moralityFirst of all, for anyone unaware of the news stories about the two pre-teen thugs from Edlington who tortured and abused two little boys, here’s a link to the story. Now, I passed a comment online that I regarded the two perpetrators as evil. I didn’t state they should be hung, drawn and quartered, thrown to wild animals, etc. Just that they were evil.
Now, the definition of evil from a dictionary I have nearby is “morally bad or wrong; wicked; depraved; resulting from or based on conduct regarded as immoral”. I think that the behaviour of the thugs could be described as evil under that definition. And I’m sorry, I may come over as a roaring thunder-lizard of reactionary, non-politically correct thought but I’m afraid that someone who does evil things is, until they reform, evil. And there appears to be no indication that these boys have shown any regret, repentance or even any sort of apology for what they did. From past evidence, it would appear that the only emotion they have felt is the dismay at being caught.
I was quite surprised (whether I should have been or not) when someone came back and questioned whether it was right to call them evil, and other suggestions were made about whether the boys themselves were victims of their upbringing and background. I have to say that the upbringing of these individuals is shocking depressing, but the one thing that separates human beings from animals is that between stimulus and response we have the capacity for choice. And it is in that moment of choice – that instant where civilised behaviour, conscience and sense of right and wrong operates – that the determination to be evil is made.
The fact that some folks believe that whether a behaviour can be evil or not based purely on circumstances I find to be rather disturbing. The idea that different moral truths hold for different people is called Moral Relativism, I don’t have any time at all for it. Not too long ago I posted on here about the dangers of peering in to the Abyss. These boys seem to be the products of such an activity, aided and abetted by our own culture. Whatever the cause, I don’t honestly see how anyone can look at their behaviour and say it is anything other than evil, and a moral relativist approach to these matters helps no one except the perpetrators and apologists for them. I’d go further; it actually promotes repeat behaviour; by failing to come down firmly about an issue and say that ‘that behaviour is wrong’ or ‘that behaviour is evil’ we provide a moral and ethical grey area.
I don’t believe we should be ashamed to state that something is evil. As CS Lewis pointed out in his work of Christian apologetics ‘Mere Christianity’, the vast majority of human beings seem to have a built in feel for what’s right and wrong, what’s good and evil. As a Christian I try not to judge; I’m far from perfect, after all, but I do believe that there is a ‘line in the sand’ which we can draw in absolute moral terms, and it’s the edge of the abyss I wrote about above. Moral Relativism takes away the sharp drop, building steps for us all to walk down in to the abyss. And for that reason it should be shunned.
I came up with the title for this piece after reading 
If you take a look at the section of this blog that lists posts by the month in which they appear, you’ll see that whilst recent months have been pretty regular, there have been some hiatuses in the past. Looking back over them I can identify the fact that at the beginning of the period of silence, something happened in the ‘day job’ or in life in general that broke me away from writing the blog post. And I stayed away from the blog for a while after that for the simple reason that I hadn’t really become habituated to blogging.
Some years ago I worked for a large UK bank-assurer as a contract software developer. One project that I became involved with was to provide a bug tracking / change management system. As with all software systems, we decided to give it a ‘cool’ name and someone in the team suggested ‘Jedi’.
On 29th December, 1170, four knights of King Henry 2nd killed Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, and thus created a martyr of a man who’s principles had forced him to behave in a manner that was anathema to his King and his one time friend. It’s usually accepted that the King hadn’t actually ordered this assassination, but that the knights took it upon themselves to dispatch the Archbishop after they’d heard him utter those now infamous words ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest’.
Long before it was the title of a movie, it was a fairly well known saying. 
One of my ‘guilty secret’ films is the 1982 John Badham movie ‘War Games’, in which a teenager inadvertently starts the countdown to World War 3 by hacking in to a military computer system. He thinks he’s playing war games, but the computer thinks that it’s the real thing and starts counting down to a real missile launch. At the end of the film, the youth and the computer’s inventor manage to convince the machine to stop it’s attempts to launch the missiles by telling it to try out various game scenarios in which the result is always the same – mutual destruction. The computer, smarter than most politicians, remarks that nuclear war is an interesting game; the only way to win is not to play.
I was reminded earlier today, whilst reading a book called ‘Life 101’, of a useful piece of advice from one of the more under-rated personal development gurus of the mid 20th Century – Sergeant Ernest Bilko of the United States Army. Let’s listen to what he has to say on the topic of a three letter word…
In ancient Jewish society, the scapegoat was a normal goat that was ceremonially loaded with all the sins of the community, and then driven from town in to the wilderness, as part of the ceremonies around the Day or Atonement. The goat would almost certainly die in the desert, and with it would die the sins of the community. The term has passed in to general usage, as we all know, to refer to someone who gets to carry the can when the crap hits the fan.
I was recently fortunate enough to have this old chestnut of an insult thrown at me online in a discussion about some news item. It’s a strange thing to say to anyone; the fact that I’m typing indicates I do indeed have a life, and to be honest I think with my achievements I’ve managed to fit 2 and a half lives or so in to things so far. 🙂