Transforming Evil: Embracing Love and Non-Cooperation

Dallas writes our constant asking why in the face of evil, why do such bad things happen, why do people do such terrible thing signals a lack of insight willing or unwilling into the forces that inhabit the normal human personality, and thereby move or condition the usual course of human events. Above all here's the key, it shows a failure to understand that the immediate support of the evils universally deplored lies in the simple readiness of decent individuals to harm others or allow harm to come to others when the conditions are quote unquote right. [00:02:12]

That readiness comes into play whenever it will help us realize our goals of security ego gratification or satisfaction of bodily desires. This systemic readiness that pervades the personality of normal decent human beings is fallen human nature to understand this is the first level of understanding the why of evil people do, he says, it's like something that is flammable and is just waiting for a spark and it's inside all of us, so that it doesn't take much for me to lie doesn't take much for me to gossip and I'm often not aware of how deeply it's in me. [00:02:55]

The magnitude of evil in human deeds is also a result of the institutional structures or common practices that emerge at the social level in politics art business journalism education the intellectual life government service sexual family relations and sports and entertainment. This is our system, so now sin, wrongness evil the readiness to harm gets into our bodies it gets into our habits, but then corporately it gets into our systems, and roughly a system is to a community what a habit is to an individual. [00:05:31]

The social structures exhibited in such cases are strictly speaking not in any individual but in the world where we live, though they totally depend for their existence and power upon the readinesses that are in us individually. Structural evils are practices that whether they are stated or not explicitly are accepted and enforced by others in the context of our actions, but none of these evils would continue to function if the ten commandments and the two great principles of god love of god and neighbor were generally observed. [00:07:18]

In that case malnutrition war oppression class and tribal conflict overpopulation crime and violence family strife would eventually cease to be possible as mass conditions, because individuals would not cooperate in their development and would take measures to stop it. Such non-cooperation would transform the social and political as well as the personal areas of our life almost beyond recognition. I admit it is difficult to imagine what such a world would be like, try picturing a world where lying does not exist. [00:07:54]

He talks about how the kingdom of evil structurally is very weak because it depends on the readiness of individuals to do what is wrong in one sense then the kingdom of evil is very very fragile, pull one string and the whole thing unravels but individuals cannot be counted on to do what is right, we must be transformed. And so finally this, we must at some point stop looking for new information or social arrangements or religious experiences that will draw off the evil in the world at large. [00:08:30]

The monstrous evils we deplore are in fact the strict causal consequences of the spirit and behavior of normal human beings following generally acceptable patterns of life, they are not the result of strange flukes accidental circumstances or certain especially mad or bad individuals, the tyrants satanic forces oppressive practices of this world play upon our merely decent lives as a master organist dominates his or her instrument, but is holy powerless without it. [00:09:20]

The solution, the response, the invitation today is, offer gentle non-cooperation with evil, see the odd weakness of evil is the only reason that I gossip or judge other people or lie is that other folks will collude with me in this to get what it is that I want, and of course now I can't stop cooperating with evil on my own I can't, but he can, I think I'll let him. [00:10:01]

So those of us in the fellowship of the withered hands seek not just not to cooperate with evil but to do that by of course cooperating with the holy spirit as I go through this day as you go through this day, ask god to speak to me not about the evil that is out there in somebody else but the readiness that is in here, god help me to see and understand the flammability inside me. [00:10:31]

My predisposition to cheat, to lie, to judge, to lust, and would you replace all of that god as I am ready, with a predisposition to love and to speak truth and to live in courage, and so I can be a little part of the divine conspiracy to bring in another kingdom, today offer gentle non-cooperation with evil. [00:11:01]

Dallas I've heard in several of his talks discuss how a turning point in his own life was as a student when he came under conviction by the holy spirit because he had cheated on a test, and he went and confessed this to people at his college even though he might well have gotten expelled, and it made me think about times that I can remember when I was in school and I cheated. [00:04:20]

Although I had a vague sense of guilt mostly I just tried not to think about it and I never experienced that kind of coming close to god under conviction that would move me to tell a teacher or the person that was in charge or seek to make it right or find out what causes me to do this and how do I get healed of it, so there is inside me a readiness to do wrong and it is still there and it's inside all of us but that's not the end. [00:04:38]