Faith in Our Fathers — one more shot at the circumcision debate

Over the past couple weeks the circumcision debate has been heating up again in the international news and blogosphere. I don’t think I have anything further to say about the medical aspects of the procedure itself, but I basically agree with the sentiments one of my young Muslim friends posted recently: “You know what I’ve never said in my life? ‘I wish I had me some foreskin. How dare my parents make a decided improvement to my penis! And in safe medical conditions At that! Whilst I was too young to be bothered by the idea of penis surgery! Those bastards!’”

I realize that the issue of it being a “decided improvement” is controversial, but this further demonstrates that boys who’ve had this done really don’t see themselves as victims. Most men, whether theirs are cut or uncut, adore their penises just as they are and don’t long for them to be the opposite way, especially among those whose are cut. So those who claim to be defending the boy’s potential choice in the matter don’t seem to have a particularly strong case.

But there’s another underlying question that seems to be worth discussing here: To what extent do children “belong” to their parents? To what extent are parents free to physically, emotionally and ideologically do as they please with their children; and to what extent should governments be ready to step in and do something to protect children whose parents’ ideas and behavior are against the child’s best interest?

The short answer has 3 parts:

1)      A workable solution on this one will not be found in the extremes –– it’s always going to be a balance question.

2)      These situations require wisdom rather than logarithms, but that’s nearly impossible to achieve in a state free from certain cultural prejudices.

3)      Parents should be given the benefit of the doubt as much as possible. If anyone should be considered innocent until proven guilty, it’s a child’s parents.

Now let me try to unpack that a bit.

As with most political questions, there are two extremes here: those who want the government to play the role of all-knowing nanny wherever possible, and those who believe that the solution to all social problems is to just get governments to leave people alone. Let’s just say that those who are prone to be helpless cry-babies would be more inclined to lean towards the first option there, and those who tend to be bullies and psychopaths would lean more towards the latter opinion; but not everyone who takes the extreme views can justifiably be accused of being a crybaby or a bully respectively.  It might, however, be fair to say that the extreme you lean towards the most says something about what type of person you are more prone to sympathize with or relate to, and which you are more prone to reject and eject from your social circles whenever possible.

I must confess from the start that, as a school teacher, I have a distinct dislike for behavior of both of these extremes, but I tend to be more angered by bullying than by whining. So that would make me a moderate, leaning more towards the “liberal” than the “conservative” side on this one. In other words it is particularly important to me that kids do not get emotionally abused or beat up on, and I believe that the government should play some role in preventing such abuse.  Conservatives, on the other hand, are prone to take the stand that kids have to learn to stand on their own two feet as early as possible, and God has given them parents to take care of them until they are ready to do so. So governments need to largely stay out of it and let parents do their job. Otherwise we raise a generation of helpless whiners who always expect the government to take care of them.

But let’s start with some “liberal” moral principles that even the most radically arch-conservative pundits can agree with: No child should be forced to live with a parent who is a violent alcoholic or drug addict, and no child should ever be subject to sexual abuse within the home. The basis for such judgments should be rather self-evident. It should follow from there that, given the breakdown of traditional social control mechanisms within societies –– neighbors no longer automatically stepping in to take care of each other’s children –– we need specialized organizations to step in and help kids in those situations, both in the form of branches of government and NGOs.

We can probably also reach a consensus on the matter that no parent should have the right to physically mutilate or damage their child in a way that results in a diminished capacity for normal adult life later on. Any parent who intentionally scars or cripples his/her own child, even partially, certainly doesn’t deserve to be allowed to freely raise that child as he/she sees fit! Even a Fox News follower could agree to that.

The open question is, how far do we want to see controls go over the amount of dysfunctional behavior we will allow parents to exercise before someone steps in, and how strict we are going to make our automatic child protection laws? In response to that we need to ask, what sorts of parental misconduct are most likely to do lasting damage to a child, thereby justifying imprisonment for the parent and/or foster care for the child?

To be honest with you, aside from the extreme mentally disturbed types of parents mentioned above, there’s really only one type of situation where I’ve regularly seen parents do irreparable damage to their children: messy divorces.

