Collegiate Times

"Our knowledge is not there to compare to His knowledge. As a little child, how do you reconcile your parent who prevents you from watching a television program? You know from the depth of your heart that these are your parents who have taken care of you all these years. And at some time you say, 'This is your way of caring for me.' You don't understand, but there it is," said Sedki Riad, a Muslim and professor of electrical engineering.

Evil in both of these interpretations exists within the individual. Jon Rice, the campus pastor of Chi Alpha, said,  "I don't think evil is thrust upon us. Every person has the inherent potential to turn away from God - and what I mean is not just the Christian religion but the idea of those things that God represents, to turn away from those toward a self-centered view. I think that manifests itself in evil actions. But at the same time I don't think evil is all consuming. I think in every person there is that image of god that even no matter how far they've gone they can still be redeemed."

Forgiveness

Weisband and Thomas have several points of understanding with the campus religious community within their framework. But none are as total as their understanding of an individual's ability to be, in one's soul, evil.

"In history, there are people like Hitler, like Cho, who have done atrocious acts, and you look at the Scripture and you see people who have done heinous acts. Paul, in his history, murdered Christians before his surrender to God. No one would think he had hope, Christians would classify him as evil, but through his conversion he changed and became the greatest missionary that ever lived," Rice said.

Weisband and Thomas specifically structured their inquiry to avoid the impossible task of assessing the souls of suspected evildoers.   

"I hesitate to point to a person, to any person, and say that person is evil. To do that is to say there is something in their being, in their nature, in their personality, that is evil. I prefer to think of it to think that people do evil. People who do evil are normal. And to say that they are evil sets them apart and makes them less human, less like the rest of us, that's inaccurate," Thomas said.

An understanding that evil individuals are rare and, even if in existence, impossible to identify allows Weisband and Thomas to leverage their conception of evil powerfully in regard to forgiveness.

In the aftermath of an evil event like genocide, the international media focuses on the leaders of the different movements who, more often than not, Weisband said, escape justice or are simply confined to a cell in the Hague, the home of the Internatinal Criminal Court. The widespread, social participation needed to enact evil events like the Holocaust goes untreated.

"You'll get one or two big fish. But for the most part, when evil is done, it is done by many. If you think in terms of criminality or pathology, you can never, ever, ever, get to (the many)," Weisband said. "You can never have a true process of forgiving and transcendence because you can't have historical transcendence. You can't get to forgiveness because cultures can't build on denial. If you have criminality and criminality is sequestered - a couple of big fish go to prison and history can move on and its all forgotten - you can never develop beyond the original reifications, the original forms of objectification. So the rise of anti-Semitism, the rise of hatreds between people, can never be transformed. That's why evil is the other side of forgiveness. It's not just analytical, theoretical or semantic. It's about cultural development."

Where their understanding of evil takes the thinker, Weisband and Thomas argue, is to a more creative space where new futures are possible.

"The imaginative capacities of individuals are trapped in this idea of criminality, of trial, of incarceration, of punishment, and not in the idea in that you have an entire culture that needs to find a way to forgive and move forward," Thomas said.

Closer to home, there might be another upshot, Weisband said.

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