You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running towards the destruction to help out.... This is a giant planet and we're lucky to
live on it, but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily
miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a
tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards
darkness. But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white
blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash
away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is
beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were
inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago. So when you spot
violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety
misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good
outnumber you, and we always will."
Patton Oswalt
Facebook
post responding to Boston bombing
I intended to post this some time back but it got slotted into the drafts and then went out of my mind. Oswalt is right up to a point: there are always great people who will run 'towards the destruction to help out'. And that does show that the heart of God is at work in humanity. However I'm not so sure that he's entirely right about humanity not being inherently evil. Certainly the theology of the church, and of the Jewish people before that, was that the world and its people were awry and that we needed a Saviour to put it right again. Christians believe this was Jesus and that he has saved the world. However the working out of this salvation is still having to be done day by day, bit by bit, and the history of the 20th century alone shows that evil rears its ugly head at the drop of a hat.
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