The problem of evil is so wide, so encompassing, and so
gargantuan that it has engaged the thoughts of scholars,
researchers, theologians, and ordinary men and women in
all cultures and in all regions throughout the ages.
And this problem has continued to grow and has grown so
big, so thick that one can actually touch it. Any time and
anywhere you find evil or an evil deed, you are always
bound to ask ‘why should such and such happen?’
Throughout the landscape of history you are faced with
hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of experiences of
unexplainable acts of man’s inhumanity to man. One is
compelled to wonder how any human being could ever
have conceived the idea of inflicting such horrendous act
of cruelty and wickedness on a fellow human being.
We know what, but why should any one pick up an axe and
smash the head of a wife or husband until the skull
empties its contents in a pool of blood? The what is usually
tied to money, fear of losing a spouse through imminent
divorce, property or pursuit of power and position. But
why perpetrate such great evil of taking another person’s
life in cold blood; a life that once it is taken cannot be
replaced?
Look at transcontinental slave trade. Innocent fellow
human beings were uprooted from their ancestral homes
as FREE men and women and were immediately thereafter
transformed into slaves with subsequent suffering, horror,
trauma, indignity, deprivation, humiliation, rape and
senseless murder. To imagine that such unprecedented act
of evil could be allowed to last a span of 400, repeat 400
years without the evil perpetrators blinking an eye speaks
volumes for the depravity of the beasts in human skin that
made it happen.
Just close your eyes, and imagine with your mind’s eye the
picture of a man piercing the lips of another man and
putting a load of heavy padlock to lock up the victim’s
mouth so that the slave victim could not communicate
with his fellow slave victim, in some cases, his brother or
his equally enslaved children or his wife before enforced
slavery. Just imagine! Imagine a slave woman being
serially and regularly raped in the presence of her
husband by some smelly pink skinned perverts.
To imagine that perpetrators of this horrific acts of evil
carried the Bible in their hands and quoted scriptures
[written of course by the same evil purveyors]to justify
their fiendish acts is to begin to wonder how far evil men
and women can go to justify acts of inhumanity.
Less than 10 years after the symbolic abolition of physical
slavery economic slavery, which is worse than physical
slavery and mental slavery, the enslavement of the mind
took root. And that three-legged evil continues unabated
till the present moment. In fact the triplet is waxing
stronger by the day.
Again, less than 50 years after the so-called abolition of
physical slavery, a big evil perpetrator woke up on the
wrong side of his bed and convinced himself that Jews
were less than human and the entire race should be wiped
off the surface of Europe. Innocent men and women
stripped raw naked were heralded like sheep into the gas
chamber to be roasted alive and burnt to ashes. How
could anybody’s mind conceive of such horror? Evil.
We can go on and on to itemise acts of evil that have
beclouded the world. Palestinians have been living a life of
living dead in the last 65 years with some of them
permanently domiciled in refugee camps under the flimsy
excuse that some one was born of a slave mother and
another child was born by a legitimate wife. Arrant
nonsense, when the historical fact is that Ibraheem/
Abraham/Braimoh/ Brimo was born in Ur in present day
Iraq, which without a doubt means the Arab-Patriarch of
the Jews was a full blooded Arab.
But this piece is NOT about slave trade, the holocaust, the
murder of 27 million Congolese by King Leopold or the
plundering of wealth of India, Africa and the Middle East
or the rabid enslavement of the African mind through
some ill-digested archaic dogmas. These are just some of
the examples of the depravity bred by evil.
The big question is why is there so much evil in this world?
It is a theological question as well as a psychological
question. It is a philosophical question as well as a
political question. It is a chemical question, the chemistry
of the human brain as well as psychiatric question.
Researchers must pay as much attention as they pay to
Cancer Research as they should pay to Evil Research.
There is so much suffering in the world. There is so much
brazen injustice. There is ugly and horrifying wickedness.
I am not concerned about some bogus pedestrian and
utterly irrational and unscientific argument that some child
born to Ben Panthera some two thousand years ago died
for the sins [acts of evil]that may still be perpetrated 2000
years hence and that once you confess after killing your
father and raping your mother, you are automatically for­
given and shall go upstairs in the clouds and eat eba and
ogbono with some one in a funny utopia called Al-janna or
Paradise! This kind of dogma can only fuel acts of evil. Kill,
confess, repent, heaven! Sleep with your daughters.
Confess, repent, heaven. Empty the nation’s treasury,
confess, repent, heaven!
The sad corollary, contradiction and the glaring deceit in
this unimaginative dogma is that the people who brought
this dogma to Africa are the most unforgiving of human
race. And they exert the stiffest penalty including long term
imprisonment and even death penalty on offenders.
I repeat that we must all find solution to the question of
evil. I am aware that the classic novel Lord of the Flies
tends to suggest that evil is inherent in every human being,
but also adds that the elements and environment can also
be good breeding ground for evil. This is to therefore
suggest that as much as evil could be embedded in human
nature, it also lends itself to causative efects.
Enslaved African minds that have been so permanently
shut to reasoning are quick to suggest that holding on to
God or prayers will be the solution and end to evil when
empirical evidence on ground suggests the contrary.
Burning people alive in propagation of religion, or starving
flocks to death, while their pastors, imams and rabbis are
feeding fat and emitting loud bang of fart and burying their
heads in clouds of jet planes, is a loud affirmation of the
worst evil.
This writer does not have all the answers to the
problematic question of evil, but the world should draw its
attention to it and device ways and means of minimising it.
Massive poverty, massive corruption, massive
unemployment, the crass inequality in the distribution of
world resources are all by-products of evil, the abuse of
power, position and privilege by one man over the other.
Religion, whatever it means cannot and will not end evil
and evil doing because almost all religious dogmas and
literatures justify the exploitation of one man by another
and the ascendancy master-servant relationship in human
affairs.
We have to look in other direction if mankind is to deal a
decisive blow on evil or look on until evil consumes the
earth.