But it's a false dichotomy. The world isn't nicely divided into good people and evil people. In fact, there very few evil people, and even those generally considered evil have rarely, if ever, thought themselves to be evil.
People like good and evil because it lets them split the world into two parts. More importantly, it lets us say "I'm not evil, so I must be good". Makes sense, right?
But the world isn't that simple. I rather doubt that any studies have been done to back me up, but I can nonetheless confidently make the assertion that Christianity has lost more souls to pettiness and squabbles within the church itself than it has ever lost to Satanism.
Evil people - well, people we consider evil, although I think they're often just misguided - do damage, certainly. But more damage is done by perfectly normal, everyday, "good" people. Not because these people regularly attempt to genocide entire ethnic groups, but because there are so many more of us. Off the top of my head, I can think of perhaps five genuinely terrible people who have lived in the last half-century. No matter how much damage they do, they will struggle to match the damage done by the 6, 7, 8 billion people who lived alongside them.
And this is where the truly worrying implication of the dichotomy of "good versus evil" becomes apparent. Greater atrocities have been committed by people working fervently for Good than have ever been committed for pride, selfishness, greed or any other hallmark of an evil person. One need only think of the inquisitions, witch-hunts and crusades of the Christian church; the more recent homophobia perpetuated particularly by modern churches, mainly in America but also elsewhere (The rightness or wrongness of homosexuality in a Christian context is a topic I am neither qualified nor willing to discuss, but the blatant hate preached by some churches is doubtlessly wrong); the various atrocities committed by Oriental religions, including militant Buddhist sects in and around the 16th century; and perhaps most strongly in the modern Western consciousness, militant pseudo-Islamic terrorist groups.
These are only a few examples; a little research will provide you with many more. And every one of these groups is convinced that they are doing not just something acceptable to good, but something mandated by good.
To paraphrase Sir Terry Pratchett, they have gotten so caught up in Good and Evil that they have forgotten about right and wrong.
It's a scarily easy thing to do. If you think about it, you will realise that we all do it, to a greater or lesser degree, on an almost daily basis. How many times have you looked down on someone for doing something "evil" - someone you know or someone in the news, it doesn't matter who - and completely forgotten that they are human beings, like us; if you are Christian, they are your fellow (lost) sons and daughters of God.
We get so caught up in insisting that we are good (as opposed to being evil, which we clearly are not) that we excuse almost every wrongdoing as a momentary slip-up. "Okay, so I did something wrong, but I'm still a good person!"
But good people are people who do not do wrong things - or do them as little as humanly possible. Nobody is completely, perfectly good, and I know perhaps a handful of people who are almost good people. Almost, but not quite.
When we trick ourselves into thinking that being "good people" allows us to do wrong things - not evil, but wrong - it is the first step towards a very slippery slope that leads to very "good" people doing very Wrong things.
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