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- #21
This all sounds like trump!!!1. An essential element in recognizing evil, in the context I mean it, is that evil is often gratuitous.
There are gradations of evil, true enough, but usually we know the motivation: money, power, love....personal aggrandizement that leads the weak of character to murder, steal, injure, torture....to attain profits of some sort.
2. But....not just to gain power.....evil can be recognized in the use of power, as well.
"The late Roman emperors were good at this sort of thing ordering someone to be killed in the middle of a dinner party,...and expecting the other guests to laugh. ...trying to be ingenious and unpredictable.
Stalin used to gather cronies and henchmen...for all night dinner-and-drinking sessions; at dawn, for fun, one or two of the guests might be led away, in sodden terror,to be executed by the NKVD. No explanation- just the heavy whimsy of the Antichrist awardng a door prize at the end of his party."
Lance Morrow, "Evil: An Investigation," p. 23
3. But, what to say when the motive is elusive?
a. "Las Vegas shooting motive eludes investigators as new details emerge about gunman Stephen Paddock"
Las Vegas shooting motive eludes investigators as new details emerge about gunman Stephen Paddock
b. "Texas Church Shooting: More Than Two Dozen Parishioners Killed Federal officials said the motive for the shooting was unclear. " More than two dozen parishioners killed in rural Texas church shooting
4. There is, of course, a way to understand most crimes....even some that we claim as 'incomprehensible.'
Evil.
It is the motivation. It may be a force, or the personification...Lucifer himself.
Evil is personified as Lucifer, Satan....the angel who lost his battle with God.
So.....evil is associated with God, in at least some sense.
"When two snipers were terrorizing the Washington, D.C. area, in the fall of 2002, at one point they left a Tarot card, "I am God," in an empty shell casing at the scene of one of their murders. The snipers were a study in the dynamics of doing a certain sort of evil: the gratuitiousness of their predations , the secrecy, the terror, the (one gathers) satanic glee, the random quality of their shootings, the sense of power, the immense injustice of their inflictions, the people struck down dindiscriminantly, with no reason, no order, no rational, all at the whim of the destoyer: Evil is an imitation of God...."
Lance Morrow, Op.Cit., p. 36-37
I say that at some level, motiveless evil is the desire, the attempt to be God-like.....exactly the same motive as Lucifer.
And....yet again, ExlaxMan brings nothing to the conversation.
OK.....back to your blanket-fort.