My own parents were divorced long before it was the popular thing to do, but if there is one thing I have to give them both credit for, it’s being very careful not to fight over the children or use the children as weapons against each other.  I’m not sure how successful I was in following their example, but attempting to do so was one of my main priorities in dealing with my own divorce. I do know my sons were used as weapons against me on many occasions though and I’m sure at times I retaliated in ways I shouldn’t have, but I always made a serious point in avoiding such irresponsible behavior. I sincerely hope that my sons’ scars from that mess do not run too deep, and I have reason to be optimistic in that regard.

However as a teacher and as a friend to many children of divorce I’ve seen some serious nightmare situations, well beyond the messes I’ve had to deal with in my own family experiences. I would go as far as to say that, passing childish stupidity aside, in every case of serious behavioral disturbance among middle school students that I’ve had to deal with, there has been a divorce situation –– usually a very fresh and very messy one –– somewhere in the background.

In these nasty and painful situations parents seem to forget that the children are neither pets nor mutual property to divide up, but important individuals with their own human value that parents have the initial opportunity to nurture and care for. While looking for ways to vengefully hurt the offending ex, parents often forget that, as resilient as kids are, they are too fragile to be used as clubs to beat the other with or as projectiles to throw at each other.

Another variation on this theme is when one parent, usually the mother, becomes so lost in the pain of rejection that she grabs onto her child(ren) as an emotional flotation device –– clinging to them for dear life to keep herself from drowning in her sorrow.  There’s no easy solution for this kind of problem, but children shouldn’t have to deal with the stress of being a parent’s therapist and care-taker.

There have been many times that I have wished that social workers were more aware of these problems and on top of things –– taking the task of child protection and child welfare more seriously –– but of course I recognize that they too are human beings, with their own human limitations and prejudices. How much can I honestly expect from them? Looking at the situation in Finland, which I really know best, I can see that honest efforts are being made to overcome biases against men and against cultural minority groups within the social service system. Is there really anything more –– besides speeding up this cultural and gender diversification process –– that I can ask for in the system?  Should they be more gung ho to intervene and remove children from their parents? Should there be more laws limiting what parents are allowed to do with their children? I would actually hope not.

Determining what dangers parents should be allowed to subject their children to is in itself a dangerous thing for authorities to do.

We don’t need more rules to substitute for thinking and active involvement where children’s well-being is concerned. This is a point that Barry Schwartz has made extremely well. What we need is social workers and other public employees who are deeply and personally motivated to help both children and their parents deal with problematic situations. In doing this they must learn to set aside certain cultural prejudices, such as belief that women are inherently better care-givers than men, or that members of religious minorities should not be trusted to love and care for their own children. They need to look at what is actually causing children harm and reducing their chances of flourishing as human beings later in life. While there are continuous studies in the field of youth research in particular to help identify such risk factors, and to enable concerned parties deal with such risks more wisely, ultimately each case will be unique. Tolstoy may have said it best: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We need public servants who recognize this and cultivate personal wisdom in dealing with the needs of each unhappy family.

Not that I expect to see that happening any time soon though. Many who get into the field of social work, in both the public and tertiary sectors, do so because they have a certain zeal to see things operate according to their own preconceptions and prejudices. A classic example would be the American missionary group that was attempting to remove a bus load of children from Haiti after the recent earthquake there, to keep them from evil of being raised in a Voodoo culture. It’s not as though public sector social work has succeeded in weeding out morally equivalent motivations among its own. Thus there is probably a greater shortage of morally objective people in this field than any other which I know of. System-wide, I don’t see much hope of this changing within my lifetime, but on a case-by-case and worker-by-worker basis there is hope that some individual children and families with problems who would have slipped through the cracks before might start to get the sort of help that they really need.

Meanwhile though, we have a number of parents who are trying to raise their kids with the loving hope that they can make these little people as much like themselves as possible –– only smarter, prettier, healthier and richer. This includes parents doing everything in their power to pass on their religious beliefs (or lack thereof), their political perspectives, their ethnic cultural identity and often their professional identity to their kids. These kids are sent to religious confirmation classes and political party youth gatherings, brought to holiday get-togethers with others of “their kind,” and even hauled along to their working parents’ “office” or “shop” with whenever possible; while being given little say in such matters. Sometimes this form of social conditioning can be rather restrictive or even abusive towards the kids in question. Parents’ desires for their children can be an incredibly bad fit for the kids themselves; and at times it seems like the worse the fit, the less likely the parents are to acknowledge that their expectations might be problematic. This can happen regardless of what religion (or lack thereof), what profession (or lack thereof) and what sort of ethnic identity the parents have. All parents are capable of screwing up at times by trying to make kids into something that they’re not. Does that mean that we should the model of Plato’s Republic and prevent parents from raising their own children though? Hell no!

