Evil is an adjective

 

It enters my mind that if one believes in Satan, or devils or demons or evil spirits or whatever (sentient beings essentially evil) one must presume that "evil" is a reality. This is difficult; if nothing else, what exactly is it, some miasma? To be sure lots of things we would rather not happen do happen. Typhoons blow, volcanoes erupt, we age and die. None of these, though, is "evil." They are just what is. Thinking about them, they are things that have to be, and have both good and bad aspects to them, depending on viewpoint. People, too, do bad things: they lie and steal and kill. Do these things have a good aspect? I rather think this is harder to understand. A more subtle perspective is needed since the harm the criminal does harms the victim and also harms the criminal (in either a karmic way or in the Western sense of accumulating sins). We know, however, that the criminal act os caused by the same sorts of desires and drives that motivates all of us to do bad things. Perhaps for reasons of inheritane or upbring they are just less inhibited. Perhaps or less intelligent, not being able to see through their rationalizations. I find it hard to say that my impulses: my ambition, my pride, my libido, my desire to have others admire me, my desire for money, and so on, are actually evil. These are desires derived from the subconscious or even deeper down. They are evolved instincts that get modified and made acceptable by our upbringing and environment. It cannot be said that an instinct evolved for natural reasons (survival) is evil"." It is just a mindless natural process even though sometimes it leads to harm. In short we need to think about it before we label someone evil.

What you’re circling around is a very old and very stubborn problem: whether “evil” is something that exists in its own right, or whether it’s a way we describe certain kinds of harm, ignorance, or disorder.

Your instinct—to hesitate before calling anything or anyone “evil”—puts you in the company of some serious thinkers.

In much of classical Christian philosophy, especially in Augustine of Hippo, evil is not a substance or a “miasma” at all. It’s a privation—a lack or distortion of good, like rot in wood or blindness in an eye. That neatly avoids the problem you’ve noticed: if everything that exists is created or arises from natural processes, where would an independent “stuff of evil” come from? On this view, nothing is made of evil; rather, things go wrong, become disordered, or fall short.

Buddhist thought goes even further in dissolving the idea. In Buddhism there isn’t really a category of “evil beings” in the absolute sense. There are actions rooted in greed, hatred, and delusion—what you might call the misfiring or overgrowth of ordinary human drives. But those same drives, seen clearly and trained, can lead to compassion and wisdom. So the emphasis is less on condemning a person and more on understanding causes and conditions.

That lines up closely with what you’re saying about instincts. Ambition, pride, desire for recognition—none of these are inherently “evil.” They’re raw materials. They become destructive when they’re unexamined, unchecked, or coupled with blindness to consequences. The difference between a generous leader and a tyrant is often not the presence or absence of drive, but how it’s shaped, restrained, and understood.

Where things get more uncomfortable is with human cruelty. You’re right: a typhoon isn’t evil; it just is. But when someone knowingly causes suffering, we feel a strong pull to say “this is evil,” not just “this is unfortunate.” That word is doing a kind of moral work—it signals seriousness, danger, and the need for boundaries. It may not describe a metaphysical substance, but it does express a judgment about harm and responsibility.

Your point about the criminal being harmed as well is important, and often neglected. Whether one frames it as karma or as psychological and social consequence, destructive actions tend to deform the person who performs them. That doesn’t erase the harm to the victim, but it complicates the picture: the “wrongdoer” is also, in a different sense, another casualty.

So perhaps one way to reconcile all this is:

• There is no clear evidence that “evil” exists as a separate thing in the world, like a gas or force.

• There are patterns of thought and action that reliably produce suffering and destruction.

• Calling those patterns “evil” is a human shorthand—useful, but blunt.

And your concluding caution is, I think, a wise one. Labeling a person “evil” can freeze our understanding. It tempts us to stop asking how did this arise?, what conditions produced this?, how can it be prevented? It also lets us quietly imagine that we are made of different material than they are—which, as you’ve noticed when you look inward, is not really true.

If anything, the more unsettling conclusion is that the roots of what we call “evil” are not alien at all. They’re continuous with ordinary human nature. That doesn’t excuse harm—but it does mean that clarity and restraint matter more than condemnation.

