I believe in evil, you should too, here's why.

All our actions are goal-directed actions. Open the window because you want some fresh air. Go to work to earn some money. But what goal does fresh air and money achieve? Is there some final goal that all the little actions and little goals are a means to? Yes there is, and that's living. Living is an end in itself for us.

Unlike all the other animals the prospect of living for humans presents a moral crisis. All the other beasties have their goals and actions set for life. Bees have to make honey, sea gulls scavenge, whales bob about slurping up plankton. We, on the other hand, have to pick our own means of living- it's voluntary for us except that you need to decide how fast because otherwise you'll die of procrastination- that bit isn't a choice. Most of the avaliable options end up killing us, that's what you call bad, and anything left after that's what you call good.

Being around these days in the Western world with our recorded 2000 years of handed-down experience at being intelligent to draw on is rather a good deal. Guys and girls before us have been sorting out this moral crisis about how to live and have eliminated lots of bad choices and recommended lots of good ones. Hat tips to Joseph Lister for antiseptics, Ben Franklin for electricity, The Beatles for the music. And a big thankyou to this year's Darwin Award recipients for showing us what not to do.

Yes, between capitalism and modern Western civilisation we've pretty much got this moral crisis each and every one of us is faced with cornered and wimpering in submission! If we keep this up our strength for living, and the corresponding joy in living, can only improve. But now I come to evil.

Using your intellect to exercise volition- that's the name of the game. So evil is what? Evil is force. Force and mind are opposites. Without our volition, without the ability to choose goal-directed action, morality comes to an end and with it your power to live. Force is the death of us, freedom is a moral imperitive. But now I come to evil-doers.

"My position was that you cannot divorce evil from its practitioners — evil is not a Platonic abstraction existing in some other dimension independently of the human beings who perpetrate it — and that it's perfectly proper to attack them personally precisely for the evil that they are perpetrating & provided one can show that they are indeed doing that, in which case the attacks are not gratuitous or ad hominem"
- Lindsay Perigo

This I fully agree with. Evil is a name for human goals and actions at their very worst misuse. The freedom we need is not freedom from the forces of reality (this is our volition's subject matter) but freedom from other people tampering with our capacity for morality. You might end up in the same deadly bind either way, perhaps holding onto a cliff by your fingertips. If your own free choices lead you there and to slip to your death then there's no evil, nobody else to blame. But if someone forced you into that same position against your volition then that is evil. Evil needs human beings to perpetrate it. There are no evil trees or evil spirits, just us.

To that extent it is perfectly proper to send these wishes to the following individual perpetrators of evil, looking them in the eye and to their faces:

"Death to Destiny Church!"
"Death to Scouting New Zealand!"
"Death to Shinto!"
"Death to The Salvation Army"
"Death to St Stephens Anglican Church!"
"Death to St Bedes Colledge!!"
"Death to Parnell Christian Woman's Knitting Circle (meets every second Sunday at Jubilee Hall, bring your own wool and scones)!! Yahh!"
"Death to Islam!"
"Death to Mothers For Environmentalism!"

That parishioner, that Scoutmaster, that Priest, that school teacher, that Muslim, that Mother: evil. Religion in all these forms is a kind of mental illness, a virulent force to attack intellect and volition. In no measure should it be tolerated. As to when, how, and if you break the news to these individuals- there are different schools of thought.