There is no cultural system that can be proven to outsiders to not entail risks of traumatizing children every now and again. Human life is inherently messy, right from the start. The best we can do is to bond with those close to us and choose to respect those who differ from us, who still share our goals in terms of trying to mold in their children in their own image.  If we have valid scientific, medical proof that parents are preventing their children from enjoying a significant part of human life through their traditions (e.g. in the case of female genital cutting) or if we see that due to significant life management problems in their own lives parents have lost track of trying to do what is best for their children (e.g. in the cases of divorce trauma or alcoholism) then yes, we need to do something about it. But other than that we need to put the human rights of those of other cultures ahead of our tastes as far as how we would like to see them raise their children.

So getting back to the matter of traditional infant male circumcision, what is the case against it? Does it disable the boys in question in any significant way? Does it emotionally scar those who have undergone such an operation? Does a lack of foreskin cause widespread resentment towards parents who chose to have it removed? If not, where’s the problem?

Yes, like any medical procedure, if those who perform it are fundamentally incompetent it can result in serious damage. But the obvious solution there is simply to make sure that, as with any medical procedure, there are adequate controls in place to keep incompetents from performing the operation.

Beyond that the objection seems to be that since it is a matter of (trivial) body modification, based only on masculine identity within religious minority communities, it shouldn’t be allowed. I’m sorry, but to me that stinks of prejudice against both men and religious minorities. It assumes that any group that differs from the cultural mainstream should not be trusted to decide things regarding their own children, especially where masculine identity is concerned.

Another argument, which is stressed less in public debate (though I did hear it mentioned on BBC this week) but which has probably has as much practical effect as any in terms of grounds for attempting to ban circumcision, is that mothers often feel traumatized about having this done to their little boys. Fathers want their sons to be like them in this regard, but mothers are more hesitant to go along. The implication here is that when it comes to decisions regarding children, female perspectives are inherently more important than male perspectives –– even with regard to the treatment of the male organ. Anyone else have a problem with this sort of cultural assumption?

As I’ve said before, for me, at the end of the day, foreskins are a fairly trivial thing. The bigger issue is cultural freedom and control. In particular there is the offensive matter of German courts now telling Jews and Muslims that they are not allowed to maintain what they consider to be an important part of their tradition –– involving one of the oldest, safest and most harmless medical procedures known to mankind. Given that, when done competently, this does not in any demonstrable way reduce the boys’ quality of life, I really do believe that governments should leave this matter up to parents to decide on (together). Rather than attempting to outlaw this practice, civil authorities should be working to insure that it is always done professionally and under safe conditions.

If someone really wants to help insure quality a high quality of life for the boys in question and prevent them from being traumatized by parental mistakes, there are much bigger things than infant foreskins for these “helpers” to worry about.

On Not Being Gay

This blog is going up late because for the past week and a half I’ve been traveling around the more rural parts of South Africa, seeing parts of this country that are more exotic to my western eye: sugar cane fields ripe for harvest, cows and goats wandering the streets, zebras and giraffes in their natural habitat, economies based on frantic informal buying and selling everything on the side of the road, black children in school uniforms flooding the dirt paths through villages together with their livestock, women cutting marsh reeds for making wicker items, mothers of all ages with babies strapped to their backs and large parcels balanced on their heads…

I never did see any elephants crossing the road though.

It would be too easy under these circumstances to associate the international headlines coming out of rural South Africa at the beginning of this month with this same sense of things here being radically exotic and non-western: Over the May Day holiday weekend among the younger high school boys of this province there was a particularly nasty gang rape of a retarded girl, that one boy shot a cell phone video of that started getting passed around on line; and then on the eve of May Day, in the same sugar cane fields I drove past a few days later, a teenage boy brutally raped a girl just more than half his age, attempting to strangle her and gouge her eyes out in the process. In the latter case the girl survived –– barely –– blindly crawling out of the sugar cane fields in what remained of her school uniform, so badly mutilated that her family didn’t recognize her. The prognosis is that she will eventually regain sight in one eye, but beyond that hope for a normal life for her is fairly limited.

