evil on Oppression

Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world. Have mercy on us. O Christ, in your humility, your lonely struggle and your agony, you share our suffering. Give us faith to trust your grace....

Leader: Save, O Lord, for the godly one is gone; for the faithful have vanished from among the children of man. People: Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart ...

We boast of taking advantage of others, love evil more than good, speak deceit rather than tell the truth. We relish words that hurt and harm. We take refuge in wealth, security in savings and in succ...

Sometimes evil can feel so strong, so powerful, that its damage seems permanent and the final word on the subject. In this short excerpt from Philip Yancey, we see a reversal, perhaps a foretaste of w...

A major stumbling block for many earnest seekers is the compelling evidence throughout history that terrible things have been done in the name of religion. This applies to virtually all faiths at some...

Manipulation is the use of influence to control others for personal gain. It is the dark side of influence. … While manipulation is inherently evil, influence is the best way to lead and move others t...

When you pass beyond good and evil, you pass into the realm where might is right, and where anything that reminds you of the old moral values—for instance, a large Jewish community—stands in your way ...

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

A predominant characteristic . . . of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach...

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish...

Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that ...

A gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it.

The Old Testament oscillates among three things: evil seen as idolatry and consequent dehumanization; evil as what wicked people do, not least what they do to the righteous; and evil as the work of th...

To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.

He that is kind is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.

Arise, 0 LORD; 0 God, lift up your hand. Forget not the afflicted. We call to you in our sorrow and frustration, Lord God, eternal, everlasting God. Why do you stand so far off? Why do you hide y...

Evil is the force of anti-creation, anti-life, the force which opposes and seeks to deface and destroy God’s good world of space, time and matter, and above all God’s image-bearing human creatures.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willi...

Somehow, strangely (and to us sometimes even annoyingly), the Creator God will not simply abolish evil from his world. The question that swirls around these discussions is, Why not? We are not given...

If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God.

Almighty God, harsh words and personal attacks can bring out the worst in us. We find ourselves spending energy on thoughts of retaliation and plans to protect ourselves. Father forgive us. We long to...

You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it for what it is, and then seeing the good as better.

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality, but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissolubl...

When we look for larger, broader, more sustainable analyses of evil, we find of course that the major worldviews have all had ways of addressing it. The Buddhist says that the present world is an illu...

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. . . . In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt,...

The worse a person is the less he feels it.

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

I once heard a preacher say evil is live spelled backward. Anything that goes against what helps us live is therefore evil. And evil is always ugly.