I think, Sam, you have a hard time conceiving of evil. You think perhaps that it doesn't truly exist. I am your exact opposite. I not only believe in evil, I've seen it for myself and I know that humans are capable of great evil just for the sake of it and no other reason.
No, I've seen evil. It's one of the things that leads me to believe there IS a God. Maybe more on that another time..
It's just that, for one, it's not really everywhere. Most people do bad things because they have justified in their mind - that it is ok. They do NOT do it, BECAUSE it is bad. Now a sociopath IS evil, because they lack anything resembling a conscience. A psychopath is evil, but only because they're so delusional, their mind just doesn't act right. They're the exceptions.
Most people if they do truly awful things, it's because they've decided in their mind that it's ok. A hundred, two hundred years ago, people convinced themselves that persons of a different race or ethnicity were NOT really human. I know, I've read some of the material then - people committed horrendous crimes against blacks, Jews, Slavs, gays, Indians (both kinds) and so on, because somewhere, they justified their own hatred by believing these persons were a threat.
People will commit - - lesser crimes - because they think it's inconsequential. As in, this store won't miss this pair of jeans or this coat, and they have insurance anyway. People will deface monuments, burn cars and block highways, because they believe they are saving humanity.
And people will abort a fetus before birth because they've told themselves, it's just needless tissue and no more immoral than removing a wart - they will end a viable fetus - a baby - because they've told themselves it will just live a miserable life unloved and unwanted. And they will "mutilate" a child, because they truly believe they are HELPING a child, and the parents are hurting it. I agree -it's sick. It's sick because it's "new and enlightened" - and its prevalence is remarkably high in bluer states. If it were "science", it would happen everywhere.
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What they do NOT do, is do something BECAUSE it is evil. Even Manson claimed he was the way he was, because he was MADE that way.