It feels natural to try and distance ourselves from such atrocities. We can’t be talking about normal teenage boys here! There must be something profoundly messed up in the culture which leads to these sorts of inhuman actions among those who are still effectively children.

From enough of a distance it may seem that this is part of childhood being stolen from African children by guerilla fighters and underground armies and the like. People like Kony are making children into monsters that do horrible things to each other. But in these cases civil tensions really have nothing to do with the situation. South Africans regularly march in protest about their poor and risky lives, but there is no risk of civil war here. So far the most radical left wing politicians here have just been big mouthed clowns who talk about state takeover of larger businesses; but their campaigns remain purely democratic at this point, and their conspicuous incompetence is seriously limiting their potential impact in that arena even. (For further perspective on this see my Julius and Rick blog from a couple months ago.) Children in South Africa are not being trained to commit atrocities, especially against other children.

How then can we explain the messed up motivations behind these particularly heinous and obscene crimes, committed by those who aren’t even men yet? One journalistic analysis of the eye gouging rapist has brought out two factors that might explain matters somewhat: The boy was being raised by his grandmother, with little by way of masculine role models in his life; and he was being bullied at school in the typical way that other boys jokingly accused him of being gay. This makes the problem a distinctly African one in some senses, but not so exotic or different from Western culture any more.

A lack of positive male influence in life is a tragic problem in many parts of the world. Men have been isolated from families by the economic demands of industrialized working life, and where they have not been able to find work outside of the home their value as men has been severely marginalized. Thus to prove that they are “real men” many fathers resort to drinking, violence and other testosterone boosting activities that destroy what little chance they might have of building a relationship with their children. This leads to a matriarchal network of young mothers and intense grandmothers doing the child rearing, and boys having little idea about how their masculinity is supposed to (or allowed to) work. If all forms of masculinity –– other than “providing for the family” and other than that staying out of the way –– are just as thoroughly disrespected within a boy’s childhood home, it is little wonder if he starts to express his own masculinity in highly anti-social ways.

This problem is particularly acute in Africa, but it is a well known dynamic in all industrialized nations really. Across the world school boy cultures are increasingly polarized between the “tough guys” who make no apologies for their anti-social masculinity, and “wimps” and “faggots” who do what women tell them to and are thus accused of acting like women themselves. Not that there’s anything wrong with women, per se; it’s just that no self-respecting young man wants to be one. If someone finds a functional solution for this problem they should be given the Nobel Peace Prize for the century.

Bullying is something we all know about from personal experience of being bullied, or taking part in bullying others before we knew any better, or from watching it happen and not really daring to do anything about it. It’s a near universal form of competition for dominance within a group, particularly among more immature individuals: bullies trying to win social acceptance by proving to others that they would be more valuable allies than the “oddballs” they have singled out for torture. This can be particularly brutal at times, and sadly many of the other evils we find in society trace back to the emotional scars left by school bullying, sometimes generations ago even. This can be the first link in a chain of violence that escalates and becomes cyclical, leading to all sorts of other evils.

Kids get teased for any number of reasons at school: for being fat, for being foreign, for having weak hand-eye coordination, for being physically or intellectually under developed or over developed for their age group, for having speech impediments, for having unusual coloring… or for having the wrong sort of emerging sexuality. This last one is particularly nasty because it is so indefinite, especially in the years immediately following puberty. You can pretty easily tell when a kid is unusually tall, or clumsy, or of conspicuously different ancestry from the rest of the group; you really can’t tell when a kid will turn out to be more sexually attracted to his or her own gender than to those using the bathroom on the other end of the hall. If suspicion of this is grounds for social rejection, isolation, public humiliation and physical abuse –– if neither the tormentors nor the tormented can be entirely sure about whether the assumed grounds for this nastiness is real or not –– that makes the seditious evil of the bullying all the more destructive.

If a kid is bullied for being of the wrong “race” he can usually figure out what it is about him that the idiots tormenting him have used as a basis for singling him out for torture, that it’s not something he can change, that it’s not something he did anything to deserve and that it’s actually a not a flaw. From there the emotional adjustment process is a lot easier. Such kids still have to deal with the brutality of the attacks they are subjected to but they know they are on higher moral ground than their attackers, and with the sense of confidence this gives them they can fight back or ignore the abuse far more effectively. But when a kid is bullied for “acting gay”, it’s actually not always clear where such an idea comes from, whether or not he’s voluntarily doing anything socially unacceptable, whether it’s a matter of simply learning to act more “normal”, whether he actually is more sexually attracted to members of his own sex and whether that would be something horrible if he is. A young victim of homophobic bullying cannot be sure whether he should lash out against his tormentors or against himself, or against someone else entirely.

