousted from neighborhoods due to the large number of children who are kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Not all of them are killers, but enough of them are to make it tough on the remainder. This is not helped by the fact that the killers are people who appear to be ordinary and trustworthy so long as you do not know their sexual proclivities. In short, people who blend into society and seem, on the surface, to be harmless. The problem with choosing a group for exile from society is well known. It is a short step to exile people for religious, political, and societal reasons. The more short steps that we take, the more likely we are to fire up the instruments of death for entire groups. We overlook sometimes that in addition to the Jews, the Nazi's also attempted to eliminate the mentally disabled, the gypsies, and the liberal Christians. While they were doing this, Stalin was wiping out millions of Russians who were of German extraction. Lest we pat ourselves on the back, we were putting thousands of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps at the same time. Does all of this mean that I favor allowing sex offenders to wander around our neighborhoods? Some form of monitoring is called for, but is making them camp out in the woods, as they do in Georgia, an answer? We need to think through what we do and make our actions as reasonable as we can. Evil is a problem to be sure, but it is not the end problem of the world. Nothing does more harm to society than our unwillingness to adopt the Golden Rule in a manner to make it effective. I have written previously about the children who die needlessly because society has not figured out how to take care of them. Many more of our children die this way than are killed by sex offenders. So what should we do about evil? The Gnostic believes that the ultimate end of evil is our union with God. Once we have attained a full partnership with God, we will have a far more mature and well developed response to all of the evils of society, not just some of them. Once we have all attained the ability to truly love God, we will also attain the ability to love one another fully. How much evil will simply dissipate when that day arrives? Let us pray for that day to come, and let us work to achieve it in ourselves. That is the Gnostic Way.