Posted by
ricaler on Thursday, February 21, 2008 8:57:09 PM
A three year old boy is found by his mother doodling with whipped cream over their new, wide-screen TV. Whipped cream is everywhere else in the room as well, it's covering the coffee table, little sister is a new creation with only her eyes peering out of the white mounds of cream. Two or three empty cans of whipped cream litter the floor. Mom is aghast! We've all seen the videos on AFV. Cute, devilish, bad? ..........Fast foward 10 years. A thirteen year old boy has been discovered to have scratched the paint on the new SUV severely enough to require a visit to the repair shop. All of this done over a perceived slight about friends he's no longer allowed to visit after school. Cute, devilish, bad, really bad, evil, worse? What's the difference? Aren't both destructive of property? Don't both behaviors violate "the rules" of acceptable behavior? ....Fast foward again...10 years. A twenty three year old man routinely targets tourists for armed robbery, he's stabbed at least half a dozen over the last year. He thinks one died...that was cool, and he wants to send another to the morgue this month. You might be his next target! Cute? Bad? Evil? Epitomy of evil? What words do we use to seperate the progressively worse behaviors? The first behavior is an unintentional transgression, the second is an intentional transgression, and the third is an intentional, willfull, and persistant transgression. I harken back to a previous age when persistant, willfull, intentional evil behavior was spoken of as iniquitious or wicked (if you prefer). Behavior that was intentional evil was refered to as sinful...still a great descriptive term, but we seem reluctant to use it because it might be "judging" someone. Behavior that was an unknowing violation of "the rules" was just deemed evil. Today the common use of evil is to describe iniquitous behavior and the result is confusion, morally, secularly, and spiritually. Try this classification when you read news articles or in your personal inneractions...see if more clarity results.