Other grounds for teasing are things kids outgrow in one way or another. Size differences even out considerably when young people are finally full grown. Those who are less coordinated either develop the necessary coordination as they get older or they learn to compensate for it in other ways. Those who are too bright for their peer group either dumb themselves down or find new circles of friends that can relate to them better. Immigrant kids learn the new language and culture and find ways to fit in, and others come to see the variety that outsiders bring as a cool thing. Kids with who have been marginalized because of doubts about their sexuality have it much worse. If they are in fact homosexual by inclination in most parts of the world they will suffer lasting social stigma and moral condemnation for who they are. If they are in fact heterosexual by inclination, having suffered such abuse can seriously damage their chances of finding a desirable partner, and of building a stable relationship –– sexuality is always a matter of proving something, not of enjoying the depth of personal inter-connection it can bring.

If I relate this all to my own personal experience, I was teased in school for being different, but not for any serious suspicion that I was gay. I’ve had friends among fellow bullying victims who were gay, some of whom may have had a crush on me even, but it never occurred to me to have any sort of romantic interest in another guy. In retrospect I wish I could have been a better and more supportive friend to some of them, but of course there were things I just didn’t understand back then. At first I saw gay men as just clowns, in a tradition running from the Scarlet Pimpernel to Gomer Pyle. They were nothing more to me than a silly joke. When I came to know a few gay fellows of my own age at first I was almost always the last one to believe that it really was the case; labeling someone as gay was something that left a very bad taste in my mouth. When it became clear that someone really was gay my immediate reaction was a mix of nervousness and pity.

It took quite a while before I could start to relate to openly gay acquaintances as friends without really worrying about their sexuality. For me a lot of it had to do with my time in the restaurant business: in all types of food service establishments I encountered a continuous stream of both fellow workers and customers of that persuasion, and learning to relate to them in a friendly, cooperative and unreserved manner was a functional necessity. Sometimes their ways of expressing their identities still came out as a bad joke but more and more it became clear that they were just people like all others: trying to do good to others in hopes of receiving good in return, defensive regarding things over which they’ve been attacked in the past, looking for acceptance wherever they can find it, hoping to find love of many different sorts as life goes on.

I’ve come to realize quite thoroughly that a fear of homosexuality is a far more dangerous thing than homosexuality itself. Sexuality of any sort has its own beauties and dangers to it, and we all have to find a balance between enjoying our drives and restricting our urges. This applies quite equally to both women and men, both gay and straight. The fact that we tend to more easily accuse those who are different from ourselves does not give any of us the higher moral ground in these matters. Yes, the majority of the human race will continue to be heterosexual and sexuality will continue to be a source of strife within the human race for as long as we succeed in avoiding extinction. That doesn’t mean that any of us are justified in issuing blanket condemnations towards others’ sexuality. The most important thing is to stop kids from bullying each other on such a basis, and to keep them from doing horrible things to themselves and each other to prove something about their sexuality.

 

 

The Nature of Evil

For years I’ve tried to remain neutral on the question of what constitutes evil. It’s the sort of thing you can get yourself in a lot of trouble with on the one hand, since the people in the world that I consider to be the most evil actually have their friends and defenders. And beyond that, there are too many religious fundamentalists out there getting extensive mileage out of labeling those who don’t share their opinions as being of the devil. So why should I add to the collection of those labeling others as evil? Isn’t there enough of that going around without my contribution?

But looking at the various treatment of the subject by both hypocrites and sincere, well-intentioned individuals –– both religious and non-religious –– I’ve reached the conclusion that the issue is too important to too many people for me to keep evading it. Do I really believe in evil as such? Is there a power in the supernatural world opposed to all that I hold to be virtuous and dear? Or using non-religious language, is there some collection of tendencies, active among human beings, that I have a moral obligation to stand up against? Does this work in such a way that anyone who fails to oppose these tendencies and forces is thus de facto a bad person?

You might be seeing why I’d wish to evade such questions.

