Why We Shouldn’t Label People

In an over-polarized era, labels abound. Liberal, RINO, socialist, neo-con, Nazi, Marxist, racist—all these and more aren’t meant to be descriptive but dismissive. Especially when we assign the additional labels of good or evil to people. Labels shut down discussion. We use them to put people—who at that...

If An Evil Person Does a Good Thing, Is It Good or Evil?

“Whoever is not with me is against me.” “Whoever is not against us is for us.” Jesus made both of these statements, and they aren’t different ways of saying the same thing. The first, from Matthew 12:20, restricts the number of people who are for Jesus to those who are with him. If you aren’t specifically...

Good and Evil and the Untrained Eye

In Matthew 13 Jesus tells a parable about a man with a wheat field. During the night, some guy with a really, really bad attitude snuck in and sowed some weeds among the wheat. Which is interesting because weeds are the kind of things that don’t need sowing. They just appear. But these aren’t ordinary...

How a Normal Person Moves Toward Evil

The first and most basic step toward doing something evil is when you consider another person as something less. Less godly. Less good. Less human. When Europeans decided Africans with their superstitious religions were less godly, with their cannibilistic ways were less good, with their primitive jungle...

The Cross as the Response to Evil

“They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” “Learn war.”  That’s an interesting phrase.  Seems we have, all of us. When I was little I just assumed that we would always be at war. ...

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