Religion and Horror: Between Heaven, Hell, and Earth.
Part One: The Question of Evil.

Introduction written by and Essays compiled by Anthony Servante

Homer has a Choice to Make

Introduction:

Oft-times, the definition of “evil” comes down to angels and demons. We imagine an angel on our right shoulder and a devil on the left. Note: the right side is where our heart is and “right” is “good”, while “left” in Latin means “sinister”. These creatures whisper advice in our ears, convincing us to make a decision when we are at a crossroads between choosing a good or bad action (e.g., when we want to shoplift a candy bar). When we choose the bad decision, we did something bad, and when we choose the good, we did something good. We choose between good and bad as if they existed outside ourselves in a tangible form, because if our action had no definition, our decisions would have no meaning and that existence outside ourselves would simply be “chaos” and anarchy. So, where does our definition of “evil” come from, if not from ourselves or “something” outside ourselves? That’s where religion comes in.

Religion gives us boundaries so we know the limits and consequences of our actions. We have Heaven and Hell. We have Karma. We have Reincarnation. We have a set of rules. But, as we have seen since time in memoriam, these rules often have various interpretations. This variance exists because science and philosophy give us so many options. Evolution versus Creation, for one. Free Will versus Predetermination, for another. Let’s look at the definition of “evil” through the eyes of William James to start things off.

For James, Evil is the absence of order. Without rules, there can only be evil actions. Consider that the universe is part of a divine plan, a perfect unity; then evil and good would play opposing roles but fall under the same umbrella, thereby rendering them both equally “good” under God’s divinity. James believed evil could not exist in a perfect or divine order. Therefore, evil had to be the opposite of order: chaos. Good is defined by our following the divine plan, while evil is defined by our following no plan. For instance, a perfect person who obeys all the laws can do no evil; if he accidentally kills a person while obeying a law, then he did no evil. Maybe he was wrong, but wrong is not evil, no more than guessing the wrong answer on a test is evil. But if a perfect person intentionally kills a person, he is disobeying the law and doing evil and wrong. While the former person committed “manslaughter”, unintentional murder, the latter person committed first degree murder, intentional murder (premeditated). For James, the former person is called “healthy-minded”, happy within the rules of divinity, while the latter is called a “sick soul”, happy outside the rules of divinity. Think Hannibal Lecter happy. James sums it up: “Evil is empirically there for them [evil doers] as it is for everybody” (Varieties of Religious Experience). In other words, we can choose evil; we can disobey the divine rules as easily as we can the legal rules of civilization.

Similarly, CS Lewis believed that there exists a “dualism”, good and evil forces fighting for the decisions of man, much as our devil and angel sitting on our shoulders. Our conscience is constantly at odds to make the right choice, but often mislead by bad advice. The divine plan is still in motion, regardless of the choice one makes; the choice was always God’s will. Thus CS Lewis argues, “The moral difficulty is that Dualism gives evil a positive, substantive, self-consistent nature, like that of good.” The contradiction here is then that the Devil, Satan himself, is part of the plan, a predetermined agent of free will, leaning toward evil, just as Christ is a predetermined agent for good. Still, as with William James, we have a person willing to choose evil for its own sake. How often have we heard after a great disaster of death, an earthquake or hurricane that takes many lives, or a small tragedy where one innocent child is killed, “It is God’s will” or “God works in mysterious ways” or “God wanted these victims now rather than later”?

Kevin Bufton on evil

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When I was a boy, I always felt that I understood the nature of Evil.

That’s Evil with a capital ‘E’, of course. Born and raised a Catholic, it all seemed so much easier in those days. Before I continue, I must point out that I am, in no sense, a theologian, or an expert on Catholic dogma, and that the views I present here are not the Church’s official stance on evil, as a living breathing entity. Rather, it represents how I felt about it at the time, those feelings being viewed (and, if I’m honest, distorted) through two decades’ worth of staunch atheism.

But there I was, altar boy and Boy Scout, and I understood what Evil was. It was always something that came from outside. The Church had a name for it, of course – it used to call the phenomenon The Devil. Oh sure, your average man or woman was capable of acts of astonishing cruelty, but only because they allowed Satan to corrupt them. The love of God was being pushed from their hearts, because they had been tempted by the Dark One.

