Every serious conception of life implies the vision of evil and the admission of its existence. To ignore it or not to see it makes a man irresponsible and superficial, cutting him off in some measure from deeper and more profound elements of life. To deny evil is to lose the freedom of the spirit and to escape the burden of freedom.
Our present age has witnessed a terrible increase of evil coupled with the denial of its existence. But man is powerless to resist evil if he fails to recognize it as such.
Human personality deceives itself when, having made a distinction between good and evil, it thinks itself competent to delimit evil. When we abolish such limits and when man finds himself in a state of confusion and indifference, his personality begins to disintegrate, for the power of conscience is inseparably connected with the denunciation of evil.
In the confusion and state of indifference resulting from the loss of the perception of evil man loses his freedom of spirit and begins to reach out after a good which is guaranteed to him by necessity , and thus his center of gravity ceases to be within himself but passes into the external and outward, and he ceases to be determined from within.
Rationalism denies the irrational mystery of evil because it denies that of freedom. It is more difficult for the rationalist to believe in the devil than to believe in God, and people with this mentality elaborate a variety of theories which deny the existence of evil, and by means of which evil is transformed into a mere insufficiency of goodness or else a stage in its development.
-Nikolai Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit
Thoughts:
About the only thing that continues to surprise me these days is people's (continuing and seemingly endless) failure to recognize evil.
You would think that after enduring over eighteen months of unrelenting demonic pressure people would be wise to evil. Ironically enough, in most cases the exact opposite appears to be true. The more intense the evil gets, the less people see it.
Here's a simple little rule of thumb - those who fail to recognize evil also fail to recognize Good.
Our present age has witnessed a terrible increase of evil coupled with the denial of its existence. But man is powerless to resist evil if he fails to recognize it as such.
Human personality deceives itself when, having made a distinction between good and evil, it thinks itself competent to delimit evil. When we abolish such limits and when man finds himself in a state of confusion and indifference, his personality begins to disintegrate, for the power of conscience is inseparably connected with the denunciation of evil.
In the confusion and state of indifference resulting from the loss of the perception of evil man loses his freedom of spirit and begins to reach out after a good which is guaranteed to him by necessity , and thus his center of gravity ceases to be within himself but passes into the external and outward, and he ceases to be determined from within.
Rationalism denies the irrational mystery of evil because it denies that of freedom. It is more difficult for the rationalist to believe in the devil than to believe in God, and people with this mentality elaborate a variety of theories which deny the existence of evil, and by means of which evil is transformed into a mere insufficiency of goodness or else a stage in its development.
-Nikolai Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit
Thoughts:
About the only thing that continues to surprise me these days is people's (continuing and seemingly endless) failure to recognize evil.
You would think that after enduring over eighteen months of unrelenting demonic pressure people would be wise to evil. Ironically enough, in most cases the exact opposite appears to be true. The more intense the evil gets, the less people see it.
Here's a simple little rule of thumb - those who fail to recognize evil also fail to recognize Good.
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