From a religious perspective, on the one hand the early Hebrew prophets had nothing to say about a devil. No where in the sayings of Abraham or the writings of Moses or David is there any reference to a personalized force of evil. Their spiritual enemies were the various gods of nations they were at war with, their own unbridled passions and their lack of direct obedience to God’s instructions. That was enough to explain all of the evil that needed explaining back then. So in principle one doesn’t need to believe in a devil in order to base one’s life on faithfulness to the One True God.

Yet on the other hand, for the later Jewish prophets, who had the issue of explaining the actions of brutal and powerful conquering empires to deal with, the devil started to become a pretty important figure. It is thus no surprise that fighting against the power of the devil is a huge issue in the teachings of Jesus and in the narratives of his life. Thus one really cannot claim to be a Christian without acknowledging and accepting the idea of a power of evil out there which needs to be fought against. From there the cultural history involved becomes very much a secondary issue.

But this leaves us with a few very thorny theological problems: Where did this power of evil arise from to begin with? To what extent is it part of the universal human condition? How did it get that way? What can ultimately be done about it?

Those are the questions that American evangelicals in particular love to take a swing at every now and again, but in doing so they are more often than not forgetting one profoundly significant aspect of the problem of evil: throughout the Bible it is associated with major colonial powers. The devil, or the anti-Christ, is always related to some empire which is preventing God’s people from having things the way they would have hoped and expected. In the Hebrew Scriptures it was the Babylonians and Persians. In New Testament times it was the Romans. The question for all of Jesus’ followers was, since the devil was working for the Romans, when was God going to give the Jews (and believers in Jesus’ kingdom) power from on high to kick some Roman butt? That actually never happened.

Eventually Rome started to fall of its own weight, and when it did a political genius named Constantine decided to use Christianity as a means of propping the empire back up for another century or so. The evil empire thus became an official ally of Christianity! This gave rise to a whole new set of problems regarding the essence of evil which the newly politically empowered church largely swept under the carpet: How do we reconcile the idea of the empire being evil with us being the empire? How do we determine what the new focus of the devil’s power on earth might be so that we can join together in fighting against it? How do we go about separating ourselves from “the evil of the world” when we’re in fact more in control of the world than anyone else?

 

To say that the answers to these questions offered by church leaders over the past 1700 years or so have been variable is a pretty serious understatement. Suffice to say, there is no pat answer to the question of the nature of evil in Christian doctrine that would save us the trouble of thinking about the subject. Far from being troubled by this, I actually consider it to be a good thing.

This brings us to the point where Christianity essentially believes that all of us have evil within us that we have to deal with somehow. And more than in any other world religion, the focus of Christianity is on receiving God’s mercy to deal with that. From there it’s a matter of being God’s special servants, and “doing our job” in a spirit of being incredibly grateful for having been “hired” while we were still hopelessly under-qualified for the position. Our main task in this job is to prevent evil from keeping others separated from God and keeping us separated from each other. Far easier said than done.

But setting aside the challenges inherent in those details for the moment, let me ask, does anyone have a better suggestion as to what the basic point of ethics should be? With all due respect for atheists and non-religious thinkers in general, their proposals for what our ultimate goals in life and purposes for our existence should be –– reasons why anyone else should really give a flying rat’s ass –– have historically been even more vague and variable than the Christian and theistic ones. Could it be to do whatever we feel like, as long as we pay a little attention to where our actions might be leading us along the way? Is it to make as many people as happy as possible? Is it to terminate unspeakable suffering? Is it to learn to be logical as an end unto itself? Is it to “keep evolving,” in some abstract sense of the term or another? All of these suggestions are rather problematic in their own rights.

So perhaps the question of the ultimate good is too abstract and difficult for us to reach any functional agreement on. Perhaps agreeing to fight some sort of evil together is the best we can do in terms of a basis for human cooperation. Rather than looking for something we all can agree on as a positive motivation for shared action, perhaps we need to find things that we can all agree together to hate and to fight against.