You remember that line from the Lord’s Prayer, right? “Lead us not into temptation.” As a good Catholic boy that was the Golden Rule, the one that stood above an beyond even the Ten Commandments, as it was proclaimed at every Mass, every school assembly and…well…pretty much the whole time, now I come to think of it.

I understand religion using an outside force as the source of all Evil – it is in the nature of religion to cultivate an Us vs. Them mentality. It seemed to me, even as a kid, that it was too easy an explanation for the very real horrors the world seemed to dole out on a daily basis. Starving children in Africa, earthquakes in Armenia, tsunamis and landslides, war crimes and murder – this was not the behaviour of a kind and loving God.

As I grew older, my faith waned. I didn’t set out to become an atheist, nor did anybody try to persuade me to. Over the course of many years I found that too many of my questions were not being answered to my satisfaction. We had a number of excellent priests both at Sacred Heart Church and at St Mary’s Catholic College – all good, godly folk, for whom I had nothing but respect. It wasn’t their fault that the Good Book was inadequately prepared to fend off my youthful curiosity.

Over the years, that curiosity hardened itself into something akin to cynicism. Actually, scratch that – I’m not a cynic. It’s true that I think humanity is capable of inflicting unspeakable atrocities on one another, but it is also capable of extraordinary kindness and generosity. I guess I like to think of myself as a realist, and the reality is this – evil comes from within.

As an atheist, this has to be the case, and that’s horrifying. If there is no God, then there is no excuse for evil. This is something that I believe in my heart of hearts. I don’t want to hear about upbringing, social division, peer pressure, privilege (or the lack thereof) – those are excuses. You may as well say that the Devil made you do it. Evil is really easy to define, if you’re a secular chap like myself. If you know that something is morally wrong, and you choose to do it anyway, for no material gain, then you are evil – you have committed an evil act. I’m prepared to hear any retorts to this definition, but you’ll be hard pressed to sway me from my position.

Murder, rape, bullying, child abuse, bigotry, torture – we know that these things are unacceptable, and yet they happen every day, all over the world. As you’re reading these words, somewhere on this planet, a wife is being beaten black and blue by a husband who made a solemn vow to honour and to protect her; a teenager is being bullied to the point of suicide by his own schoolmates; dogs are being forced to fight one another before a crowd of cheering spectators in some dodgy underground car park; a mother is letting her baby starve to death, because she has grown to hate the thing she brought into this world.

Every single one of those perpetrators is evil, and if you’re a psychiatrist or a psychologist and you fancy defending them because they operate under different societal norms than most of us – fuck you. “The Devil made me do it” is not an acceptable defence these days, and putting a different hat on the Great Horned One doesn’t alter that fact.

I’m a horror writer – I write about monsters, which are examples of evil coming from without, and they are breezy things to write, despite the gore, because there is little in the way of a moral quandary for the protagonists. This evil that is set against them is not of their doing, so they cannot be blamed. There again, I sometimes write about human beings, who know exactly what they’re doing when they commit their vile acts. Writing such characters can be emotionally draining, because I have to switch my mindset to that of a guy, just like me, but without any restraints.

Even then, I can pick up a newspaper on any given day of the week, and see more evil committed than I could ever set down in a novel and then, to make matters worse, I guarantee I can find at least one comment, on one message board defending, or justifying the most abhorrent acts imaginable.

Lead us not into temptation, that old prayer goes.

Deliver us from Evil.

Amen.

Mark Parker: on Evil

ON THE NATURE OF EVIL

Evil: The Result of Freedom Put to the Test?

by

Mark Parker

For as long as human kind has been in existence, the question of evil, and its nature, has been on the minds, and in the hearts, of those in the natural order, created with intellect and the power to reason. From the beginning of humanity’s inception, the struggle between good and evil—to find an apt correlation between the two—has been wrestled with by men and women, in hopes of finding some semblance of what the actual meaning of evil is. But, more importantly, what it might mean to our lives; the import and impact it might have on us, both physically and spiritually.

One might ask, how could any of us rightly know what evil is—or what it isn’t? As is the same when attempting to define a universal concept such as love, try as we might, none of us really come close to defining what we’re attempting to, in considering such a thing. Rather, in attempting to do so, we primarily point to the attributes a thing like evil is imbued with—as if doing so might sufficiently explain what our mere vocabulary cannot.

