Oklahoma Wesleyan University

Undergraduate

I want to ask you a question. Do you believe evil exists?

These past few days as you have watched the endless reporting on CNN, MSNBC, or FOX News about the rampage of Cho Seung Hui at Virginia Tech did you feel as if you were a spectator to something terribly wrong? As you read the countless news articles about this week’s massacre did you conclude that you were witnessing something blatantly and unequivocally immoral? Did you know in your heart that you were watching and reading about something explicitly and absolutely beyond the pale, something that was just bad, something that was evil?

Let me dig a bit deeper.

When you looked into the eyes of Cho as he leveled his 9 millimeter Glock point blank in your direction (thus, giving you the exact view of the last thing 32 of his victims likely saw as they faced their own death) did you see anything objectively bad? When you listened to this young man’s rant as he read his disjointed and venomous last words and testament what did you think? When he exonerated himself of any responsibility and, thus, blamed those whom he was about to kill by saying “the decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off” what did your conscience tell you?

Did you find your own blood running cold and were you nearly speechless as was one Virginia Tech junior who, after viewing Cho’s video, said “I saw his picture on TV and when I did I just got chills . . . There are really no words”?

Did something well up inside you and did that “still small voice within” join in the chorus of our culture and scream “What is wrong with us? What is this world coming to? Somebody do something! After Columbine, after Paducah, after Nickel Mines, after Oklahoma City, after 9/11, after endless terrorist bombings and Islamic celebratory beheadings, please do something! Moral neutrality be damned . This just has to stop!”

After this week’s news do you really believe that there is no such thing as right or wrong, good or bad? Do you really buy the politician’s claim that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as it works for you? Do you seriously accept the academic arguments of our day that pedantically preach objective truths actually don’t exist and any position on values, virtues, morality, good and evil, is, after all, simply a personal construct relative to the individual or to the culture who claims it?

Do you believe this stuff or do you see in the face of Cho the consequences of post-modernity’s love affair with self and our consequent infatuation with making the rules up as we go, with constructing truths rather than obeying them, with killing the prospect and promises of God rather than honoring his hope and precepts?

After this week, what do you think? As you look deep into the eyes of Cho what does your heart tell you? Do you think we have it right? Do you think man can achieve utopia on his own – that we have the goodness within ourselves to develop our own systems of morality – that we don’t need the boundaries or restrictions of any absolute standards – that liberty can be real without the limits of law and that license can be granted without the selflessness of servitude?

Do you believe that all is well in the world and that the progress of humankind marches boldly in a positive direction? Or in the shadow of April 16 do you see something that your instincts have told you was there all along: that the difference between good and bad is real, that right and wrong exists, that justice and injustice, life and death, morality and immorality, vice and virtue have objective definitions beyond matters of personal opinion, that the human heart has the propensity to choose poorly and to do bad things, that the most empirically proven fact in history is the very existence of sin.

Do you believe in evil?

Now ironically I think if your answer is yes that you actually have more hope than those who say no. For, if you admit that an absolute wrong is in fact real don’t you at the same time have to agree that there must be an absolute right? If objective badness exists doesn’t there also have to be objective goodness? Isn’t the only measuring rod of “evil” the reality of an unchanging and immutable standard of “good”? Without a Logos, a Tao, a Word and a Way beyond you and me and bigger than your wants, desires and opinions or mine how would we know or recognize those things we call wrong, unfair, bad, or evil? Wouldn’t the very discussion be meaningless? The scale must be something beyond that which is being weighed. The image of Lady Justice tells us that judgment must presuppose objectivity.

Think about it. If you and I are the final measure of our own morality then when it all comes down to it, we cannot evaluate the moral rightness of any action at any time for any reason. The logical end of such narcissism has to be a futile nihilism that looks back into the eyes of Cho Seung Hui and says “Who am I to judge?”

Do you believe in Evil? Have you been watching absolute Bad raise its ugly head in unrestrained celebration in recent days and have you said to yourself, “Shooting kids in schools is wrong, flying planes into buildings is appalling, bombing open air markets is unjustified, and celebrating the beheading of your adversaries is not a personal moral construct. These are atrocities and they have to stop!”

If this is your heart’s cry then take courage and confidence in the absolute Good that you have just implicitly embraced. Surely it is only in this Goodness that we find any objective basis for civilization, for sanity and for our salvation.