Article March 19, 1990 Issue

Why it is natural to resist evil

Evil has no legitimacy. So we don't need to accept or to put up with it. God gives us only good.

Marlene Chatterton

Recently I heard an acquaintance say that if it weren't for the bad things in life, we wouldn't know how to appreciate the good. While such a statement may stem from trying to make the best of a bad situation, it rather implies that evil has some terrible necessity in daily life.

It is often true that after an ugly experience has ended, relief is so powerful that we are uncommonly grateful; but to decide from this that evil is essential leads to the unacceptable conclusion that it has some intrinsic goodness.

In the Biblical allegory of the garden of Eden, the argument that evil is good was used by the serpent to fool Eve. When Eve repeated the serpent's argument to Adam, she was the unknowing dupe of so-called original evil. So are we when we make excuses for evil occurrences. We need to ask who is doing the talking when we, like Eve, accept and repeat arguments put forward by the serpent. After all, if we truly believed in the necessity of evil, we would not be so eager to resist it or to do all that we can to realize our highest sense of good for ourselves and for society.

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