When asked to define evil, we mostly speak around the topic; talking of ghosts and goblins, demons and devils, possession and the possessed, as if each of these things might substantially offer some sort of true meaning to what it is that we’re questioning. But, of course, to some extent even that fails—or at least falls short. Humanity’s ongoing struggle to give definition to a concept like evil, only serves to produce a kind of existential, metaphysical tension in our hearts, minds, and souls, causing us to remain frustrated at still having no further clarity on the topic, despite how far we’ve managed to get in our discussions. Why must it all be so difficult, we ask? Can’t the meaning of evil really be as simple or un-convoluted as the playground assertion that evil is merely the word live spelled backwards?

In some ways, perhaps it can be—at least in rudimentary ways. More often than not, the direst truths are based on a simple crux, inverted or otherwise. In speaking of evil as the word live spelled backwards, we point to a simplistic rationale that in some ways makes perfect sense when we think about it. And, why wouldn’t it? Surely it can be said that evil is the counterpart or opposite of what is termed to be ‘good.’ The contrast to that which is, at the very least, life-giving.

Following St. Augustine and scholastics such as St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas, it is suggested that in our attempt to define evil, we must not attribute to evil what is not proper to it, namely a nature or substantial existence of its own. “Evil has no existence in itself, for it is merely a privation of good in some being, and not a positive being [in itself]. Evil is an absence, defect, a negation, a privation. Evil is a lack of something in a good which is proper to it and which it ought to possess.”

When we consider what the origin of evil might be, most of us only have what generations of religious teachings or posited moral constructs have taught us. And naturally so. Scripture asserts that evil was the natural consequence of man choosing to “eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 3), when he was specifically instructed not to. That, in fact, evil was the rightful result of man choosing disobedience over fidelity to his creator. Disobedience inasmuch as our first parents chose to act in a way that was out of accord with what was intended, therefore relinquishing paradise in favor of subjugation. The moral prison created through their act of betrayal.

In most Western religious teachings—Christianity, most specifically—the time of man’s fall from grace created a path of diversion for the rest of humanity to follow—or at least, a move from man’s original innocence, to a state of original sin.

In an effort to illustrate this, if we consider a vessel carrying crude oil, should that vessel run aground—through the fault of the one operating it—therefore bleeding a hull of crude into an ecosystem that was pure prior to the vessel’s wreckage—it is clear to see how such an incident of the crude comingling with the system around it, forever tainted all that it came in contact with, thereby irreversibly altering the balanced purity of what existed before.

Scripture would hold that, similarly, when our first parents chose to act in a way that was deigned to be out of accord with what their creator had provided for their sufficient good, they were left to live the result of their action; the same action that altered what was to follow in man’s continuing story. This assertion speaks to the consequential breach that was formed, between who we were created to be…and who we’ve become through our oftentimes wrong exercising of the gift of our Free Will.

In studying the Spanish language, one quickly learns the word sin in Spanish translates to mean without, which is both interesting and telling in this instance. Perhaps it could then be said that “evil” defines those times when humans act in ways contrary to their nature, or the will of the one who created us—outside the embrace of providential love.

Scripture would go on to suggest that in man’s fallen state, we have become consciously aware of our own propensity to choose evil, act in evil ways, or do evil things, and therefore are made all the more desperate for it. While Christianity would assert that humanity was created with the gift of Free Will in order to choose freely to love our Creator, and love one another. Simply put . . . when we live separate from this truth—this gift—we are living ‘in sin,’ or under the burden (or problem) of evil. So in attempting to determine just what evil is, or what its nature is—whether it is cause or consequence—perhaps we might conclude it’s a bit of both.

In Clive Barker’s novel, The Damnation Game, the following quote opens the book, and aptly so:

“Hell is the place of those who have denied;

They find there what they planted and what dug,

A Lake of Spaces, and a Wood of Nothing,

And wander there and drift, and never cease

Wailing for substance.”

—W. B. Yeats, The Hour Glass

Jeff Parish on evil.

