By Scott Tibbs, May 20, 2010
One of the most wicked things about our culture is the obsession so many people have with covering up and excusing things that are just plain evil. This culture does everything possible to avoid exercising discernment and recognizing that some things are genuinely evil.
A case in point was the comment section for the story about a 13 year old boy who was charged with raping a 16 year old girl. Allowing, of course, for the possibility that there was no crime committed and recognizing that the boy has not been convicted, I pointed out that children who commit sexual violence at such a young age are often abused themselves. I also said that the boy may just be evil.
One of the responses floored me:
| Sexual urge is natural and built into each of us to preserve the species. It has nothing to do with being "evil". Man's laws try to govern a natural urge directed by hormones. This law puts an arbitrary age at which it is acceptable to engage in sex. |
What an incredibly misogynistic statement. This accusation against the boy has nothing to do with sex, procreation or sexual urges. This is about rape. Does the poster have a daughter or a niece? What if she was raped? Would the poster then brush aside rape as the product of "natural" sexual urges? This is truly sick.
We live in a culture that hates discernment. We want to find some sort of clinical excuse for unthinkable acts, or excuse the person who commits such acts because of something in his background. We do everything we can to find any excuse other than the most obvious explanation that is slapping us across the face: some people are just plain evil.
Sometimes, our culture's hatred of discernment has tragic (though entirely predictable) consequences. Convicted murderer Willie Horton was given a weekend pass from prison. On one of his furloughs, Horton attacked a young couple, stabbing the man 19 times and repeatedly raping the woman. The scandal crippled Michael Dukakis' ambitions to be President, but Mike Huckabee proved himself to be a fool when he didn't learn the lesson and released a dangerous thug from prison who went on to murder four police officers.
We do this because we do not want to recognize our own depravity before God. Not one single person is righteous. We have all sinned and we are condemned before a holy and righteous God. (See Psalm 14:3, Psalm 53:3 and Romans 3:12.) We hate this truth and we try to pass ourselves off as basically good. some of us even go so far as to find excuses for the most heinous, cruel and abominable acts imaginable.
I understand evil. I am intimately familiar with evil because God has revealed to me my own heart. I am a wicked, violent, egotistical, selfish, arrogant, lazy monster of a man who richly deserves everlasting torment in the fires of Hell. For a reason that I cannot wrap my feeble human brain around, my Father in heaven chose to redeem me of my sins by sacrificing His only Son to suffer and die in my place.
