Faced with profound human wickedness all around us, we fail to ask the most basic questions of all. Why is there evil in our hearts and in the world? How do we explain it? What can we do about it? Is the world itself really evil?

Some Terrible Incidents

The gruesome case of super-rich American socialite Ghislaine Maxwell raises a slew of questions. According to The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland, she was convicted of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for sexual relations with her one-time boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein.

According to the media coverage of the events, Ghislaine Maxwell was conditioned as the daughter of publishing magnate Robert Maxwell to cater to the whims of a monstrous man, and simply transferred her allegiance, and her service, from one monster to another. Growing up surrounded by wealth and power, with officialdom's deference taken for granted, would have had an impact as well. Ghislaine Maxwell may have assumed that people like her, and Epstein had a special kind of impunity, that they could break the laws that restrained the appetites of lesser mortals, because that had been the case for the majority of her life.

At least three such evils occurred in sharper and more horrific form in December 2021.

There were convictions for Arthur Labinjo-Hughes' father and stepmother in this heinous case. The six-year-old boy was subjected to a regime of torture that was filmed by those who inflicted it. The youngster was forced to stand in isolation for up to 14 hours at a time, with no food or drink. He had been beaten. To punish him, his father ripped the football shirts he wore to shreds in front of him. The jury was shown footage of a weak and frail Arthur shortly before his death saying, "No one loves me." "There will be no one to feed me."

Later, another crime of a similar nature occurred. The heart-breaking case of Star Hobson, a child, a baby, who died at the age of 16 months after being punched to death by her mother's partner while her mother did nothing to save her. To make matters worse, the pair filmed their months of cruelty to the little girl and apparently found the videos amusing enough to send to friends.

Coming to India, police in Maharashtra have arrested a teenager accused of beheading his pregnant older sister with the help of her own mother. After her family objected to their relationship, the victim eloped and married her lover in June.

The Why of Evil?

When confronted with these tragic incidents, we raise a slew of institutional and bureaucratic concerns. The assumption is that there will always be people capable of horrifying brutality, that this fact will never change, and that therefore the sensible focus of our attention should be on prevention.
However, as a society, we refuse to examine what humans are capable of and why we commit such heinous crimes. The real question is, what makes us capable of such atrocities? The liberal society, which extols human virtues, has no explanation for why such evil incidents occur on a regular basis.

The Religious Response

From a religious standpoint, we can understand these heinous crimes in terms of sin and evil, concepts alien to the secular mind. We recognize that unfathomable evil is a part of the human story. At the same time, Christian vision adds that being human has unimaginable good. We do believe that in spite of our own horrible failures, God has created the whole world and found it good.

We cannot deny evil. But we just cannot afford to absolutise evil also. The final triumph of truth, goodness and glory is guaranteed! In spite of the heinous crimes around us, we can be consoled "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor 12:9).

So, as Christians, we recognize the presence of evil in everyone's heart, as well as the need for forgiveness and mercy. We also recognize the greater power of love, forgiveness, and goodness, which cannot be adequately explained by humanistic or liberal traditions alone. Here, we must invoke God, who has triumphed over evil and showers us with an abundance of goodness.

Epilogue

Thus, when we believe in God, we also believe in His goodness as well as in the goodness of fellow human beings, in spite of our fallen nature. So we are called to recognise and eliminate evil, seek for forgiveness and put our trust in the goodness of God and of fellow human beings.

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