It took me 2 hours to read “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero” but im writting about it anyway…
Although this article took me so long to read, it did in fact have a lot of diffrient and useful prespectives on the idea of Evil. Its very hard for me to pick one of these people to agree with, as they all came from very diverse backgrounds and had great points on their perspectives of Evil, however I thought that Andrew Deblanco and Kanan Makiya had some awesome discussions on Evil in modern society.
One thing I noticed about all the authors, weather they supported the concept of Evil or not, they all related their discussions to 9/11, the Holacaust, or both. I assume this is because these events are prime examples of evil, and most people can agree that these events wern’t just mere wrongdoings, that they did have some kind of supernatural force (evil) conducting them.
Getting back to Andrew Deblanco; I thought he had a great point about what happend on 9/11 and why we responded in the way we did. Andrew says “At the same time to pretend that an event like that which took place on Sept. 11, 2001, can be explained with the ordinary language of politics or psychology seems to me quite inadequate to what happend. We really did experience evil on Sept. 11. And we need to understand it in order to be able to cope with it.” In plain english, Andrew is saying that the terriorists attacks that took place in NY are evil, and we as Americans must accepct this concept to fully understand it. Kanan Makiya says “The ability to be at one with the desire to die and to inflict death on as many people as possible is truely evil.” She has a great point in stating that a person who will give their own life, and take 100’s of others can not be diagnosed. This type of person (in relation to the terriorists) is a prime example of evil.
In conclusion, this article gives many perspectives on the idea of evil, some supporting it, others rejecting that evil exists. I personally think there is an evil, in my mind there can’t be a person who commits such grusome and horrible acts without some type of evil being behind it. To end my writing… I think i’ll leave you with a quote.
Evil: “You can never fully absorb it. It’s got many dimensions. It lives on through time, in different ways. Its sort of like a great work of art.”