The Devil Is Still to Blame
She must have walked back into the room to find her husband’s face swollen and in pain from the first stab she dealt him earlier. Amid what should have given cause for rethink, she dealt the final stab to him and so we are likely to think of Maryam Sanda as Evil. But the problem of evil is deeper than humans can comprehend. Why is man so evil? Why is there evil in spite of the omnipotence of God? Does evil have different genres? All evils are equal but, to employ Orwellian-grammar, some evils are more equal than the others. Who is the real author of evil? And above all, who is to blame for man’s evil?
We think of the recent Guatemala volcano, killing over 109 persons; the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami that wiped out 230,000 people and the 2017 flooding that displaced over a 100,000 people living by River Benue banks. In our pantheistic world-view, insisting that the universe and nature are the alter egos of God, we see such disasters as His act; actus dei. But natural disasters are not the only evil, if at all they are.
In December 2005, parents waited happily at Port-Harcourt Airport to receive their children, returning from School for Christmas Holidays. The DC9-32, bringing home these angels, slammed on the runway and burst into flames. Only one of them survived with a heart rendering disfigurement. Auto crashes, fire accidents, miscellany of diseases in our hospitals, are nothing but plain evil. In this genre of evil, the theist and the most of us will curse the devil.
So, what about the murder allegedly committed by Maryam and the reported Udeme Odibi’s movie-like killing and chopping off her husband’s genitals and giving herself some scuffs as a ruse? What about Evans, who built an empire at the expense of fellow men, whom he held hostage like caged birds. A few years ago, a daughter of a General, met a guy online. It seemed like a prospect for life’s beautiful things. In the innocence of her upbringing, it was lost upon her, that there were many beasts in designer-suits. She went to meet him and experienced the most gruesome manner of dying.
Murder, rape, arson, treachery, stealing, kidnapping and other evils are easily designated as the evil of man for which only he is accountable. These are neither natural disasters nor accidents and so we hold man as the sole author and ‘give the devil a break’.
The story is told of Adam and Eve who lived as man and woman in nakedness and were not ashamed. This illusive state of affairs in which ignorance was bliss prevailed until ‘the serpent’ entered the scene. He re-educated them on what might, in every sense in which empiricism may be conceived, have seemed to be the advantages of the ‘forbidden fruit’; ‘enlightenment’, ‘godlike status’ and ‘knowledge of good and evil’. The first bite brought them to a new dawn of amazement and shame. This story, offered in many forms, to most theists, provides the first account of the antagonism between God and the Devil. Maybe, our atavistic instinct that God is the antithesis of the Devil and that there is always in the human heart, a tension between good and evil derived essentially from the Adam and Eve field experience. It seems that upon a preponderance of many theological philosophies and moral opinions, our deeds are either good or bad. Our discussion assumes that the Devil is the personification of that evil.
Good and evil are often prescribed as a choice. James Russell Lowell wrote, “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, in the strife of truth and falsehood, for the good or evil side some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight, and the choice goes by forever between that darkness and that light”. Marvel at Lowell’s selection of antonyms, with choice as a nucleus. Our named actors in this discussion, one might think, had choices; to kill or not to kill; to kidnap or not and so forth.
In the volumes, it is written that there is a way which seems right to a man, but the end of it is death. Does this not defy the assumption that choice is an antidote? If the choice ‘seemed’ right, has such a man not exercised best judgment albeit towards a fatal end? It is possible that evil attacks the very faculty for good choices. The prescription of choice assumes that man is ever capable of rational decisions and inferentially accords man undeserving qualities.
Maybe, evil is not just a matter of choice but an attestation to the philosophies and ideas that we are a product of our environment. At a conference, a young man asked Dr. Ravi Zacharias about his response to the view that evil is not within man but outside of man since he is a product of his environment. Dr. Zacharias quipped that in that case, ‘we should not be imprisoning people like Madoff but their neighbours’. The philosophy of environmental impact on conduct will run aground if it cannot show us that Maryam grew up in an environment of husband-stabbing women or that Evans was raised in a hamlet of kidnappers. –Ibe Ikwechegh, Lawyer, Training Consultant and Public Speaker