CHASING “EVIL”

By Jeff Parish

On the cartoon Spongebob, the geriatric Mermaid Man is famous for shouting “Evil!” and running off in some random direction. The evil may be a true villain, a tree or a water fountain. Some, like the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, would have us believe the notions of “good” and “evil” are just as silly, mere abstract terms that have no real meaning. Among the more religious-minded, however, evil is a very real problem.

But what is “evil”?

In English, the word has two basic meanings. One is something that causes injury or harm. This is an archaic usage frequently found in the Bible. After Moses led Israel out of slavery in Egypt, he spent forty days on Mount Sinai talking with God and receiving the Commandments. In that time period, the Israelites decided to make a golden calf and worship it. Which understandably made the Lord angry. He decided He would wipe out the nation and start over with Moses (Exodus 32:10). But thanks to Moses’ intercession, “the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (Exodus 32:14). Or as the New American Standard puts it: “So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.”

The more prevalent meaning of “evil” and the we understand it is as a force in nature that governs and gives rise to wickedness and sin. This definition is even more common in Scripture. The account of the Flood begins with, “GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). Judges 2:11 echoes a common refrain found throughout the book: “Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals.” In 2 Samuel 12:9, Nathan asks King David, “Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the Lord, to do evil in his sight? Thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon.”

But where does this wickedness come from? Some argue that it must be God since He is the primum movens. Except Scripture says otherwise. Psalm 5:4 tells us the Lord is “not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: Neither shall evil dwell with thee.” The New Testament takes it a step further with James 1:13 -- “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.” The apostle John perhaps summed it up best in 3 John 11: “Beloved, do not imitate what is evil, but what is good. The one who does good is of God; the one who does evil has not seen God.”

God does not create evil. In fact, evil is the antithesis of God. Genesis tells us what the Lord creates is good. C.S. Lewis notes in the ninth letter of The Screwtape Letters that evil lacks the power of creation. It can twist and distort that which God has provided, but it cannot truly make something new. Anything good can be warped and perverted. Take the desire to provide for a family or oneself. Push it a little further, and you get Ebenezer Scrooge. Patriotism and love of one’s country can drive men to perform great, selfless deeds. They can also be used as an excuse for atrocities and give rise to men like Adolf Hitler. These are not things God created; they are what man has accomplished with what God has given him -- namely, free will.

As far back as the Garden, God has always given the human race a choice as to whether or not to follow His instructions. Life is a pass/fail, sink-or-swim kind of test, but the decisions are ours. We are not robots receiving instructions and mindlessly repeating a task over and over again. We are free moral agents. And that is something we should all embrace. Far from being cruel, God’s gift of free will is the ultimate display of love. As parents, we teach our children and send them out into the world with the ability to make their own decisions. We hope they choose good. We train them to do so, but that does not mean they will not stumble. Even with the best upbringing, a child may well make bad decisions and have to live with the consequences, be they personal, financial, or even criminal. Does that mean we hate our children? Of course not. Any parent who has to deal with a wayward child grieves and hurts like no other, but neither generation has a claim on the sins of the other, whether they were sins of omission or commission. We certainly have plenty of both.

History shows us that evil comes in two forms: Passive and active. In fact, they often go hand-in-hand. Names scream of cruelty and mass murder from the annals of time: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, the Khmer Rouge, the Inquisition. There is no doubt that these people and more did horrible things -- often in the name of helping their fellow man -- but how many of them could have climbed to such horrific heights without the broader population’s help? And how often did that aid come in the form of apathy or a blind eye? As John Stuart Mill said, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” God does not come into this picture, except as an absence.

Mankind has no one to blame but himself if his time on this earth is more Hell than Paradise. And that is evil, indeed.

Thank you to our authors for enlightening us on the subject of Evil. In Part Two of Religion and Horror, we will look at seven novels exemplifying the various views on religious evil as discussed in our introduction and in our essays. Here is a list of the works that will be analyzed:

Milton: Paradise Lost

William Peter Blatty The Exorcist

Billie Sue Mosiman Banished

Lisa Lane Myths of Gods

Hank Schwaeble Diabolical

Kat Yares Vengeance is Mine

Elizabeth Massie Sineater.

We will announce when Part Two will go live on Facebook. Check Anthony Servante’s timeline for updates. Thank you for visiting the Dark Entertainment Trends Blog on this Sunday.

(Edited June 2nd, 2024, from the Servante of Darkness Blog Archives.)