But there’s a long and problematic history of such motivations. Just within the scope of church history we have the examples of Diocletian gathering the Romans together to fight against the scourge of Christianity; then Christians taking charge and having a very troublesome time in the Dark Ages when they couldn’t find enough evils to fight against besides each other; then the popes began calling together all western European Christians to fight against the evil Muslims –– freely killing off any Jews, Orthodox and non-believers who happened to get in their way –– which in turn brought the Muslims together to fight against these evil Christian invaders; then you had the grand Catholic versus Protestant wars throughout Europe and their colonies, with plenty of anathemas going back and forth; then there was a phase of white colonists rising up against the evil empires which sent them out to begin with, seeking to be free from the evils of the economic oppression they felt they were under; then the darker skinned residents of European colonies abroad started fighting together against the evil burdens white men were placing on them; then came Marxist revolutionaries, attempting to unify peasants and factory workers against the evils of global capitalism; then there were the Nazis rising up against what they saw as the twin evils of Communism and the Jewish conspiracy to oppress the “master race”; then came the Cold War, with a drawn out stalemate between NATO and Soviet blocs, each thoroughly indoctrinating their children as to how evil the other side was; until now we’re once again we seem to be in a state where people can’t decide which evil is most important to join together in fighting against, and where uneducated Americans in particular seem to be randomly attacking whatever evils they can find.

Odds are that somewhere within that last run-on sentence each reader here came to some point where they said to themselves, “yes but that really was evil!” That would essentially demonstrate my point: for all their problems, hatreds and indignations over perceived evils get people involved and get stuff done. This is a dynamic we really can’t ignore. We have to find ways to use it to get stuff that really needs doing done. Towards that end we have to form some sort of clear picture of evil to motivate people with.

For President Obama the first great evil that he has worked to unite people in opposition to was the completely dysfunctional state of the US healthcare system. The second great evil that he has tried to rally people in opposition to is the lack of concern that many Americans feel for those who are suffering and abused, often at the hands of rich Americans, both at home and abroad. Those are tough evils to convince Americans to fighting against though, especially since it isn’t entirely clear how those evils are different from those being rallied to fight against them. American Republicans, on the other hand, are trying to rally people together to fight against the concept of taxation in general as inherently evil; and against the idea of evil, dark-skinned, non-English-speaking foreigners (like the late Barack Obama Senior) coming into our country, using our public services, stealing our women and giving us little in return. Those are far less coherent concepts, but far easier to sell to the ignorant as objects of hatred to fight against.

Can I do better than that in terms of presenting a clear picture of what evil is worth opposing these days? I frankly doubt it, but do I feel that I at least have a moral obligation to present a coherent picture of what I see as evil and what I am willing to stand up and fight against. I believe that if more people would take the trouble to do this for themselves, politicians and hate-mongers would have less to work with when they come to manipulate us. Here then are the great evils I wish to fight against:

Envy – Too many people get hung up on competition with others to the point where they would rather destroy everything the other has than accept the roll of being the one with fewer toys. This sort of destructive competitive impulse has been the cause of ridiculous amounts of needless violence, pointless consumerism (and the environmental destruction it causes) and useless personal anxiety. If people could get beyond this impulse the world would be an infinitely safer and more pleasant place for all of us. And all it would really require is for them to grow up a bit.

Bigotry – The ignorant assumption that “our group” is naturally better than “their group” might be useful for inspiring some sad souls whose self-image is in the crapper otherwise, but that doesn’t by any means excuse it. This might be harder to outgrow than envy, but it can be seriously improved on with education. When people actually come to understand something about where the “others” are coming from in terms of their own situations and motivations, they actually tend to discover that they aren’t nearly as strange, disgusting or inferior as they had previously assumed, or been conditioned to believe.

Bullying – In this form of evil –– yet another sort of defensive maneuver used in personal competition –– juvenile-minded individuals start looking for someone they can prove that they are stronger and “cooler” than, and they then proceed to find ways of torturing that vulnerable individual in order to beef up their own status. As a teacher I’ve told students that I consider bullies to be a life form somewhere between earthworms and cockroaches on an evolutionary scale, but that wasn’t a very philosophical way of putting it. The main point is that bullying causes all sorts of deep personal damage to both the bullied and the bullies that in turn lead to lifetime patterns of destructive and anti-social behavior in both. Teach kids not to bully each other –– teach adults not to continue bullying each other –– and a great number of the stupid and immoral things that businessmen and politicians do beat up on others could be eliminated within a generation.