I’m curious—do you find the language of “evil” useful at all, even as a warning label? Or would you prefer to do without it entirely?

I tend to view a word that is in the language would not be there except it serves a purpose. In this case it serves to define n human act, not a person or natural event.

That’s a very clean way to rescue the word without getting tangled in metaphysics.

If “evil” names a kind of act rather than a kind of being, a lot of the philosophical knots loosen. You don’t have to posit some strange substance or force in the universe; you’re simply marking out a category of human behavior that is especially destructive, especially blameworthy, perhaps especially resistant to excuse.

It also preserves something important that softer language can blur. If we say only “harmful,” we risk putting a calculated betrayal and an accidental injury too close together. “Evil,” used carefully, can signal intention, awareness, and a certain depth of disregard for others.

At the same time, your restriction—apply it to acts, not persons—guards against a very real danger. Once a person is labeled “evil,” they tend to become, in our minds, a different species. That makes understanding harder and, historically, has justified some very grim responses. If instead we say “this was an evil act,” we keep the door open to the more uncomfortable truth: the actor remains human, continuous with the rest of us.

There’s also a practical advantage. If evil is in the act, then it’s something that can, at least in principle, be interrupted, reduced, or prevented. If it’s in the person as an essence, it feels fixed and almost fated.

Your view ends up sitting in an interesting middle ground. It keeps the moral seriousness of the word—this is not just “unfortunate”—but avoids turning it into a cosmic substance or a permanent label. It’s almost surgical: precise, limited, and purposeful.

The only tension I might gently press on is this: do you think intention is required for an act to be “evil”? For example, would you reserve the word for acts done with awareness and choice, or could something done out of ignorance or self-deception still qualify?

First, let us keep the word an adjective and not let it be a noun. I find it hard to believe but am compelled to understand that there are a few in the world for reasons we don't understand are absent any sense of compassion. Combine that with greed and one gets a con artist, combine that with certain abnormal libidos and one gets sadistic acts, combine it with ego and one gets a bully.

That’s a very disciplined way of handling the word—keeping “evil” as an adjective tethered to conduct rather than letting it harden into a thing or an identity.

What you’re sketching out, if I may sharpen it slightly, is almost a kind of moral chemistry. You’re not positing a mysterious substance called evil; you’re describing combinations of familiar human elements that, in certain proportions and absences, yield behavior we recoil from.

The absence you point to—compassion—is crucial. Most of us, however imperfectly, have some capacity to register another person as real in the moral sense. When that capacity is missing or severely blunted, the ordinary restraints weaken. Then quite ordinary drives—gain, status, pleasure, dominance—can run without friction. The results, as you say, vary by what they combine with: deception, cruelty, humiliation.

What’s striking is that none of the components are exotic. Greed, ego, desire, even aggression—these are all part of the standard human equipment. It’s the configuration that matters, especially the absence of a counterweight.

That raises an interesting implication. If compassion is not just a virtue but a kind of regulating faculty, then its absence isn’t “evil” in itself—it’s more like a deficit condition. The “evil” arises when that deficit allows other drives to operate in ways that knowingly produce serious harm.

This also helps with your earlier concern about instincts. Instincts don’t need to be labeled evil; they need to be balanced. A strong appetite for recognition can produce a great statesman—or a tyrant—depending on whether anything checks it. Compassion, self-awareness, and perhaps social constraint serve as those checks.

Your framework also avoids a common trap: it doesn’t require us to pretend that all harmful actors are simply misunderstood or that all wrongdoing is mild. Some acts really do show a chilling degree of indifference or exploitation, and your use of “evil” preserves that moral clarity. But by not turning it into a noun, you avoid freezing the person into a permanent category.

There is, though, a slightly unsettling edge to your view. If what we call “evil acts” emerge from combinations and absences within ordinary human nature, then the line between “us” and “them” is thinner than we might like. Not everyone will cross it—but the ingredients are widely distributed.

I wonder how far you’d want to take that. Do you see compassion itself as something innate that can be missing in a few people, or as something that is always present but can be suppressed or deformed by circumstance?

