We Need, Once Again, To Understand Good and Evil

Monday, September 15, 2025

Saturday just past I wrote, “One man killed another.  That will never make sense.  Motivation does not matter – it is just an evil act….Any meaning we try to assign to these events is, in some sense, an expression of narcissism….”  But I wonder if anybody really understands?

From the left – “‘Am I safe here?’ TPUSA student speaks out after GWU official calls Kirk assassination ‘fair’” — “Presbyterian College professor’s essay in response to Charlie Kirk murder: ‘Masculinity is a death cult’”  Is there no longer any understanding of evil on the left?  Has it become a label they use only when it suits their point of view?  Do they think themselves God?

Things have long been tortured and a bit crazy in the left-leaning academic world, but I always thought there were limits to how far it would go – like murder.  Yet here we have people trying to justify murder – or worse.  I am sure that if we pressed these people they would tell us they don’t condone murder, just that “they have sympathy with the shooters motivations.”  Pretty fine line there – particularly at a time when if someone points out that Hitler made the trains run on time they are a fascist – a priori.

In an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post, Gabriel Rosenberg has written, “Democracies everywhere are discovering that violent rhetoric can all too easily become violent action.”  That happens because the rhetoric destroys the very idea of right-and-wrong, good-and-evil.  When the detention and deportation of people, most likely that committed criminal acts in their country of origin, that entered the country illegally is somehow comparable to the Nazi death camps, there is no meaningful concept of morality.  When it is stated that an individual that genetically enjoys the physical performance benefits of manhood can fairly compete with individuals that are genetically female, the concept of fairness is dead, as is pretty much any concept of reality.

I must conclude that the left does cast itself in God’s role.  If we mere humans, creations of the Almighty, can define what is and is not moral based on our will alone we are indeed placing ourselves in God’s place.  As a believer I fear for people that do so.  God, whose grace is infinite, has a rather low opinion of blasphemy.  It is not my place to judge, but it is my place to fear God’s judgement.

From a practical standpoint, making ourselves the arbiter of right-and-wrong makes morality fungible.  How can you ever be good in a world where the very idea of what it is to be good changes on a whim?  I love this quote from C.S. Lewis:

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

It seems to me we live in a completely faithless age – where all there is is personal desire and perspective.  Which is a recipe for chaos.

Of course, this did not begin with issues like murder.  It began long ago with things far less morally clear.  We normalized divorce.  Out of wedlock birth became culturally acceptable.  Only after we removed any hint of wrong from the morally grey areas did we begin to destroy the idea in more fundamental ways.  On each step of the path we comforted ourselves by not seeing the slope that lay ahead.  We started to use compassion in opposition to grace instead of as a component of it.  And now we are here, in a place where we try to justify murder.

I know, most of the world understands the utter evil that was the assassination of Charlie Kirk.  But I fear the significant minority that insists on making the plainly immoral seem reasonable.  There is a sickness out there that we have to deal with.  And it is not going to be easy and it is not going to be comfortable.  And if we do not get straight in our own minds what is right and what is wrong, not just about murder but a host of issues, they will have won the battle.