No Honest Conversations about Evil are Possible

by Bob Allen 

We can’t have honest conversations about evil because we no longer know how to recognize it.
Erick Erickson of RedState wrote a pretty moving post about the Dylann Roof massacre: “The Conversation We Won’t Have.”

Yet again we have a twenty-something white male loner or semi-loner who got a gun and decided to kill people. In most cases we have found that the mass shooter was mentally disturbed. In this case, it looks more and more that Dylann Roof was just a servant of an evil that says some of those created in the image of God are better than others or that some people are not created in the image of God at all. 

As a nation, when these things happen, we never have the conversation about real evil. We also never have the conversation about mental health. For that matter, we don’t have honest conversations about why some kid in Minnesota or Alabama would want to go join ISIS and kill their fellow citizens or why some kid would want to join neo-nazis or a gang.

Instead, we descend into partisan conversations where everything is political and neither side can concede or acknowledge the other’s points. Everyone and everything gets blamed while ignoring the actual person who killed.

My summation: We cannot have this conversation, because we have thrown away the yardstick, and no longer have a common standard to which everyone can appeal. No longer do we have an acknowledged authority. In such an environment no one is safe, because as soon as you take ultimate power out of the transcendent and put it into the hands of men, authority shifts with each new person who holds office—or has the biggest gun.

Instead of the one, true God, in America we now have 330-million pretend gods—every one of whom wants his or her own view of reality—no matter how warped—to be enshrined as law for all. That is why every discussion becomes a political discussion, because it’s all about human-crafted power, rather than bowing to the real Power outside of ourselves.
As long as we have a pantheon of gods equaling the number of people within our borders we will have an unending war for control of the alleged “Ring of Power” which resides in political office. As long as men see themselves as god, there will be war without end. If we will not freely bow to our Maker, we will find ourselves more and more forced to bow to the whims of men.
We deny evil, because to admit it exists is to confess we are.