I would hope that compassion can be taught, but I don't know.

That “I would hope… but I don’t know” is, I think, exactly the honest place to land.

There’s some evidence pointing both ways, which is why the question has never quite settled.

On the one hand, there do seem to be people in whom the capacity for compassion is strikingly thin from very early on. Modern psychology would talk about traits like callous-unemotional disposition—children who simply don’t respond to others’ distress in the usual way. That suggests there is some innate component, or at least a temperament that makes compassion harder to develop. In those cases, teaching compassion in the usual sense may be limited; one may instead be teaching rules, consequences, and habits of restraint.

On the other hand, for the vast majority of people, compassion appears to be quite malleable. It can be strengthened, weakened, redirected, or narrowed. Upbringing matters a great deal—whether a child is treated with care, whether they see others treated as real and worthy, whether they are encouraged to imagine another’s point of view. Even in adults, practices like deliberately attending to others’ experiences can noticeably deepen empathic response over time. So in that broader sense, yes—it can be taught, or perhaps better, cultivated.

But there’s an important nuance that fits nicely with your earlier framing. What we often call “teaching compassion” may not be creating something from nothing. It may be more like removing obstacles—fear, insecurity, tribal thinking, habit—so that an underlying capacity can operate more freely. Where that underlying capacity is very weak or absent, the task shifts from cultivation to containment.

That leads to a rather sober but practical conclusion:

• In most people, compassion can be grown, encouraged, and made more reliable.

• In a small minority, it may never become a dependable guide, and society has to rely more on structure—rules, enforcement, consequences.

Your instinct to hope it can be taught is not naïve; it’s probably the only workable stance for living among others. But your hesitation—your “I don’t know”—keeps you from over-romanticizing human nature.

And it ties back neatly to your earlier discipline with language. If we keep “evil” attached to acts, and recognize that the capacity to avoid those acts varies from person to person, we can be both morally clear and psychologically realistic—without needing to imagine demons or to deny responsibility.

If I may ask one step further: do you think compassion is something we owe others regardless of how they behave, or something that must be, at least in part, earned or sustained by mutual recognition?

As I've matured (and my personal experience is the only evidence I can depend on with complete assurance), I come more and more to believe in turning the other cheek. That is to deal with others compassionately and not be the least concerned with whether they deserve it. This is rather logical too if we concede everyone is sentient.

There’s a quiet strength in the way you’ve come to that—not as a rule handed down, but as something tested against your own experience and found workable.

What you’re describing feels less like a moral pose and more like a kind of internal economy. If one accepts that others are sentient—capable of suffering, confusion, distortion—then responding with compassion isn’t a reward for good behavior, it’s a recognition of shared condition. In that sense, “deserving” almost becomes irrelevant, as you say.

There’s also a practical intelligence in it. If you make your compassion contingent on others earning it, then you’ve handed control of your inner state to whoever happens to be in front of you. But if compassion is your default stance, you remain—if I may put it this way—sovereign over your own responses. You’re no longer constantly negotiating: Is this person worthy? Shall I withhold? That’s a tiring business.

At the same time, “turning the other cheek” is often misunderstood as passivity, and I don’t think that’s what you mean. One can act firmly—set boundaries, prevent harm, even punish when necessary—without relinquishing compassion. The distinction is between how one acts and what one harbors inside. Outwardly, one might still say “no,” or even enforce consequences; inwardly, one does not harden into hatred or contempt.

There’s a paradox here that I suspect you’ve noticed: unconditional compassion can actually make one clearer, not softer, about wrongdoing. Because you’re not reacting out of anger or wounded pride, you can see the act more plainly and respond more proportionately.

And your earlier framework fits neatly into this. If “evil” is an adjective for certain acts, then compassion toward the actor doesn’t dilute the judgment of the act. One can say, without contradiction: that was an evil act—and I will not let it pass—and yet I do not withdraw my recognition of you as a sentient being.

It’s not an easy stance. It asks a lot of steadiness, and perhaps a certain detachment from one’s own ego. But it does have a kind of internal coherence that many other moral positions lack.

