Religious people have this powerful concept, "evil", that many of us seem to have lost in our effort to see the world rationally, according to the old concept of "Enlightenment". And yet, I think that what's happening around us deserves to be described in this way. The wanton destruction of everything - human and non human - under a pervasive blanket of indifference can only be described as evil walking the Earth.
Here is a meditation by Richard Rohr - Franciscan Friar. He mentions brush fires not in the context of climate change, but the meaning is clear.
The Invisible Spiral of Violence |
Meditation 22 of 52 |
If you cannot recognize evil on the level of what I call the
world, then the flesh and the devil are inevitable consequences.
They will soon be out of control, and everything is just trying to
put out brush fires on already parched fields. The world or “the
system” is the most hidden, the most disguised, and the most
denied—but foundational—level of evil. It’s the way cultures,
groups, institutions, and nations organize themselves to survive.
It is not “wrong” to survive, but for some reason group
egocentricity is never seen as evil when you have only
concentrated on individual egocentricity (“the flesh”). That is
how our attention has been diverted from the whole spiral of
violence. The “devil” then stands for all of the ways we
legitimate, enforce, and justify our group egocentricity (most
wars; idolization of wealth, power, and show; tyrannical
governments; many penal systems; etc.), while not now calling it
egocentricity, but necessity!
Once any social system exists, it has to maintain and assert
itself at all cost. Things we do inside of that system are no
longer seen as evil because “everyone is doing it.” That’s why
North Koreans can march lockstep to a communist tyranny, and why
American consumers can “shop till they drop” and make no moral
connections whatsoever. You see now why most evil is hidden and
denied, and why Jesus said, “Father forgive them, they don't know
what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). We
don’t.
