See God        (face to face)

     There are many things which threaten, prey upon, and plague humanity, but none of them are evil. There are always choices available which would have tragic consequences, but that doesn’t make them evil. The idea of evil is drawn from what we fear and reject. It is the belief that there is an insidious force that acts in direct opposition to goodness. However, goodness is a quality of being, not a force that produces desirable outcomes. Neither God nor goodness have an opposite. The fact that people act out of fear or desire, and that they can choose to damage or destroy, simply reflects how we are wired and how we can be mistaken or malformed.

     It is not as a result of evil influence that we both imagine and practice reproductive activities with high frequency and in violation of promises and mores. It is not an evil force that leads reasonable people to behave violently. In fact, every violation of the ten commandments, all seven of the deadly sins, and every other transgression we seem to commit are rooted in both our nature as an organism, and our use of identities in our thought process. Our creation of civilization and its many templates for behavior and conduct are a sensible effort to focus our natural and aberrant impetuses. The fact that we often fail to override our own nature or misdirected will, does not mean that evil is afoot. It means we are organisms attempting to use immature intellects to control our ancient physiology. When we identify, we simultaneously select a range of choices for our subsequent behavior. Once we make an identification, it is the intensity of the resulting fear or desire that determines how inappropriate our behavior might be, not the presence of evil. Every “evil” act in the history of humanity began as an identification in a mind that could neither see truth, nor surrender to the heart.

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