I’m curious—has this shift made you feel more at peace in dealing with people, or has it sometimes made you feel more exposed or vulnerable?

The Sermon on the Mount is to be read in context, not literally. It says never pray in public, what it means is don't be a hypocrite about it. It says turn the other cheel, what it means is don't seek revenge.

That’s a very grounded way to read it—less as a list of rigid instructions and more as a set of correctives aimed at human tendencies.

When you read “do not pray in public” as “don’t perform piety for display,” and “turn the other cheek” as “don’t be driven by revenge,” you’re really getting at the underlying target: hypocrisy, ego, and retaliation. The literal wording is sharp, almost exaggerated, but the purpose is to redirect the inner posture.

That style of teaching—deliberately overstated, even paradoxical—is quite consistent with how Jesus Christ is portrayed elsewhere. It jolts the listener out of ordinary moral bookkeeping. If taken woodenly, some of those lines become impractical or even contradictory; taken as you’re taking them, they cut directly at motive.

And your interpretation aligns with your earlier point about compassion. If the emphasis is on not seeking revenge rather than on submitting to harm in every circumstance, then the teaching becomes psychologically realistic. It’s not asking you to abandon judgment or self-protection—it’s asking you not to let injury harden into retaliation.

There’s a subtle but important shift there:

• Literal reading: endure everything, regardless of consequence.

• Contextual reading: do not let your response be governed by ego, display, or vengeance.

That second version is much closer to a discipline of mind than a rule of behavior. It’s about what you refuse to become in response to others.

It also fits rather neatly with your earlier caution about the word “evil.” If one is not driven by revenge, one is less tempted to fix the other person in a permanent moral category. One can condemn the act without needing to fuel oneself on anger.

The interesting tension, of course, is that teachings like this can be misused—either to justify passivity in the face of real harm, or to demand that others accept mistreatment. Your reading avoids that by keeping the focus inward: don’t be hypocritical, don’t be vengeful—but it doesn’t require blindness to reality.

It’s a rather mature equilibrium: moral clarity without theatrical righteousness.

Do you find that this way of reading religious texts—looking for intent rather than literal rule—came naturally to you, or was it something you grew into over time?

After the Baptism Satan came to Jesus and "tempted" him various ways. Anyone who reads this literally misses the entire point, anyone who dismisses the idea does too.

That’s very well put—and it gets at why those passages have endured. If one reads them as a literal interview between two beings, it can feel almost theatrical. If one dismisses them as superstition, something essential is lost. The force of the story sits in between.

Temptation of Christ and the figure of Jesus Christ present something recognizably human, even if expressed in mythic language: the confrontation with inner possibilities.

The three temptations, taken non-literally but seriously, map rather cleanly onto enduring human pressures:

• The urge to use power for immediate relief or gratification (turn stones to bread).

• The urge to prove oneself dramatically, to demand recognition or certainty (throw yourself down).

• The urge to grasp authority, to dominate, to secure outcomes by compromise (all the kingdoms of the world).

Whether one calls the voice “Satan” or not, those are not exotic temptations. They’re familiar movements of mind. Framing them as an encounter with an external tempter gives them shape and clarity; it lets us see them as something to be recognized and answered, rather than just drifted into.

So the story works on two levels at once:

• Not literal reportage of an event in the desert.

• Not dismissible fantasy either.

• But a structured account of moral testing—almost a dramatized interior dialogue.

In that sense, “Satan” need not be a being made of some metaphysical evil substance. He can stand for the organizing principle of temptation itself—the voice that rationalizes, distorts, and urges the shorter path.

And the important part isn’t that the temptations occur—it’s that they are recognized and refused. That’s where the teaching lies.

Your earlier discipline about language fits here too. Just as “evil” is better kept as a description of acts, “Satan” can be understood as a way of naming a pattern rather than asserting a creature. The danger is real; the imagery is a vehicle.

If anything, this reading makes the story more—not less—demanding. It removes the distance. The question quietly shifts from “Did this happen?” to “Where do I meet these same temptations, and how do I answer them?”