Scape-goating – Rather than following the ritual given in the Jewish scriptures that this practice takes its name from, these days we have extensive numbers of evil people who look for vulnerable individuals to take the blame for all of their problems and the results of their bad decisions. The classic example that everyone seems aware of is what Hitler did with the Jews: claiming that all of the Germans’ problems were then Jews’ fault, thus they deserved to die. Usually, however, this evil practice is far more individualized and subtly personally vindictive. It can be a teacher, a classmate, a co-worker, a boss, a spouse, a neighbor… that the escapist accuses of having caused all of the problems in their life, or that of their child. And far too often these accusers manage to convince themselves that the charges they press are perfectly valid. Not only can this do the same sorts of damage on both sides as bullying, but it also prevents people from ever facing up to their personal responsibility for the state of their own lives. Fix that, and a whole range of other problems automatically get dealt with in the same stroke.

Sexual abuse – This is one of the more traditionally recognized forms of evil, where some aggressor (male or female) chooses some involuntary participant (male or female) to satisfy his or her sexual desires. Even if this is not a physically torturous experience, which it most frequently is, the emotional damage this causes to the victim in terms of a loss of self-confidence and a personal sense of value are immeasurable. The way in which this can prevent the victim from experiencing sex as a form of deep personal bonding thereafter is a tragedy of the highest level. The way in which victims of such abuse proceed to self-medicate and take out their sense of bitterness and resentment on others can lead to social dysfunctions of epic proportion. What counts as criminally prosecutable rape is not the issue here. The question is, are both parties in the sex act doing it as partners, in every sense of the word? If not, regardless of the legalities involved, there’s something evil going on. Another thing that can turn sexuality into a form of abuse is when it is based on some form of deception, such as adulterous cheating. I believe that complete physical intimacy should always have, at the bare minimum, a fully voluntary and mutually respectful quality to it. Ideally it should also have a dimension of emotional and/or spiritual connection to it. Lacking the latter can make it cheap; lacking the former can make it out and out evil.

Dehumanization – Perhaps in the broader sense of the word, dehumanization is the common thread in all of the evils mentioned above, but in the deepest sense of the word this is the essence of what combatants are trained to do to each other: don’t think of the enemy as a fellow human being; think of him as a target to take out as part of the game, or an animal to be hunted down, or a strategic objective to be accomplished. Give them slang names that keep you from thinking of them as real people. That makes it a lot easier, if necessary, to torture, rape, kill and mutilate these individuals in order to gain an advantage in battle. While I’m not a strict pacifist, I can’t believe that any objective which requires that form of psychological conditioning in order to be achieved can be used as a justification for such means. Whenever we have to stop thinking of other people as inherently valuable human beings in order to do what we intend to do, we have stepped over the line into complete evil, regardless of how we try to justify it.

So what do all of these things have in common? Besides a laundry list of sins that I particularly hate, is there some basic quality to all of these things that makes them really evil? And to what extent are all of these tendencies inborn rather than the result of corruptions we are educated into? My answers –– and you are free to disagree with me without my consequently considering you to be evil –– are that in our postmodern world these are the things which most deserve to be hated, because they lead to the greatest damage to and destruction of the human spirit. They isolate people from God (or a sense of spirituality, if you prefer) and from each other, and they prevent people from truly loving themselves in a healthy way. These things potentially happen for all sorts of reasons, but more than anything else because of a tendency for cut-throat competition to become the meaning of life for some people. If “winning” is ultimately more important to you than any other form of human satisfaction, that makes you a potentially very evil person.

Redemption, in turn, comes back to a matter of setting aside our pursuit of personal victory, and putting a shared sense of thriving, connection and appreciation for the gift of life at the top of our personal priorities. In this regard the essence of the Christian message is that if we live by our own competitive instincts, we automatically lose where it really counts; but by throwing ourselves on the pure mercy of God we can still “win,” as long as we are willing to set aside our competitive nastiness in the process.

Can atheists and those of other religious persuasions find their own ways of living beyond their competitive instincts? In individual cases I have little doubt. In fact I have greater doubts as to whether my fellow Christians can ever consistently live up to ideals expressed in this message of redemption. What I won’t do is lay out the alternative narratives by which the others can find their paths to personal redemption, but in order not to be a bigot or a bully about it I need to acknowledge that I don’t have any exclusive right to represent God, and it is completely possible and plausible that they can find such a path without my help.

Meanwhile, in terms of my own “spiritual warfare,” on my honor I pledge to fight against all six of the evils listed above, with whatever strength and by whatever means God grants me. How many others are there here who will pledge to join me in this sacred quest?