Hostility, hatred, and violence are the greatest evils we have to contend with today. Evil is now-ever has been, and ever will be-an existential reality, an inescapable fact with which we all must reckon. Our discomfort resides largely in the religious and theological implications of evil, based on values, ethics, and morals that many today find judgmental. What is more, we need to discriminate between evil and good in our daily fife with others, and as psychologists in our professional work. On a still subtler level, evil can be considered that tendency which - whether in oneself or others - would inhibit personal growth and expansion, destroy or limit innate potentialities, curtail freedom, fragment or disintegrate the personality, and diminish the quality of interpersonal relationships. …show more content…
We see evil every day in its infernally multifarious forms. Existential evil is an ineluctable part of our human destiny, and one with which we must reckon as best we can, without closing ourselves off to its tragic, intrinsic reality. Human evil can be perpetrated by a single individual or by a group, a country, or an entire culture. The most pernicious form of evil today, may be madness, mental illness, or psychopathology:. It is evil in this guise, and in its most radical manifestation-destructive violence-that has now become the target of such intense psychological scrutiny and treatment.
One of the oldest dilemmas in philosophy is also one of the greatest threats to Christian theology. The problem of evil simultaneously perplexes the world's greatest minds and yet remains palpably close to the hearts of the most common people. Evil, in a general context, is the absence or opposite of that which is ascribed as being good. In certain religious contexts, evil has been described as a supernatural