It's all about degrees.
We know that there are troubled people in this world. We also know that our legal systems have a hierarchy of punishment associated with the severity of a particular crime. Whether or not those punishments are always just is a topic for another day. My point here is that there are degrees of punishment based on degrees of action.
One of the commonly spouted tenets of Wicca is that we don't believe in evil. Some clarify the statement to mean an absolute evil, or even an entity associated as a devil in the Abrahamic religions. Others recognize that the world is full of both positive and negative, from the opposite ends of a battery to the behaviors of an individual. I believe that there are evil deeds: murder, rape, molestation, and torture. I also believe that a person committing evil deeds is not an evil person.
I hesitated on using this subject for this week's particular letter. So many people have an opinion on the subject and yet so few are able to articulate their views about it. That's not the fault of the individual. Instead, I think the blame falls to the different avenues of human study: psychology, sociology, and even philosophy.
If you look into the modalities I mentioned you will find scales of behavior, and more specifically, research into an action and whatever it was that caused said action. You'll also find that those actions can be explained by a myriad of conditions, viewpoints, and characteristics. Often, what one modality explains as XYZ, another will explain it as ABC. That's all fine and dandy until someone comes up to us at the supermarket after spotting our pentacle necklace and goes into a speech about how we're being lured by the dark side, whether we know it or not, and that evil is all around us.
Yes and no. My perspective is that anyone can perform evil actions. It's just that most of us have the correct conditioning, mental stability, and whatever else it may be to keep us from doing those actions. There are no evil people. Just deeds.
I'm interested in your thoughts on the subject. Please leave a comment and let me know if you agree, disagree, or don't really care to think about it in detail at this time.
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